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- Failbetter Games
- Failbetter Games
- Failbetter Games
- Failbetter Games
Sunless Skies
Released On: Jan 31, 2019
87
6.8
All Platforms
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 35 Critic Reviews
87
80% Positive
28 Reviews
28 Reviews
6% Mixed
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 35 Critic Reviews
87
80% Positive
28 Reviews
28 Reviews
6% Mixed
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Failbetter finally balances smart gameplay and ingenious prose in this poignant saga of mortality, writ large.
It is challenging, yes, but the sensations that it makes you feel are fantastic and they are a big image about the greatness of this adventure.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 84 User Ratings
6.8
57% Positive
48 Ratings
48 Ratings
20% Mixed
17 Ratings
17 Ratings
23% Negative
19 Ratings
19 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 84 User Ratings
6.8
57% Positive
48 Ratings
48 Ratings
20% Mixed
17 Ratings
17 Ratings
23% Negative
19 Ratings
19 Ratings
I love sunless skies but there are flaws
pros
great exploration when ever I played the game Loved seeing everything i saw in the backgrounds
great writing this game has some of the best writing I've seen
combat I did like the combat but its not the best
great atmosphere and story the story kept me in maybe not the main story but the side story's
cons
I felt slow when exploring and a better engine is costly
The main story I had to look for specific things to learn about story
The best way to get money in my opinion takes time and resources to do
even with the cons the pros outweigh them by a lot in rate this game a 10/10
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PC
Failbetter’s strange brand of Victorian fantasy meshes with the game’s measured resource management and dangerous combat to define a truly rich role to play, one that inevitably gives way to moral compromise as you operate, with some struggle and no small amount of complicity, under capitalism.
Sunless Skies is a strange amalgamation of genres with even stranger stories to tell, but the weird world and nightmarish encounters come together to create something special. Combat and repetition may weigh down the Homeric adventure, but the overall journey is well worth the ticket.
Sunless Skies is an amazing surprise. It is a very solid RPG and strategy game, and its narrative is one of the best we’ve seen in years.
At its best, Sunless Skies is a triumph. Its writers have crafted a world of endless wonder where seemingly anything is possible. At heart, it's a text adventure that conjures the imagination to send you on a journey as spectacular and memorable as any big-budget graphical blockbuster.
Sunless Skies is a real "interactive book". In the new game of Failbetter Games there are texts of a really rare quality for a video game, like a good sci-fi novel. Too bad that the strength of Sunless Skies is also its greatest limit: there are often long sequences of readings a bit too verbose and ends in themselves.
this game is amazing the atmosphere and writing are flawless this game is one of the best
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PC
Sunless Skies é um jogo com uma narrativa tão viva, intensa e complexa que talvez fosse melhor se aplicada em um livro. O jogo como um todo seria no máximo medíocre se não contasse com essa parte. Seu gameplay é lento e difícil; sua direção de arte é boa, mas sem identidade e pecando em alguns quesitos; sua parte sonora é mediana. Pode valer a pena, porém, se você tiver a paciência para acompanhar uma história incrível.
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PC
Failbetter live up to there name... Many improvements to Sunless Sea. but Still so much fail.
Pro's: Great writing, improved User interface that takes the design of '100 days', gorgeous world design, combat much more dynamic and fun.
Cons: 70% of the game is doing nothing waiting to get somewhere.. the pacing is awful and ends up you have to grind the same locations to get a slither of story.
This game tries to be a rogue lite like the first.. but it makes for a terrible roguelite experience as you end up just like the first repeating the same story content. You can turn this off which i recommend.. but you still have to deal with **** movement speed and the wims of autosave.. which just failed on me.
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PC
Don't be fooled: Sunless Skies is a game about horror. More accurately, it's about the narrative of the game beating you over the head every so often to remind you of the horrors you're supposedly in.
I gauge Sunless Skies by a ratio that I call 2 to 1; two parts brilliance to one part BS. See, most horror games allow you to circumvent the horror aspects by allowing you to plan for---and by extension mitigate---parts of the bad stuff you encounter. It's a delicate balancing act that the best horror games are able to pull off. There are exceptions, such as Darkest Dungeon, where you just have to prepare as best you can and hope for the best.
Sunless Skies delights in disallowing that mitigation, foisting inconvenient and often hidden dangers upon you at every turn. I'm referring to the "Nightmare" and "Terror" mechanics, in which "Terror" fills at a constant rate regardless of what you do, and "Nightmares," which measures how close you are to an unavoidable game over. Too much Terror, and your crew panics, with mutinies, madness, and outright crew loss. This guage fills constantly, and also fills due to actions you take. The problem is, it fills almost no matter what your choices are, and the game doesn't always tell you what induces Terror. Strip an enemy locomotive for parts? Somehow, that's scary, so you get Terror. Fail a check for hidden goods? Find Terror instead. Simply walk into the parlor of a Crewmember whom you apparently know well, but not well enough? That's Terrifying. Strike up a conversation with the wrong person? Oh, Terror.
