Added: 03.04.2015 19:43 | 0 views | 0 comments

The wonder that exploration brings within a game is finite. Once we discover something, we can never discover it again even if we start over. A world fully revealed is suddenly a more static place than when it started. It's at this nexus point between the potential and the static that Failbetter's Sunless Sea finds itself in. Though it sports an immensely imaginative setting and fantastic writing, Sunless Sea's roguelike-inspired elements don't quite gel with the longform exploration you're meant to embark on.

Built in the mold of such games as without taking into account how quickly progression scales in them. You can go to zee for the joy of discovery and experience all you can so you can write your masterpiece, but you're put in an awkward position no matter how you position your new captain. If you start with a blank map, you'll have to spend each new start building up your resources again near home waters, which is time-consuming and monotonous. If you utilize a previous map, however, you don't get any new fragments--essentially experience--for landmarks you already discovered, which hamstrings progress towards meeting the prerequisites for victory. You need to cash in a large amount of secrets here (which let you level up stats, but also serve as a resource), which is awkward because you get a secret every time you get a certain amount of fragments and relying on a revealed map means not getting very many in that playthrough. Rather than creating interesting tension, these two scenarios just exacerbate the game's slow pace to intolerable levels. You can also win by acquiring a lot of money, but this victory condition sidesteps the most interesting parts of the game, instead pushing you to either care about finding the most profitable trade routes or find an exploitable, repeatable way to make some easy scratch. Finding your father's bones, which is the other victory condition, is by far the sanest way to experience Sunless Sea, which gives you a tangible main quest while also giving you the freedom to explore the Unterzee at your leisure.

Which brings us to the fatal flaw in the game's structure: the diminishing returns inevitably associated with exploration. In roguelikes, the procedurally-generated dungeons ensure that you'll always have a different experience each time you play through the game, but the reason for that was as an ultimate test of mastery. You play until you die, learn from your mistakes, and then try to get further based on your personal growth. Sunless Sea tries to do a similar thing by mixing up the islands every time you die. Each playthrough will feature different discoveries at different times, often mixing up the order you visited them last time in the interest of keeping the world from that inevitable state of being static. The problem is that the content of the islands themselves never changes. Sure, you can pick different options when the game lets you, but for the most part, everything that happens on the islands is the same as before. You're not really dealing with an uncertain, dynamic ocean voyage so much as you're living in a salty version of Groundhog Day where you have very little agency to change things. And though permadeath can be turned off in the settings, the game still encourages you to play many different captains so that you can reset all the quests and reap more rewards as you go when all you want to do is unravel the game's secrets you haven't yet discovered.

Sunless Sea is an ambitious work that attempts to capture the sheer kinetic thrill of discovery in a bottle without the inevitable entropy of player completion depleting it, and falls well short. The promise of lengthened replayability only makes the methodical pace a joyless grind at times. But the things you're meant to discover truly defines the best of Sunless Sea. The stories you'll be able to tell from your journeys--that time you helped those rat mechanics defeat a bunch of guinea pig nobles; the creepy place you found yourself after sailing off the edge of the map; your continued struggles with managing your cannibalism--truly makes Sunless Sea a voyage worth taking for those with the patience to deal with the litany of structural issues. In asking how games can tap into our desire to discover, Sunless Sea proves that what we discover matters at least as much as how much we can discover.

Added: 03.04.2015 11:39 | 0 views | 0 comments


Find your way across some rather difficult levels in this minimalistic ball platformer