Sunless Sea

LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE.

Take the helm of your steamship and set sail for the unknown! Sunless Sea is a game of discovery, loneliness and frequent death, set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London.

If the giant crabs, sentient icebergs and swarms of bats don’t get you, madness and cannibalism certainly will. But that old black ocean beckons, and there’s loot for the brave souls who dare to sail her.

Betray your crew, sell your soul to a Devil, marry your sweetheart. Survive long enough and you’ll achieve your life’s ambition.

You will die, but your legacy will live on…

Key features

• A deep, compelling world packed with 200,000+ words of stories and secrets. Find your father’s bones. Determine London’s destiny. Defy the gods of the deep sea.
• Beautiful, hand drawn art - castles of sparkling ice, prisons perched on lily pads, fog-shrouded lighthouses and the DAWN MACHINE.
• Your captain will die. But you can pass on resources from one generation to the next. Acquire a family home and a hoard of heirlooms. Build up your own story across generations of zailors who braved the sea and lost - or won…
• Real-time combat against ships and Zee-beasts, spider-crewed dreadnoughts and sentient icebergs.
• Light and dark, terror and madness: stray too far from the gas-lamps of civilisation and your crew will grow fearful and eventually lose their sanity.
• Upgrade your steamship with powerful engines, cannons and pneumatic torpedo guns. (Or buy a bigger, better ship.)
• Hire unique officers like the Haunted Doctor and the Irrepressible Cannoneer. Each has a story to tell, if you can draw it out of them.
• Choose a ship’s mascot: the Comatose Ferret, the Wretched Mog, the Elegiac Cockatoo, and more!
• Trade or smuggle silk and souls, mushroom wine and hallucinogenic honey.

More information.

RPGWatch Curation:

Explore the open sea in this addictive rogue-like. Excellent story with lots of quests, dark humor and a creepy morbid atmosphere. For patient gamers!

-> GOGMix

It's not really a rogue-like. The sea is semi-randomized, but the game plays more like a mix between a text adventure and Sid Meirer's Pirates. Addictive though. And while super text-heavy some of the sub plots are absolutely hilarious. I also really dug the subterranean gaslight setting and the Lovecraftian vibe.

Yeah, the game mechanics pretty much collide.
While it has permadeath as an option, it doesn't play well with it's mechanics are not catering towards it. If you die you have to go through exactly the same dialogues again. It's like if you play Pillars of Eternity or so with Perma Death on.

You can disable it though.

Yeah I died a couple times while learning the ropes. There's a pretty steep learning curve for the game. And discovering how to play is as much a part of the experience as discovering new cities.

After that I switched to saving.

Originally Posted by Kordanor
Yeah, the game mechanics pretty much collide.
While it has permadeath as an option, it doesn't play well with it's mechanics are not catering towards it. If you die you have to go through exactly the same dialogues again. It's like if you play Pillars of Eternity or so with Perma Death on.

You can disable it though.

The game has a lineage system. Death is only permanent when the lineage system is no used.

It's a pretty interesting game. I remember playing it a lot when it came out, seemed Lovecraftian to me in it's flavor. I put it down in favor of a new flavor of the month but I should eventually go back to it.