Sunless Skies: Victorian spaceships included

The Nutcracker symphony would be a great soundtrack for a session with Sunless Skies.

Not the naked twerking dancers?

When I was a teen, I went to a performance of the Nutcracker with my family. At one point, four royal servants carry a fat king out on a litter and my Dad leaned over my mom to whisper to me, “I finally found a part I could play.” My mom and I just lost it… one of those epic “we can’t be laughing so much right now” giggle fits.

And yet our maths is good enough to perfectly describe Sunless Skies as, of course, it exists on your hard drive as a pure mathematical function. In that abstracted sense your Sunless Skies is completely identical to my Sunless Skies, same as your nutcracker sheet music is identical to my sheet music.

Our performances of each will differ, though. So, which is more important? The silent yet mathematically pure sheet music, or our impure performances?*

That aside, and purely out of interest, which do you think would have the more meaningful impact on a Nutcracker performance? The removal of a single note or the removal of a single toe from one of the leads?** You may imagine you can pick the most important note, and that I’ll pick the most important toe (probably mid-pirouette).

* At this stage I don’t know where this is going over than philosophy for the sake of philosophy. I also wasn’t seeking to reduce art to maths (as I said, metaphor) but look what you made me do. ヽ(ˇヘˇ)ノ
** Not in any macabre fashion. It would *poof* disappear by magic. No pain would be felt and the dancer would get the toe back, unharmed, at the end of the performance. Also a note of apology, and a “I helped square a circle” gift voucher to be cashed at the Q23 kiosk.

I’m here for the footnotes. Please carry on! ;)

You successfully argue that computer games are mathematics made Art. Well done!

Fox Ferro! Another rockin’ post! Where to begin?

Firstly,

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

“Yes, now there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

But secondly, and most importantly,

It would highly depend on if they were to serve the toe later as an aperitif. They’d have to blend it first of course.

What do you take me for, some sort of animal? Of course it would be served as an aperitif.

The question is whether we’d listen to Mahler as we sipped on our dactyluiri cocktails.

Funny how mentions of cannibalism are still on-topic.

All gone.

Key 1
Key 2
Key 3

And one of them is mine! Thanks!

Now, should I go looking for that speed hack…?

Give it back.

(I keeeeeeeeeeeed! I keeeeeed!)

Very cool of you, @triggercut!

I’ve got this Wednesday marked on my calendar, and I’m more excited about getting back into Sunless Skies than any of new hotnesses I’ve been playing? Biomutant? Imagine Earth 1.0? Days Gone on the PC? Metro: Exodus with fancy new ray-tracing? Mass Effect Legendary Deju Vu Edition? Pah. All just ways to bide my time until Sunless Skies’ Sovereign Update.

-Tom

You’re playing Biomutant? A week or so early? Membership has its privileges, I guess.

My work schedule is packed for Wednesday and Thursday, but I’m hoping to steal a few hours here and there nonetheless. Sleep is for suckers.

What’s funny is that I’ve tried to talk myself down from being excited about this. The changes are likely to be incremental. Things like added crew interactions while traveling may not be too noticeable. Who knows, right?

But then I remember that when I’m playing Sleeping Gods or Nemo’s War, it’s really because I want to play Sunless Skies, but haven’t allowed myself to do so for months. And when I’m watching the Nevers, or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or Carnival Row or whatever… what I’m really doing is jonesing to get back to Sunless Skies again. And while I’m sure I’ll appreciate the improvements they’ve made over time, mostly I just want to go spend time in that world some more.

Do you guys rate Sunless Skies as significantly better than Sunless Seas? I’ve tried Seas a few times and love the atmosphere but find it hard to stick with. Is Skies more of the same?

I really struggled to get into Sunless Seas, but Sunless Skies clicked with me right away.

This is me as well. Sunless Seas looked really cool, but I could not get traction on it and put it down fairly fast. I constantly have a nagging voice at the back of my head that says the Sunless games need another try.

On a very related note, do we know when the Sovereign edition hits Switch or even how well Switch handles Sunless Skies?

The biggest problem I have with Sunless Seas is that it is a game that seems to want me to explore it…but then makes exploring it kind of difficult. Any time things start to get really interesting early, I feel like I’ve got to leave to head back to London before my fuel and supplies run out. I feel like a poor dog who someone’s cruelly tied to a tree in a backyard somewhere. I want to go run and explore and get into trouble…but I can’t. I’m leashed to London, sadly.

Sunless Seas tends to punish you for wanting to explore too much.

Sunless Skies tends to reward you for that same urge to explore, and makes it lots and lots easier to do.

And then on top of that, Sunless Seas wants me to discover how big parts of its systems work, by playing and trial and error and whatnot. Which might be something engaging for a lot of folks, but wasn’t for me. It didn’t want to explain very much about how things worked, which in the back of my mind betrayed a lack of confidence that I’d find the game world quite as enjoyable once I started figuring things out. It’s as if Sunless Seas thought it was a magician, and if they showed you how things worked, it was like showing you how to do the trick.

But Sunless Skies is totally different. The world is far more vast to explore…but they take you off the leash. You don’t burn through supplies or fuel nearly as fast. And there are plenty of other ports where you’ll find routes that allow you to explore pretty freely as long as you don’t completely ignore your fuel and supply status.

And the game is up-front about its systems…mostly. :) Failbetter’s original lead design on Sunless Seas, Alex Kennedy, left the company before Sunless Skies got proper release. His ethos on not sharing game information is really present in Seas…and then really works well in a game like Cultist Simulator, his next project.

Meanwhile, the Failbetter team he left behind took a big gamble on the world they were creating and the systems they were putting in place for Sunless Skies. Namely, they gambled that if they gave you more information about things like your character attributes, the economy and how it worked, and the world itself and its different factions…they bet that those things would draw you into the world faster and more fully and make you feel compelled to just…keep…going. One more trade route. Let me just drop this stuff off and I’ll go to bed. Oh wait, let me just take this traveler to this other port, it’s just nearby. Oh wait, let me just do this…or that…one more little bit more…Oh crap. It’s what time?

Sunless Skies has faith in itself, in its design, in its storytelling, and biggest of all that separates it from Sunless Seas – in its own gameplay mechanics and loops. And that confidence it possesses in those things makes it incredibly approachable and playable right from the start.

May 19 for Switch.

Have not heard a peep on Switch performance. Failbetter delayed the console releases because of such issues… so it’s a concern.

But I’m getting it as a gift, so I’m going in the vanguard.