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3 weeks ago
Feature: Adrift on a cosmic sea
Sunless Skies, the cosmic horror, spacefaring roguelite, splits my brain like a log beneath an axe. On the one hand, a certain ennui - I have seen all this before, I have made these long, fraught voyages before, many times, in its fine predecessor Sunless Sea. On the other, late at night my thoughts drift, unbidden, back to its dark places, its lonely ports and…
2 months ago
Feature: Okay lizardman, but no tongue
2018 has been strange as hell, I think we can all agree on this. And yet, some bits of news can be even more baffling than others, the definitive proof we are living in the weirdest timeline. Our world may be literally burning, everything is a mess, and The Brexit still looms upon us. But thanks to popular hits like Del Toro’s Shape Of Water…
5 months ago
Feature: Live, die, repeat
We’ve been battered by wave after wave of survival romps since Minecraft popularised the genre, with its deadly nights and groaning zombies, almost a decade ago. In its wake, we've been introduced to a cavalcade of punishing, persistent environments intent on putting us in an early grave. The masochistic impulse to put ourselves through the wringer for entertainment has spread to RPGs, management games, cosmic…
7 months ago
Sail the Sunless Sea once more in fan-made expansion Tales Of The Grave-Garden
Here's something to make your weekend just that little bit stranger, so long as you own Failbetter's deliciously compelling Sunless Sea. Tales Of The Grave-Garden is a fan-made expansion, adding a little more of everything to the game. More ships to sail, more weapons with which to make other ships stop sailing, and a goodly chunk of new stories to follow. They're adeptly written and…
9 months ago
Failbetter Games have launched a shiny redesign of Fallen London, the browser-based alt-history Victoriana horror RPG which spawned Sunless Sea then Sunless Skies. Failbetter last updated the site's look in 2009, when I'm not sure computers even had came in colour? Now it looks fancier and it works better on different screen sizes too, so I suppose you can fill your pocket telephone with horrors…
Maybe my perception of time is getting a bit wonky in my old age, but didn't we just finish Spring Sale season a week or two ago? No matter - cheap games are always in style. GOG's summer sale opens with a giveaway of Goldhawk Interactive's solid X-Com tribute Xenonauts. GOG also asked us to pick a few favourites from the sale, so check out our…
11 months ago
Feature: Listen now to our great story
Sit down at the boiling pot, stranger. Let me tell you a tale. A sordid tale, full of fascinating lands and captivating characters. A story of wonder and flame, strangeness and warmth. Would you like to hear it? Great. Just play this rubbish cover shooter for a half hour. I’ll start the introduction when you hit the first checkpoint. Welcome to the RPS podcast, the…
1 year ago
Following a difficult year, Sunless Sea and Fallen London devs Failbetter have battened down the hatches and scaled back some of their plans, including laying off several members of staff and delaying Sunless Skies. Part of the problem is early access sales of the encounter-unspeakable-cosmic-horrors-then-eat-your-crew space survive-o-exploration RPG sequel have been lower than expected. The small English studio assure that they will finish Sunless Skies…
Feature: In space, nobody can hear you starve
This week’s Premature Evaluation sees Fraser hurtling through the cosmos inside a space-faring locomotive in Failbetter Games’ eccentric early access space sandbox, Sunless Skies. Narrative-driven games aren’t normally a comfortable fit with piecemeal early access development - it’s harder to offer a compelling vertical slice of a story that’s meant to be viewed as a whole. This isn’t Failbetter Games’ first rodeo, however; the studio…
After exploring a cheerygrim subterranean Victorian city in Fallen London, the seas around it in Sunless Sea, then beneath those seas in the Zubmariner expansion, Failbetter Games have blasted off to the dark and dreadful cosmos above with Sunless Skies. Continuing in the same explore-o-trade-a-cannibalise RPG vein as Sunless Sea, Skies today rocketed into early access. The full release should follow in mid-2018 but if…
2 years ago
Sunless Skies [official site], the starfaring follow-up to lose-your-mind-and-eat-your-crew-adrift-on-an-underground-sea trade-o-RPG Sunless Sea, will hit early access on August 30th. That's the word today from developer Failbetter Games, who say that early access helped them shape Sunless Sea and they're hopeful it'll work out well for those dark skies too.
Sunless Seas sequel Sunless Skies [official site] has a rosy glow to it as it nears the finish line of its Kickstarter. Successfully bringing in £300k in pledges - 3x what devs Failbetter originally asked for - will do that, eh? In other words, the spaceshippy alt-Victoriana exploration, storytelling and sudden death game is, barring developmental disaster, looking like a sure thing.
All Sunless Sea [official site] players get access to the formerly Kickstarter-exclusive Pirate Poet and Cladery Heir content thanks to an update to the game today. Failbetter consulted with Kickstarter backers to see if they backed the move and the consensus was apparently "the more, the merrier", or words to that effect. I assume the timing is very much related to Sunless Skies (the Sunless…
Do not look directly at these snippets of Sunless Skies’ cosmic horror
As we continue to turn the one known human-friendly planet against us, the rich and hopeful look to space. Mate, we're purpose-built for Earth yet couldn't make this work; do you expect we'll fare better with what - and who - awaits us up there? Sunless Skies [official site, Failbetter's follow-up the the oceanic horror of Sunless Sea, will let us explore that possibility. Announcing…
Failbetter have been looking at Sunless Sea in order to inform what they do in Sunless Skies [official site], their Sunless Sea sequel set in a kind of Victorian/Fallen London version of space where the stars are being murdered. It looks like one of the lessons is about making the return journey part of exploration a bit shorter/less punishing. Obviously Sunless Skies is still in…
Feature:
I've just jettisoned a wounded zailor while underwater. It was to free up a last gasp of oxygen for the rest of my crew as I frantically try to ascend from the depths of the Zee in Sunless Sea's [official site] Zubmariner update. As the screen fades to black (to resurface, not to die horribly) I wonder whether to imagine the departed comrade as being…
Sunless Sea [official site] will adventure under the Unterzee when the Zubmariner expansion launches in a few hours - we'll tell you later today about our time with it - but developers Failbetter haven't forgotten about the surface. New quests for the supernatural naval roguelikelike's base game are arriving in a free update alongside Zubmariner, perhaps teasing what's under the waves but not requiring you…
'Sunless Skies' sounds a bit too 'A Day Trip To Reading' to my ears. I guess 2unless 2ea, Sunless Sea 2: None More Sunless and 2 Sea 2 Sunless were deemed insufficiently lyrical. The name, of course, matters nought: what does matter is that charmingly bleak, ocean-bound, narrative rougelikelikelike12 Sunless Sea [official site] is going full sail to sequel-land with Sunless Skies next year. And…
Here's a twofer: 1) A new update for awfully nice and nicely awful adventure Sunless Sea [official site] has added text and UI scaling to finally improve how the game renders its many words; 2) Developers Failbetter will announce their next game on Saturday. The UI improvement means no more squinting, and the announcement will mean... oh dang, a new Failbetter game!
3 years ago
Feature: Darkly blissful
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. Most roguelikes or lites or whatever you prefer to call this newer generation of permadeath roleplaying games, I play to win. Or, at least, to try to win: with the intention of victory, even if the actuality of it is unlikely. In Sunless…
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