Do you keep the trinket or cast it into the water? It would be a symbolic gesture, sure, but the ripples through your story will be genuine. Drop the keepsake back into your pocket and you’ll be keeping the preposterous promises made to a young lover after a drunken night together. Drop the keepsake into the sea and, eventually, she and it may be forgotten. Then you will be free to find refuge in the next warm and welcome body (and, so long as you make to back to port, there is another).
Price and availabilitySunless Sea is available for PC and Mac on Steam for £14.99.
If a game is a series of meaningful choices, as per the designer Sid Meier’s oft-repeated, oft-abused maxim, then Sunless Sea is more game than most. The choices pile up quickly, then escalate. Sure, you’re a merchant captain , but who were you before that? Poet? Priest? Veteran? Urchin? And by what measure would you consider this new life a success? By discovering your dead father’s remains? By becoming a well-regarded travel writer? By dying wealthy? Who will serve as your crew in this endeavour? Do you care about personal hopes and ambitions? Do you care enough to help them out and, when the time comes, free them from your trade?
What trade is that, anyway? Smuggling? Piracy? Exploration? Haulage? There’s nothing so crude as a class to pick in Sunless Sea. Rather, the lines between each way of life are traversable. Decisions will lead you down certain paths, some of which cannot be returned from, but it’s entirely possible to keep smuggled goods, stowaways and legitimate cargo in your hold to make the most of a trip.
Okay, says Sunless Sea, more gravely now. When the money runs out and you’re 50 miles from home and the food is gone and disease is everywhere and your engines finally sputter out, in the darkness as you hear the monsters rounding, will you cook and eat your first mate? If you don’t, your girl back home may never know whether her heart was already broken before it was broken.