So it was three years ago that I played Sunless Sea. I loved it so much that I had been looking forward to sitting down to play this sequel even though I knew that it is a very similar game. It is in fact nearly identical to the previous game in terms of gameplay but it does have a new setting, new stories and quests, better combat, and most of all, everything has been cleaned up and greatly improved with a better interface and much better graphics.

Story-wise, this game takes place some years after the previous game. The entirety of London has been moved, brick by brick, from the Unterzee through the Avid Horizon portal and rebuilt in the High Wilderness. The Queen still reigns and has successfully built a new Clockwork Sun for her new realm. In addition to the realm of Albion, there is the new area of the Reach where new colonists try to wrest free of London’s control, the perpetually dark realm of Eleutheria who are nominally allies with London but wage a secret war of intrigue with each other and finally the Blue Kingdom which is nothing less than the land of the dead. The realms are connected by relay stations and no longer do you travel in ships on the zee but on locomotives that soar across the skies. You begin the game as the first mate of a locomotive which has just escaped from the Blue Kingdom. But as the captain has been fatally wounded, you are appointed to be the next captain. You are free to develop your career as you please though the last captain requests that you assist her in completing her final mission.

Despite the new setting and nomenclature, this is still essentially the same game. Your ship needs fuel and your crew needs food, so don’t run out of either. But more importantly, as you venture far afield, your terror increases especially if you’re going into unexplored territory and as this is a game with a Lovecraftian theme, bad things happen when your terror is high. You can make money by collecting intelligence reports from the various ports you visit and handing them in at the hub of each zone, by trading goods and completing missions. Your character is defined by four traits which can be improved as you gain levels and you can also get bonuses to traits by recruiting officers. As you earn more money, you can upgrade to bigger and better ships and equip them with better components. When you create each character, you select an ambition for that character which acts as that character’s main quest. The usual ones are earning a vast amount of money or writing an epic memoir of your experiences but there are also more exotic ones.

So far, so familiar but what’s great is that everything is now much more polished and well thought out. For example, in the previous game it can often be quite mystifying what the choices you are offered actually mean especially when the prose they employ can be very florid. Now there is explanatory text everywhere that even tells you when the choices mean nothing in gameplay-terms and are just a matter of style. If you just want to make money, there are now prospects that tell you to supply specific goods to specific ports. In general you always know what you’re lacking to complete the next step of a quest and if you need something like a Moment of Inspiration for example, the game even gives you hints on where you can go get some. The combat system is much improved as well with the ship being controlled by the keyboard and you have side thrusters that let you dodge left and right. Still I find that I prefer to avoid combat unless I need to kill something to complete a quest as it’s usually not worth the time and risk to stay and fight.

Due to these improvements plus the much better graphics, Sunless Skies is unquestionably the better game in every respect. It feels incredible to sail across the skies and watch the bustling madness of London beneath you or enter a new area zone and realize that there is what looks like an entire planet down there. The sounds are fantastic too as there are different pieces of music for different zones and no matter how often I hear it, I still get a shock whenever I hear the distinctive cry of a Scrive-Spinster. Now that there are four different maps instead of a single gigantic one, there is a real sense of progression as you move from one to the next. Each map feels like its own place with different factions, stories, characters, challenges and even slightly tweaked mechanics. The zone you start in, the Reach is huge and can feel daunting to new captains but it’s practically a kindergarten as there are so many ways to reduce your terror in it. As you travel to the more dangerous areas, effective ways to manage terror become rarer and rarer and often you feel forced to retreat back to the Reach to recover your sanity. Later on, you can’t even take easy access to repairs or food for granted.

Then there are of course the stories, oh so very many of them. There are so many quests and so many things to do. I spent quite a long time with this game and I did complete my ambition, but I also know that there is so much more than I haven’t done. Every port, every officer and every faction has stories and secrets of their own. In my game, I travelled to Death’s Doorstep to try to recover one of the newly departed, helped a princess travelling incognito marry a devil, was elected a Member of Parliament and worked to pass a bill that was then instantly destroyed by the throne and even managed to meet the terrible Queen Victoria herself! But of course as fun as it is to explore all this stories, it is all a bit too much and it can feel grindy to progress through all of the quests. Navigating the bureaucracy of the Blue Kingdom for example which requires your character to have a different status in order to be able to interact with each port is a very time consuming nightmare. For my own part, I feel that the game is at its most fun when you’re still exploring each map and trying to locate where each port is. Once you more or less know where everything is, you’re just running between ports delivering things in order complete quests and that quickly feels like a tedious chore.

That’s why as much as I loved this game, I am also quite done with it. There are so many quests and stories that the prospect trying to be completionist about it is just too daunting. Similarly you could roll up a new character with a different ambition once you complete one but you’d still have to replay a lot of the same stories and quests to amass the necessary levels and resources. That’s why I also don’t like playing this as a roguelike with a new character whenever a captain dies. There’s just so much replaying involved. Be that as it may, I still loved my time with it and it’s so great to be immersed in this setting. I would suggest that new players skip the previous game and just jump straight to this new one. It’s just a much more streamlined experience with more hand-holding to help you get situated starting out.