SUNLESS SEA on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE. Take the helm of your steamship and set sail for the unknown! Sunless Sea is a game of discovery, loneliness and frequent death, set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London.
SUNLESS SEA is a exploration, lovecraftian and survival game
developed and published by Failbetter Games.
Released on February 06th 2015 is available in English on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
It has received 9,288 reviews of which 7,715 were positive and 1,573 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.1 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 18.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 2.16€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified SUNLESS SEA into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows XP or later
- Processor: 2Ghz or better
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1280x768 minimum resolution, DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 700 MB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
MacOS
- OS: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
- Processor: 2Ghz or better
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1280x768 minimum resolution, DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card
- Storage: 700 MB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
Linux
- Processor: 2Ghz or better
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1280x768 minimum resolution, DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card, OpenGL Core
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
How to enjoy it: This game has two parts At the start it's about exploration and resource management, and it's great. But then you explore 90% of the map, and the only thing left to do is finishing the stories, including your Ambition. At this point the game is about finding better sources of fuel/supplies, optimizing your routes, trading items between. Every journey should give you some money. This way I never had to grind, as I was getting everything while progressing the stories. If you want to enjoy it, don't play by the rules. Save before challenges and reload as much as you want. It has nothing to do with skill, and failure just sets you back. Don't lose your mind. Don't eat your crew. This is not a roguelike.
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A painfully slow, oppressive slog. Also some of the best writing and atmosphere ever created. If you like games where you read a lot I would highly recommend, but it isn't for everybody.
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i really like this game shit just kind of Happens. 25 hours 4 captains n half a story tracking spreadsheet in i still have no idea what's happening but that's ok i have a council of autistic people drip feeding me lore like a trained ape. great to play while on long train rides (of which i take many)
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Tldr: Sunless Sea wants you to get to know it, which is actually made quite pleasant and interesting by the many tales of the people living in it. Once you do know your way around, however... It's Dark Souls level catharsis! I love this game. Now that that's out, I wanna say I also get when people are confused about what the game really wants them to experience. As an overview: This game is, on the one hand, a thrilling 2D open-world adventure/exploration game with rogue-like elements and a difficulty I found comparable to any of FromSoftware's Soulsborne titles. On the other hand, it is a beautifully fleshed-out choose-your-own-adventure narrative, being told as a text adventure game in each port. Sunless Sea is immersive to me in the sense that it offers so many different things to be engaged with (from at times quite tricky route-planning to not strand in the middle of the ocean, to the age-old ethical question on whether to eat your Navigator... :) ) I remember being set into my first savegame: Being told that my character would likely not make it far, and that I'd have to act brazenly to achieve basically anything at all noteworthy. (Of course, I played with manual saves enabled back then.) The shops in the starting port of London layed out a myriad of stat boosting equipment for my ship (all of them wayy expensive, mind you!), as well as letting you glimpse the (literal) mountain of items that exists in the game as trading goods. At face value, this is nothing special at first, but I can assure you that every. single. item. on. that. list. (and all the ones London merchants are not interested in) can be turned into a way to break a profit! >:D As you explore, you figure out what ports sell and buy which goods, which is also generally quite memorable because every single destination is a whole part of the world with its own culture, own customs and own peculiarities. When exploring, the world feels alive! You have to adapt to an unforgiving world (once, I "sank" by virtue of letting all my 5 crew fight a Siren. I learned the hard way that day that Sirens, if fought and lost against, kill six crew members. :,) ), while time actually advances, changing what events are available in the world as well! I totally get why people get confused or frustrated when the material portion of the world you are setting out to explore is really just teasing your ignorance, without any explanation whatsoever on what "Parabola-Linen" is, or HOW THE HELL you will get your hands on one of the elusive "S&C Longboxes"... Looking back on it though, I think this is all the more intentional: I find the creators have a unique and humorously grotesque style of writing, and when first confronted with one of the mascots of the game right there in London, you feel no less like the stranger in a strange land than the Londoners before you. Seeing that some people were frustrated by the vastness of the game while simultaneously being given no explanation whatsoever is something I can relate to, even though Sunless Sea wasn't that experience for me. I am a naturally very curious person and my drive to explore seems to have carried me through that initial phase of confusion... I think the biggest point of critique might be the way quests, stati and quest-related attributes are being represented, which might be the most frustrating of all. Generally, anything that is neither an item (i.e. for trading) nor a ship ressource nor a player character stat is a little picture including a short description altogether found in the menu "Journal". Earlier, I mentioned that time advances, which is being kept track of by a quality counting up from 0 all the way to 199 (...I believe. To be honest, I have only once completed the game in a very unexpected "draw"... THAT'S RIGHT: I FINALLY FINISHED A QUEST AND THE REWARD WAS NEITHER MONEY NOR FAME, BUT GETTING A PERMA-BAN FROM MY MORTAL SHELL INSTEAD!). This quality steps forward a certain amount (usually like 7 or 8 in my experience)whenever you return to London after having spent an irl minute out at sea. I believe this is a quite elegant solution to the question of how to advance time, but it bears one of the many catches of this game: Being out and about uses ressources, and eventually you will run out of money to buy said ressources in London. Fortunately, the game is well-balanced in that regard as the people you meet on your travels often do things like dining with you, which boils down to free ressources, one way or another. Back to qualities, which are far more than just the state of civilisations advancing in their schemes: Favours you get with factions, quest stages (including Officers', aka companion quests), any more abstract threats like nightmares or... ...