Sunless Sea

This is an excellent game. Everything Alexis Kennedy touches is pure gold. His writing really shines in this.

This is an enormous, extremely complex choose-your-path novel strapped to one of the worst games I have ever seen in my life. The story is witty and well written and engages with deep, unique lore that I really enjoy. Unfortunately, the tedious, luck-based, and shallow gameplay actively prevents you from engaging with and enjoying it. As I note, the novel portions are great, but your progress in them is limited in every direction by resources - you need money or certain trade goods or a tough enough warship to advance in virtually every storyline. But the best ways to earn money, trade goods, and better equipment require those things - money to buy goods in bulk for reselling at a markup, goods to trade, and powerful equipment to kill the few tough enemies who consistently drop valuable enough items to make them worthwhile targets. Not only that, but doing ANYTHING costs you, because moving around consumes resources you need to pay for. Thus, the early game is horrifically grindy. You have to squeeze out the same repetitive hauling runs that reward maybe one to three hundred currency, avoiding all the enemies because it’s not cost effective to fight them, while you save up for hours towards ships or equipment that can cost into the thousands. Even once you get to that point you’re not safe, because this game made the baffling decision to be permadeath by default (there’s apparently an option to change this, but I can’t figure out how). And you can die FAST - text/story events with stat-influenced RNG outcomes can be triggered at random or without foreknowledge of what you’re doing, and some of these will kill you instantly if you happen to roll poorly. In the worst cases, you can spend hours clawing your way out of the mindless early game slog only to randomly trigger an event and then die through no fault of your own because you didn’t get a high dice roll on it (this is particularly bad with the “Terror” stat that functions as crew morale, because so many events can increase it in large increments, it’s expensive and hard to reduce, and when it caps out you get a guaranteed event with very poor odds of success that kills you instantly if you fail). I love the story here. But I’ve played about fifteen hours and haven’t gotten to experience hardly any of it because all my time is spent grinding out resources to set myself up and then losing them to inexperience or getting bad event RNG. The combat is shallow, the exploration becomes stale because the map remains largely static between lives, and the progression is both deeply unsatisfying and schizophrenically balanced. It feels like a freemium mobile game trying to frustrate you into paying to skip content, but it’s not malicious, just really stupid! Look, unless the story, writing style, and setting of the game really appeal to you, don’t get it. And if those do appeal to you…also don’t get it. All of the dialogue and story paths are available for free on the wiki. Just go read it there and avoid the self-sabotage of the paid product.