Sunless Skies is a very British garden of horrors

[Administrator]

"The empire on which the sun never sets, and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained," George Macartney wrote of Britain's colonial territories in 1773. In the universe of Sunless Skies, an everlasting Queen Victoria has made this fond pronouncement a literal truth, replacing Earth's sun with a clockwork star, a sun that sets only because her Majesty wills it. The Empire, what's more, has come to reign over not just outer space but the very raw material of time - unearthing minutes like ore from the drifting ruins of the Reach, one of the new game's four discrete regions, and using them to accelerate construction projects or cruelly drag out prison terms, amongst other things. As a budding steamship captain, you too can get in on the trade, shipping wax-sealed casks of unseasoned hours alongside "everyday" commodities like aborted lab experiments or crates of human souls. It's both a parody of how empires construct their own realities, their own, brutal systems of measurement and definition, and something that hits a bit closer to home - a send-up of the energy-based mechanics of freemium social games like Failbetter's original text RPG Fallen London, where time is indeed money, a thing you can stockpile.
It's certainly worth setting aside a few barrels of hours for Sunless Skies. Available now in Early Access, the game seems just as debauched, poetic, gruelling and mesmerising a creation as its ocean-going forebear, Sunless Sea, if possibly a little too familiar for its own good. As gloriously warped as the supporting fiction is, this is a game with a simple core - travelling from port to port across a 2D plane in your clanking steam-powered vessel, carrying out oddjobs and obtaining even odder artefacts as you embroil yourself in a series of invariably sinister, very open-ended short stories.
The shift from an underground ocean to the interstellar void is accomplished with barely a ripple - you can now strafe or boost sideways to get the drop on an enemy vessel in combat, but the process of peeling back the world map's fog of war while managing your supplies, fuel, inventory and stress levels otherwise feels exactly the same. As a role-playing exercise, the game seems less in hock to bare stat-massaging than its predecessors - levelling up now takes the form of choosing a Facet or Deed rather than just spending points, which both boosts your stats and applies a twist to your backstory. Perhaps you were once subject to splendid, hellish hallucinations. Perhaps you only pretended to be cured of them. Such tweaks notwithstanding, you can expect a strong element of grind throughout - large amounts of certain commodities are needed for certain stories - complicated nowadays by the fact that fuel and supply items can no longer be stacked, forcing you to expand your hold early on if you want to make your reputation as a trader.
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