And often, the events that happen due to Terror do so with no apparent rhyme or reason, and often in rapid succession. I can't count the number of times that I've had a crew induce mutiny while I was fighting an enemy and my finger clicked a choice because I was in the heat of battle. Once, I had a mutiny happen three different times within the span of a minute of each other.
Additionally, there is absolutely no doubt that the game will force you into situations during story choices regardless of your apparent success rate. I have failed FAR more times than succeeded, even with a 50% chance or higher of success due to my stats. It doesn't help that even with an apparent 100% success rate, you can STILL have what is called a "partial success." Even a partial success with a 100% success rate comes with a penalty. That penalty is---you guessed it---usually Terror.
Eliminating Terror comes with few opportunities, but eliminating Nightmares is far more difficult, because the price to do so gets higher with every attempt. It's an un-fun mechanic that puts an arbitrary timer on your adventures, because regardless of what you do, it will get to the point where nothing can be done. This would be fine if there were multiple saves, but there are not---which is itself a heavy handed mechanic in modern games that really shouldn't be present.
Combat is about as much fun as heaving a bag of rocks around in waist-high water. Your locomotive (why a **** the SKY?? Why not a zeppelin?) is as nimble as you would expect a flying locomotive to be. That is to say, it isn't. At all. Unlike Sunless Sea, you can strafe, but that doesn't mean much. Fighting others amounts to lobbing painfully slow volleys at a distance while your enemies dance circles around you. Particularly bad offenders are the Guests, parasites that masquerade as friendly locomotives and then spring their dirty surprise at you up close, scooting around far faster than you can ever hope to turn. Your only real tactic for survival is in spending an enormous amount of cash on a vessel that can take enough punishment during these frequent (and frequently frustrating) encounters.
It doesn't help that the writing is very much in love with its own faux-Lovecraftian narrative, which it heaps upon you at every opportunity (O, horror! Lo, A Dead Star! Is it not terrible, this bleak and cyclopean sphere? Are you not frightened??) There are moments of levity, but they are far outweighed by the grimdark story, in which seeking the wonders of the sky simply aren't worth it. The game is practically devoid of any kind of humor, and the characters are a forgettable roster of cardboard placeholders, roughly half of which are of ambiguous gender, with no real reason to delve into their individual stories aside from the potential monetary rewards.
I put about 80 hours into Sunless Skies. I put twice that into Sunless Sea, because that game maes more sense of the dread things that lurk beneath the waves and the things to discover were infinitely more fascinating. Sunless Skies is more accessible, with a more fleshed out economy, but that doesn't mean it's **** more fun. The writing can be interesting, but having the specter of failure constantly hang over your head through no fault of your own isn't fun at all.
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PC
Big step back from Sunless Sea, sadly. They overdid this game.
Main issues:
The world is incoherent. There is no main theme to bond all elements. Why trains? Why not zeppelins? Floating islands? But why? How? Yes, game explains some of these but that's the problem: they overdid it. Too much of these.
Aesthetic: again, everything is overdid. I'm looking on Albion and I'm not even sure what I'm looking for. Pipes, clockworks, fine... but again. WHY? I don't ask HOW. I ask WHY. The game is alienating me too much. I don't ask for story explanation. I'm asking for aesthetic one. WHY so much pipes, metal, clockworks when it just looks... stupid. Just be for "being sake".
The tempo of the game is too slow. It was slow in Sunless Sea but here it's just... too much.
Too much stories in one port: can be treated as weird one but I believe that it would be better to divide actual stories for more ports. I'm little bored after 30-40 minutes of constant reading...
...especially where stories are not so great. But again: the problem is not lack of writing skills. It's the lacking theme and incoheretion of the world.
So overall: so far I'm dissapointed. The game is bland and boring comparing to Sunless Sea. They overdid it. Too much of everything without solid glue - the coherent world. And the atmosphere. Sunless Sea was more or less peaceful with horror elements. Now it's - again - too much "horror" elements. It's just bizarre.
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PC
Summary SAIL THE STARS. BETRAY YOUR QUEEN. MURDER A SUN. Sunless Skies is a Gothic Horror roleplay game with a focus on exploration and exquisite storytelling for PC, Mac and Linux.
Platforms:
- PC
Initial Release Date: Jan 31, 2019
Developer:
- Failbetter Games
Publisher: Failbetter Games
Genres:
