Sunless Sea Diary - Beautiful Writing, Still Hard to Read It All

I have always been proud of the fact that I read a lot when I was young, sometimes finishing an entire science fiction saga in less than two days while also dealing with school and playing big role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate, which often also involved quite a bit of reading.

I lapsed a little in my 20’s, but I recently received a Kindle Paperwhite from my friends and the move to digital content and the variety and accessibility it brings with it mean that I once again tend to spend one or two hours of my day in bed or on a comfortable chair immersing myself in new realities and experiencing the best writing the modernity can deliver.

This makes me the target audience for the exquisitely written Sunless Sea, the title from Failbetter Games that has more than a quarter million words (I have not counted but others have estimates) already prepared for gamers to experience and with even more on the way.

And I found myself really engrossed in the narratives the game can create, reading all the text it delivers (and it can be a lot at times) eager to get more clues about the nature of the world around me and experience the sometimes humorous, sometimes poetic and often tragic characters and their backgrounds.

Sunless Sea needs a little more gameplay to support the narrative

I love the moments when I reach a port and new characters and new stories develop, challenging me to understand the nature of the location and decide whether I should risk my limited resources in order to try some of the offered challenges.

The problem is that getting from one island to another becomes tedious relatively quickly and only the events associated with it are interesting.

In many ways, the Dragon Age adventure created by Failbetter Games improved on the Sunless Sea formula by basically dropping any classic gameplay altogether and by allowing players to only focus on their quests, their resources and their overall aims.

I will continue to play in order to explore more and find new ways of dying, but despite the narrative and its quality, there are moments when the experience will fail to offer something more than a good book.