Sunless Sea Review - IGN (2025)

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To understand why Sunless Sea is such a special roguelike, consider some of the places I've visited lately in my travels as a lone ship's captain in the whimsically Gothic world of the Neath, where the entire city of Victorian London has landed after being abducted by magical forces.

There's an island called Nuncio, filled with former postal workers. Its shores are covered in undelivered mail. There is a "Dead-letter Office" where a friendly rat-engineer used a special machine to retrieve and restore damaged post. In the basement, a storage room opens into a seemingly bottomless cavern, where all the misdirected mail of all the ages has gone to die.

There's Port Cecil, where everyone obsessively plays chess with pieces of carved gemstone. When my captain sat down to play, he went into a trance and began making moves according to the will of the primeval forces that govern the underworld, and played until his hands began to bleed.

Then I sailed onward to Mt. Palmerston, where I had tea with a lonely deviless who guards the road to a hellish volcano. She was charming and generous, and was very polite when she asked me to give her my soul.

There is a mix of offbeat charm and profound, uneasy weirdness that permeates every inch of Sunless Sea. It's a testament to developer Failbetter Games' tremendous writers that this world, built almost entirely through text dialog boxes and suggestive map art, is so absorbing.

But here's the rub: Sunless Sea is as much a text adventure (or hyperlink adventure, if you prefer) as it is a naval-combat roguelike. While most of your time in the game is spent piloting a tiny ship around the darkened Unterzee, encountering sea monsters and pirates, and discovering new islands and ports, much of the action unfolds via the act of reading snippets of text and then choosing from among a menu of options.

This is familiar territory for people who've played Failbetter's Fallen London, a free text adventure. But for people expecting something a bit more like Sid Meier's Pirates, where different actions and encounters throw you into a different minigame, much of Sunless Sea might seem passive.

It doesn't help that combat isn't all that involving. Enemies just slug away at you, and many of them can be easily outmaneuvered, especially if there are any rocks or inlets to help you confuse them. I rarely had much trouble taking on a bigger ship or a giant sea monster if I had a halfway decent gun and some hitpoints to spare.

The thing is, Sunless Sea really is about the journey – and I don't mean that metaphorically. Where skill and experience come into play is in how you manage the precious resources of fuel, food, and sanity in your travels. Fuel and supplies are fairly expensive, and there are very few "milk-run" type journeys you can make. Sunless Sea consistently pushes you to explore farther, to risk more, and make bolder gambles.

When they pay off, you come back into port full of valuable loot: the Admiralty will pay well for maps and intelligence. An Alarming Scholar will reward you handsomely for forbidden knowledge and rare specimens. The market is always hungry for exotic, foreign goods. One cruise can give you enough money to buy better equipment for your ship, fill it to the brim with fuel and food that could take you around the world, and recruit some of the best officers money can buy.

When your risks don't turn out, you perish. Your crew goes mad somewhere at sea, because the Unterzee is so scary and wrong that just sailing its waters will drive people crazy over time. Or you run out of fuel and have to abandon ship, and nobody ever makes it home. Or your crew starves and turns to cannibalism.

You can hedge your bets by making some decisions along your journey. Engaging sea monsters is dangerous, because even though they are easy to kite, they pack a big wallop if they manage even a single hit. It's worth the risk, though, because killing them often yields up some food and some valuable goodies. Pirate ships are another dangerous opponent, but they frequently yield fuel and supplies after you vanquish them. The better you know the ocean, the more you can plot your routes to take you past more ports and lighted buoys, which prevent your crew from gaining "terror," a value that steadily climbs when you're in the open ocean. Learning the ways you can push your luck, and navigational tricks that conserve resources and sanity, is one of the great pleasures of Sunless sea.

Even when you make mistakes or just have bad luck, all is not lost when your captain dies. You get a new one right away, and usually something will carry over from your last captain, even if it's just some money and a ship's gun. But each time, you know a bit more about the world, and what you'll find out at sea, and can play a bit more aggressively based on what you know.

Not everything is the same, though, as the Unterzee itself changes for each captain. An island might move across the ocean from where you last found it, and different things happen at different ports, playing out differently based on what's going on in the world at the time. That keeps each playthrough pretty fresh.

At the same time, the full reset of the Unterzee can be kind of demoralizing. Not just because of the loss of a character – I was crushed when I lost a really successful captain, who had explored a tremendous amount of the world and finished a huge number of storylines at various ports of call – but because not enough is changed. With his death, everything went back to the starting line and I had to repeat many of the same quests I'd done before.

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That's not quite as bad as it sounds, though. While it's a shame to just click past so much of the story after you've read it a couple times, the world and your needs change just enough that you won't always want to make the exact same choices each time through. I also ended up taking a lot of satisfaction in just how much easier progress became the more I played. My first expeditions were cautious grinds through the ocean, but by the time my fourth or fifth captain took to the sea, I was able to make up my lost progress in just a few voyages, and make some different story choices along the way. Frustration proved fleeting, and it was never long before I found myself launching Sunless Sea for just another couple voyages into the darkness.

Verdict

Sunless Sea gives you a wonderful world to explore and packs it with memorable written vignettes. Its permadeath flirts with repetitiveness, and combat is disappointing, but it’s far from running out of ways to inspire one more trip back across the Unterzee.

Sunless Sea Review - IGN (2025)

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