Sunless Skies

Enjoy a train ride into madness in this disturbing and unforgettable mix of RPG, interactive fiction and survival game.

A wonderfully refined sequel that takes everything that was great about the original and expands and improves upon it, making for a much more accessible experience for everyone.

Failbetter continues to revolutionise the RPG - not by burning it all down, but by slipping pages of prose into every crevice it can.

Locomotives don't often reach the space between stars, but Failbetter Games makes a strong case for their presence. Sunless Skies, RPGamer's Most Original Game of 2019, explores the intersection of ambition, romance, and a surprising amount of tea.

There is no doubt that Sunless Seas is a brilliant game. But there are many who could argue that it is not a good game. Those two facts are not exactly contradictions, and understanding both of them is essential to getting the most out of the experience. It’s a totally unique gaming experience, and as such, you have to sacrifice certain quality-of-life expectations.

Sunless Skies is an awesome, immersive ride for lovers of imaginative fiction and horror-laden exploration. The melding of genres bears delicious and strange fruit as top-down action mixes with compelling vignette stories. You fly a steam locomotive from port to port, injecting yourself into dozens of tales with myriad outcomes. Though hindered slightly by combat and repetition, this mesmerizing tale begs to be experienced.

Space oddity.

Sunless Skies is a fun romp with enough plot variety to keep you entertained. While the writing lacks the sharpness of previous installments, this is a good series introduction for beginners.

And so, for all my complaints about Sunless Skies being more Mary-Kate than Elizabeth to Sunless Sea's Ashley Olsen, I've found it very hard to step away from it. It is a place of wonderful sights and terrible people indeed, and I remain a sucker for the atmosphere of its long, slow journeys through places in equal parts beautiful and monstrous, even if the collect/deposit a box objectives can be wearisome. The soundtrack's gorgeous too; like so many other elements of Skies, it's a delicate amplification of what made Sea so distinctive.