Of sunless things

So some friends of ours have expressed an interest in going to this, perhaps making it into a road trip of a couple of weeks or so. I’m not that much of a hot air balloon person, and I’m really not the kind of morning person I think you’d need to be in order to be feeling gleeful at the prospect of getting up at 3:30 AM for a morning event (ouch), but on the other hand it seems like the sort of thing that might be worth doing at least once in your life…so it looks like I’ve got some trip planning research ahead of me.

In other news, we’ve recently started the sequel to Failbetter Games’s Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies. The first game is gloriously niche – you pilot a tiny ship through a vast underground cavern dotted here and there with islands and heavily populated with menaces ranging from your standard pirates to terrifying Lovecraftian horrors. As you sail, you encounter dozens of weird and entertaining little storylets – mini-plots for all of your officers, and on each island a little thicket of tales to explore that highlight the creativity of the worldbuilding. There’s a range of victory conditions to pursue, too, ranging from the somewhat mundane (become fabulously wealthy!) to the enticingly mysterious (join an adventurer in a quest to pass through the Avid Horizon, a frigid and desolate place containing a gate to…somewhere. We loved it.

And yet we’ve only finished one of its many victory conditions. Why? Because it’s a roguelike, a decision that I still find baffling. Dying and returning to the start of something makes sense for many games, but not for one where a death can easily wipe out twenty hours of gameplay. Moreover, it can be intensely frustrating to have to re-do the first part of all of your quests many many many times before living long enough to see the end of them, setting up a weird dynamic where you find yourself rushing to try to complete things before a horror from below rips your tiny ship in half. (I’ve learned there’s a mod available that can mitigate this somewhat by not re-setting quest progress on death; this might be worth a go if i want to read more of the game’s stories.)

The second game is a roguelike as well, sadly, though they’ve made the wise decision to make the goodies you can pass on to your next captain more generous. (There IS a more merciful game mode that permits save-scumming, but naturally with Mark on the team we couldn’t go for that one.) That said, our only death so far was wiped out by the game’s locking up on us (it seems that there are some growing pains with version 1.0 as it emerges from Early Access.) There’s gamepad support this time, though it feels rather janky – it’s startlingly difficult to keep your vessel moving in a straight line. Hopefully kinks that will be smoothed out as the release progresses.

This installment in the…is it a franchise now?…takes as its premise the notion that someone, at least, was successful in passing through the Avid Horizon as I mentioned above – and as it turned out, what was beyond that was a skyscape full of new wonders. And terrors, because obviously.

Ten years on, control of the skies is a battle between The Establishment and the scrappy colonists who believe this new frontier is rightly theirs. This conflict forms the backdrop for your own story, which begins with you as first officer on a small but scrappy sky-train recently returned from the land of the dead (somehow.) The voyage did not go well for the former captain, who as the game begins is dying of…something, a strange illness that covers her skin in glowing sigils. In exchange for passing the ship on to you, she requests a promise: take the black box in the ship’s hold to New London, and do not open it.

And then she is gone, and the ship is yours, skeleton crew and all. Good luck, captain.

It’s a fairly cracking beginning really, and I’m hopeful that the rest of it will be as divertingly, endearingly weird as its predecessor. Thus far, the skies aren’t quite as oppressively dark and lonely as the Sunless Sea once was – the art’s rather lovely, honestly, and does a good job suggesting layers of possibly-infinite space despite the two dimensional plane your locomotive-ship actually moves in. But the writing’s been as inventively bizarre as ever, thus far, and we’ve got a lot of new lands to discover. Until we die or go irrevocably mad, of course.

So…more of the same, rather, I suppose. But I’m all right with that.

Onward.

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