Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition
Sunless Skies
**I seduced a woman who’s head was a jeweled skull while there was a spider nestled inside my eyeball. It was
! great fun, but sadly it took
! way too fuckin long to get there.**
Who is this game for?
If you like Britishness, the possibility of a decent story, nice environments or you like mildly spooky games AND you’re either willing to cheat or your time isn’t valuable.
Gameplay
Looking for diamonds in the rough.
– Real player with 249.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Lovecraftian RPG Games.
My feelings towards this game are many and complicated. For background, Sunless Sea is one of my favourite games ever…and I can also totally understand why some people might absolutely hate it. Sunless Skies is in many ways an improvement over Sea, and yet, for me at least, it hasn’t quite recaptured the magic of Sea, and I’m not entirely sure I can explain why.
For people who haven’t played Sea, both it and Skies are games about exploring a world that is sometimes bizarre, sometimes charming, and sometimes terrifying. Both games have some of the best writing that I’ve seen in video games, with excellent worldbuilding. And both games are very slow-paced. A lot of time in these games is spent travelling from point A to point B, with only the occasional combat or random event to break up the travel. Depending on the person, this can either be a chill and relaxing experience, or an incredibly tedious one.
– Real player with 118.8 hrs in game
The Bolt Age
It has some great aesthetics and a nice story, but the game needs to be polished, I will return to this review at a later date, after some updates have been made to remove the bugged enemies, which can spawn in walls, be unable to die, be invisible and there are issues with an inability to change weapons at time.
Pros
Good Aesthetics
Nice Story
Great Graphics
Smooth animation for the electricity
Level design is decent
cons
It is just way to buggy at the minute to be playable, WITH UPDATES this will be a very PROMISING GAME but it just needs some fixes to make it playable.
– Real player with 2.0 hrs in game
I was excited to try this game out as from the trailer it looked like a game a really enjoyed in my childhood.
It did turn out to feel that way, the visuals were pretty cool and the weapons felt exciting to use. Unfortunately my laptop has served it’s time and can’t handle this game’s VFX so I’ll pick it up again when I get a new rig.
– Real player with 1.7 hrs in game
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes
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Review by Gaming Masterpieces - The greatest games of all time on Steam.
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Is it a masterpiece? Yes, if you enjoy isometric pixel art and challenging combat. Fans of soulslike action RPGs get new food.
The backstory of the game is dark and depressing. At the beginning, our main character wakes up on a beach, full of horribly mutated fish and half-rotten corpses. It looks as if we were on board a ship that smashed on the cliffs and the surf washed us up. Luckily there is a sword next to the dead body next to us. We are a warrior, the last survivor of the Order of the Strivers of Dibrom. Our task, for which we have trained all our lives, is to defeat the Seven Acolytes, cursed and powerful beings possessed by evil deities called Gahars. We must kill the acolytes and thus save the kingdom. If we fail, the evil gods will continue to rule and madness will devour the entire world. More information will not be revealed at first. If you want to know more, you have to examine the items you find and talk to the few (more or less) sane people you meet on the adventure. The graphics also provide clues as to what has happened in this desolate world.
– Real player with 21.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Lovecraftian RPG Games.
Mixed Feeling. Decent, Could Be Better.
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is a isometric action game. As the only survivor of Strivers of Dibrom, players need to navigate through the accursed kingdom and battle against the seven Acolytes of Gahars, further freeing this land from the terrifying clutch of this eldritch deity. I have a mixed feeling for this game. On one hand, I really like the artstyle and the designs of each mob. The eerie, creeping, bodily-horror always seizes my eyes, and the sense of dread emanating from mere pixel sprites invariably tantalizes my taste for this kind of pixel art. Yet, on the other hand, the level design is quite weak, falling short of depth and the incentive to explore. The combat is sabotaged by enemies' easily-exploited movesets, inaccurate hit boxes, and some questionable design choices. Still, Morbid: The Seven Acolytes manages to deliver an decent, albeit flawed, experience for lovecraftian horror action game.
– Real player with 17.5 hrs in game
The Hunter’s Journals - Pale Harbour
Without choices we’re merely going through life on a never-ending elevator
It’s been so long since I experienced a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), going back to my childhood days I found them fascinating because they were so simple in their design yet when you delve into the story there are a maze of choices to be made often with a grisly ending for any naive decisions. The choices were so quick to come by it meant the real challenge was staying involved in the story while striving for any new opening that would branch you further into the plot but, with so many trapdoor wrong turnings, it is easier said than done.
– Real player with 6.8 hrs in game
Disclaimer: This is not a technical critique. I’m a streamer and I will review based on whether I enjoyed games and how well my community responded to them. I hope there’s value in that to some.
This game isn’t going to blow you away visually if you’re used to ‘flashy’ games with ‘action’. However, as someone who very much enjoyed the ‘Choose Your Own Adventures’ books in my youth, it was easy for me to see beyond the not-full screen. It’s a book and as such would have looked odd if it filled the screen. It was easy to pick up what to do, and there were different difficulty levels to choose from. As someone who enjoys the ‘journey’ and to experience the stories rather than stress too much about having enough health to last the game, I elected for the easiest setting.
– Real player with 5.9 hrs in game
The Hunter’s Journals - Red Ripper
The Hunter’s Journals - Red Ripper
A unique fantasy visual novel
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Story
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Characters
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Graphics
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Game length, many hours of replay value
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It is a smart game, requires a mature vocabulary.
“You are a hunter of beasts and monsters”. So begins our next quest in the “Hunter’s Journals” series.
But, this one changes it up quite bit as you now have “Heirloom” weapons or armor you can take along.
You can only select one, you can however change your selection and see it will affect your outcome.
– Real player with 10.8 hrs in game
Even on the easiest setting, it is extremely challenging and each point of health and items matters so much, find your way through this weird and crazy, but intense and memorable adventure :)
If you’d like to see what we’re playing next with regular updates, or request to review a game, feel free to follow us at:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35688508-Ember-Works-Reviews/
– Real player with 3.7 hrs in game
We Need To Go Deeper
1. Amazing soundtrack that fits the atmosphere of the game completely. Which counts for battle and management of the ship into starting and or in between a adventure.
2. Anything game-breaking is immediately fixed usually by the awesome developers who spend so much of their time burning their eyes on the screen just to hear everyones suggestions and reports out.
3. Active developers in the community speaking and having conversation with the community in which they take ideas on from. (not that they need to, they’re not obligated to always respond or do work for everyone)
– Real player with 392.3 hrs in game
This game is so much fun. When you have even one other human to play it with, it is a comedy of errors as you try to manipulate your ship (which steers like a cow at the best of times, and a rock most of the time) into the depths of the Living Infinite, discovering all sorts of crazy new weapons and costumes along the way.
When you have even one other human.
It SAYS it’s playable single player, but that’s absolutely laughable. You can fill your submarine with a crew of bots that will nominally do things like slam their weakest wrenches against the holes in your ship or fire at every small enemy on your screen (even if it’s something you SHOULDN’T BE FIRING AT, like the totem that will spawn a ghost if you shoot at it but is perfectly safe if you steam gently past it)… but they won’t help you if you want a turn on the shooty shooty guns and want someone else to steer your yellow submarine. Nor will they help you bust through walls in your caving adventures if you happened to be holding an item that does not damage walls (like the chemistry set).
– Real player with 214.0 hrs in game
SUNLESS SEA
Wanted to pop a review out for this game, albeit brief.
The Sunless Sea is a top-down view game, where you make a captain and take a ship out to zee to explore the unknown, make adventures, probably die, and then make a new captain who might inherit a few of the things your last one had. For me, this was one of the first top-down games I’d played before, and its exploration focus was very different from my prior experiences of turn-based strategy games, or first/3rd person adventure/shooters and the Teltale games. These were my impressions coming from that background.
– Real player with 347.6 hrs in game
Is there a sea more sunless? This game is marketed as an immersive, story-driven, almost roguelike, nautically themed romp through alternate history London, circa 1890s. The people at Failbetter Games have created something both motivating and meaningful in their games surrounding Fallen London, utilizing hundreds of storylets that drive the player toward various choices and options.