(daylight...! o.o) -- heck, even the counts of the spies you instigated into various ports in the world (why, yes of course you can become a spymaster!), or the number of Captains lost on the current line of savegames has a neat little picture and a count associated with it! (By the way: You can circumvent having to start from ZERO after game over fairly easily... You will still have sunk that expensive merchant vessel you have drowned in, unfortunately...! o7 ) What I'm meandering around is the fact that the qualities' descriptions are often short and not rarely more emblematic than helpful. The time quality for example reads "Your time at zee will change you... and London." -- Now, do you know what this random quality that reads "Out with the old laws, in with the new." actually means?? Or try "You've been known to visit the three sisters of [Location]". I know how that quest progresses, but I am bloody unaware of how I get there. If you think it'll be half-bad because there is a list of quests, then I must disappoint you: THESE ARE THE QUESTS! >;D Seriously though: I've played the newest game the creators behind Sunless Sea made and it handles quest information better. Sunless Sea's mercilessness shines through in this place as well, and I suggest you keep some sort of notes when playing this game in case your memory and/or attention span is prone to glitches like mine. ^^ :) Frankly, I like creating spreadsheets a lot, and one day I wanted to find out the most optimal progression through the game (as trading for money to buy better ships to get faster but more dangerous money is a little grindy... Look, if you want easy progression without story or immersion, play Cookie Clicker. :p). I started logging my journeys, timing the routes, and writing down my routing in advance. I make it sound more technical than it really needs to be, my point being that keeping track of where you will (migth have to) visit five ports over makes the game a lot easier, since even if your crew suddenly all go insane at the prospect of their Captain suffering prophetic nightmares, you can still acess whether or not straining the engines for that little bit of extra speed to get to one of the safer (== more sane) ports faster is a good idea or will break your ship in half. :) ...That is not to say that this game can not be played casually, oh no! I'm just saying that, at its core, it is designed as a mild sweatshop and is, in my opinion, most thrilling when played that way! :3
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I enjoyed Sunless Sea and the world its set in, but a lot of frustrating and tedious gameplay aspects became apparent almost immediately. At first, I championed the idea of a story-based RPG roguelike, but quickly I regretted that. This game repeatedly tells you to play it on a permadeath mode, which means you lose your save when you die. This adds tension and means you get to play it just a little bit differently with the next captain you play. It adds to the atmosphere in the setting: the Sunless Sea feels dangerous and it makes succeeding all the more impressive. It does, however, fail in some regards. While I greatly enjoyed soaking in the atmosphere, I didn't enjoy having to replay certain story quests with seemingly little difference between the previous playthrough. I see that there are some choices and branching paths but they often fall in the "good" and "basically softlocking yourself bad" categories. Sunless Sea is a story, and an interactive one at that. It is also a game, which means that there is a "winning" and "losing". As much as I tried roleplaying a veteran captain who tried his luck on the unforgiving Zee, I kept thinking about just how bad I was screwing myself over with certain choices, and occasionally dipped into the wiki and forums to find out what I was doing wrong and how I could do things better. I understand that this might also just be a "me-problem", but I feel that the games tedium and, in my opinion, poor replayability really hurts it as a roguelike. I should mention that I did watch that Rock Paper Shotgun youtube video on Sunless Sea, defending the roguelike design and the tedium as an achievement, not a flaw. I almost agree with it in theory, but in practice I feel like maybe there's a reason Fallen London started as a text-based browser game.
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Frequently Asked Questions
SUNLESS SEA is currently priced at 18.99€ on Steam.
SUNLESS SEA is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 18.99€ on Steam.
SUNLESS SEA received 7,715 positive votes out of a total of 9,288 achieving a rating of 8.10.
😎
SUNLESS SEA was developed and published by Failbetter Games.
SUNLESS SEA is playable and fully supported on Windows.
SUNLESS SEA is playable and fully supported on MacOS.
SUNLESS SEA is playable and fully supported on Linux.
SUNLESS SEA is a single-player game.
There is a DLC available for SUNLESS SEA. Explore additional content available for SUNLESS SEA on Steam.
SUNLESS SEA does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
SUNLESS SEA does not support Steam Remote Play.
SUNLESS SEA is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for SUNLESS SEA.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 26 July 2025 14:34 |
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| SteamSpy data | 30 July 2025 13:44 |
| Steam price | 31 July 2025 12:43 |
| Steam reviews | 31 July 2025 04:01 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about SUNLESS SEA, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about SUNLESS SEA
- SteamCharts - Analysis of SUNLESS SEA concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck SUNLESS SEA compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
36
Developer
Failbetter Games
Publisher
Failbetter Games
Release
06 Feb 2015
Platforms
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