Failbetter Games’s Sunless Skies captures both the horror and beauty of outer space, though not as we might typically imagine it. Here, reaching the stars is a Victorian-era achievement. Spaceships are locomotives and the sun is a clockwork machine, a replacement for an older one murdered in a display of British imperial power. Distant ports drift from colonial rule, nestled not within a featureless black void but within the High Wilderness, a dreamy collage of trees and ice and rocks and mushrooms divided into their own distinct biomes. Your character captains a locomotive, hauling goods between ports for profit and engaging in text-adventure storylines that reveal strange lives eked out in a sprawling, metaphysical space swallowed by industry and oppression.
The game’s pace is deliberate and (on the default difficulty setting) unforgiving. Wherever you go, whoever you fight, and whatever you haul is a commitment, because traveling the High Wilderness burns fuel and supplies. Exploration of new spaces might yield experience points, but it also might not cover the cost of the journey, rewarding you only with accumulated Terror from exposure to the leering gaze of madness-inducing stars. New ports aren’t marked on the map. Trade opportunities and quests designate port locations only in vague relation to an area’s hub city, and most are far enough away to make the search into a real hazard. Staying out too long or failing a skill check while searching the rusted remains of a dead ship might eat up the resources you need for a safe return journey. As supplies dwindle, crew will get sloppy and die in accidents. Morale will fray. Cannibalism will appear as an option.
Sunless Skies is tuned to prey on the player’s overconfidence and impatience, which might lead you down risky detours that come to disastrous dead ends. Perhaps you’ll simply overestimate the cost of a ship-to-ship battle on your fuel stores. Doubling back to the hub, where everything can be sold or stored in a bank vault and repairs can be made, might be safer than pushing on to the next port. But locomotives move slowly enough over long enough distances that riskier journeys grow more enticing than playing it safe, particularly when turning back costs extra resources. You decide you can make it, and sometimes you can’t.
When captains die, they are, by default, gone for good—meaning that the experiences and stat bonuses that came with them go up in smoke. Sunless Skies isn’t totally unforgiving in this regard, even when the player sets aside options to tweak the game’s difficulty. Locomotives will be reclaimed after your death, and you retain some portion of their equipment, the contents of a bank vault, and the amount of the map uncovered so far. Progress on various questlines and ambitions, however, reset. And though it becomes easier to get back on your feet through repeated failures, the setbacks are significant enough to lend a real sense of danger to the game’s conflict that’s enhanced by the rickety, unwieldy feeling of the locomotives. It’s never totally comfortable to maneuver a chunky space-train around small but devastating enemy projectiles, lining up a handful of shots before the heat gauge howls in protest. What battles you don’t flee from feel hard-won—the unwanted interruptions of a mad journey whose rewards might not be worth the losses it took to get them.
As players assimilate the game’s mechanics, they’ll settle into a rhythm of running routes between ports, continuing story quests and ferrying goods purchased on the cheap as they chart paths that get the most return on investment. Success is often incremental in the game, since the more rewarding storylines and the more lucrative trading opportunities reveal themselves slowly as you sink profits back into supplies, repairs, fuel, and replacements for your lost crew. In the end, it becomes easier to survive the longer you play Sunless Skies, accumulating more capital to pay for excursions and upgrading your locomotive and acquiring more crew to take risks for you to scavenge and explore the High Wilderness.
All these elements add up to one of the most evocative games of recent years, one that’s enhanced rather than hindered by its top-down, text-heavy aesthetic. The playful eccentricity of Failbetter’s beautiful writing conveys wonder and horror and mystery as wispy bits of narration and dialogue melt into the space around your panting locomotive, reinforcing that you’re carrying your story as much as you are a bundle of bronzewood and a few jars of souls.
The world the game shares with its predecessors, Sunless Sea and Fallen London (which you don’t need to have played in order to follow the stories of Sunless Skies), is detailed and bizarre in equal measure, literalizing concepts like time and relating how mastery over “hours” that must be mined like ore are wielded by a monarchy in order to oppress the working class and trap aristocratic enemies. In the game, people work through anxieties in play-acted therapy sessions where workers disguise themselves as figures from your past, and below the wreckage of a tolling clock tower hangs a useless Parliament, whose representatives don’t matter and whose for-profit laws matter even less.
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. You risk yourself, your crew, and your resources as you immerse yourself in stories, looking for beneficial angles to profit from and reach your ambitions. In the High Wilderness, there’s no shortage of places to go and stories to find, but as all of them—like your actions—reinforce, not even the stars can offer refuge from humanity’s failures.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Failbetter Games.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