At first playthrough, especially if you didn’t play the precursor game Fallen London, you will find yourself immersed in a world that follows many of the rules and expectations of our own, but with many questions and concepts left unanswered. I went in without having played Fallen London (though I did go back and play it once I was hooked on Sunless Sea) and my mind immediately was grabbed by the implications of what was going on in the game world around me. I loved the content and the lore that the world seemed to be steeped in, and loved it even more for the fact that it didn’t give up its secrets without its due. This game is primarily an exploration game with the pretense of combat and economics, though those are not the primary focus. That said, I very much enjoy the combat and trading aspect, but it does come easier as you get more established. It is the process of becoming established that I think turns so many initial players away.
– Real player with 276.5 hrs in game
The Hunter’s Journals - Blissful Ignorance
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything - Albert Einstein
Grindwheel Games' text-based CYOA trilogy of The Hunter’s Journals rolls onward with The Hunter hired to solve the mystery behind the afflictions occurring at a Monastery; a challenge that not only will test the Hunter’s prowess but also will require scaling a dangerous Mountain in harsh weather conditions and a threat of Harpy’s along the way.
As with the earlier Journals, the game design cleverly mimics a book in its appearance and layout while also portraying glorious Lovecraftian artwork among its ‘pages’. There is also the options of VA, music/sound effects and a Gallery complete with lore, unlocked artwork and a history of this ‘Universe’. The writing style is once more beautifully descriptive and keeps the attention span of the Player by adding choice elements and challenges throughout the story progress.
– Real player with 11.2 hrs in game
Senscape recommends The Hunter’s Journal: Blissful Ignorance
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Story
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Characters
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Graphics
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Game length, many hours of replay value
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It is a smart game, requires a mature vocabulary.
“You are the hero”.
Or not.
It all depends on the choices you make.
You receive an urgent dispatch for help lacking information about what you face; you are unable to properly prepare because of this lack of information so you are going in blind and must earn things as you progress.
This is about choice and you may or may not succeed in building your strength and weaponry up by the time you meet your strongest foes beyond the village of Pilgrim’s Progress.
– Real player with 6.8 hrs in game
The Hunter’s Journals - Vile Philosophy
The voice-over for the Lady of Blades is oddly enticing.
Jokes aside, this choose-your-own-adventure styled visual novel was an engaging playthrough.
– Real player with 146.1 hrs in game
_“The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain
in the world had found a voice” - H G Wells_
Grindwheel Games and the whole design/dev team have devised a thrilling second release to the Hunter’s Journals CYOA series. By keeping to the same design layout of imitating a book (that’s complete with the red ribbon for authenticity!) it helps breed familiarity knowing you can jump straight into the Adventure without having to adjust.
The artwork grabs your attention with it’s bright, lively colours and originality while the music & effects set a smooth ambience letting you focus on the tale’s journey.
– Real player with 7.8 hrs in game
A House of Many Doors
This has quickly shot to the top of my favorite games of all time list, and about 6 months after release it’s still there. That said, gonna do my best to be relatively objective about its good and bad points:
aHoMD has an amazing setting and top-notch worldbuilding, and digging through the narrative and trying to understand what has happened and will happen is as big a part of the exploration in this game as the physical exploration aspect itself. The House is a bizarre, fascinating place, so if you’re a fan of surreal fantasy, magical realism, and slipstream works that toss you a totally alien place and tell you to infer everything from scratch, you’ll absolutely love this. Additionally, the game tweaks quite a lot of itself based on your actions and choices, and much of what you do has consequences, from the innocuous to the absolutely devastating. I feel like each one of the characters I play is really a different character because of that.
– Real player with 164.0 hrs in game
HOMD is somewhere in my top ten best games of all time.
It is an unspeakably rich, vast and beautiful universe and I’m on my second playthrough. Having taken a couple of years since the previous run, I found it haunting my dreams constantly, occasionally I’d lie awake in bed missing it like a former lover, and I had to come crawling back.
But let’s start at the beginning.
HOMD is set in The House, a bizarre dimension that sucks in people from all kinds of universes, and dumps them into a world divided into vast Rooms many miles across, where people don’t need to eat, but prolonged exposure to the ever present darkness is lethal. Light is life, and the population (numbering in billions) have gathered in quite a few vast cities spread all throughout the House, while intercellular explorers, like yourself, move between Rooms in crawling vehicles.
– Real player with 116.1 hrs in game