Sunless Skies – Stately Play

Steaming the Unfriendly Skies

September 24, 2018 Tof Eklund 0

In case you haven’t heard, Sunless Skies, the sequel to Failbetter Games’ indie hit Sunless Sea, has set course for release on January 31st, the year of her Majesty below 2019. The pitch is “Sail the skies. Betray your Queen. Murder a sun.” Works for me, I’ve wanted to murder a sun ever since I met the !@%$!?! Dawn Machine (falling as it does only behind red honey on my list of things that are actually terrible in Sunless Sea, and that only because the red honey smuggling subplot involves such an intensely personal corruption). I’ve been in on the Sunless Skies alpha and it’s been amazing, watching the world grow from a frustratingly sparse but conceptually fascinating single zone of space to a deep, dark, place, full of wonder and terror, worthy successor to the strange glories of Sunless Sea.

Sunless Seas and Starless Skies

March 7, 2017 Tof Eklund 0

iOS, PC/Mac• Failbetter Games just completed their Kickstarter for Sunless Skies, the spiritual sequel to indie smash-hit and certified (by yours truly) best game of all time, Sunless Sea. They blew past their goal of $125k, raising almost four times that much and unlocking stretch goals for Sunless Sea and Fallen London as well as Failbetter’s forthcoming spacefaring adventure. The only disappointment of the campaign was that it was conducted neither in pounds sterling nor the Echoes approved by the Masters of the Bazaar, presumably because the only thing riskier at the moment than raising capital in a fictional currency would be relying on the pound post-Brexit. Residents of the rebel colonies can take some small satisfaction in the estimation of the USD to be momentarily more stable than the currency of the crown, but they should have a care – there have been whispering of late that Mr. Iron has been seen in the Forgotten Quarter and, stranger yet, at the Cumaean Canal, working an abacus with inhuman speed and chuckling softly.