Sunless Skies moves the Fallen London universe from underground oceans to the sky. The British Empire has colonized the heavens, building railway lines through cosmic wilderness and establishing ports among the stars. Failbetter Games’ sequel addresses the most common criticisms of Sunless Sea while maintaining, and often exceeding, its predecessor’s literary quality. The community consensus is that this is the better game, and the improvement is most dramatic in the areas where Sea struggled.
The Unterzee was dark and terrifying. The High Wilderness is dark, terrifying, and beautiful in ways the ocean couldn’t be.
The Sky Is Full of Stories
The writing remains Failbetter’s greatest strength. The Fallen London universe’s expansion into space allows for even more creative freedom, and the writers use it fully. Ports offer stories about celestial empires, time-distorted regions, living stars, and the consequences of Victorian ambition extended to cosmic scale. The prose quality matches Sunless Sea’s best while exploring wider narrative territory.
The pacing improvements are substantial. Travel between ports is more engaging, with more frequent encounters, environmental hazards, and points of interest breaking up the journeys. The empty stretches that plagued Sunless Sea are largely resolved, and the moment-to-moment experience of piloting your locomotive through the sky provides visual and atmospheric variety that the dark ocean couldn’t match.
The combat is significantly improved. While still not the game’s primary selling point, combat encounters are more dynamic, more varied, and more satisfying. Different enemy types require different approaches, and the weapon systems give you more meaningful choices. It’s still atmospheric tension rather than action-game combat, but it no longer feels like a chore.
The four regions, each with its own visual identity, factional politics, and narrative themes, provide structural variety that gives the exploration purpose. Moving from one region to another changes the feel of the game dramatically, and the interconnected stories that span regions create narrative motivation for exploration.
The officer and crew systems carry over from Sunless Sea with improvements. Character storylines are well-written and integrate with the world’s broader narratives, giving your companions personality and purpose beyond mechanical bonuses.
Cosmic Complaints
The learning curve, while improved from Sea, still asks a lot of new players. The game’s systems, from fuel management to port progression to narrative branching, require investment before they click. Players unfamiliar with Failbetter’s design philosophy may struggle with the initial hours.
The writing density remains a potential barrier. Sunless Skies is, fundamentally, a game about reading. If you don’t enjoy long-form prose with Victorian-weird flourishes, the core experience won’t work for you, no matter how improved the gameplay is. The literary ambition is the game’s identity, and it makes no concessions.
Some narrative threads feel less developed than others. The four regions vary in content density, and certain areas have more fleshed-out storylines than others. The game is generous with content overall, but the quality isn’t uniformly distributed.
The roguelike elements, while less punishing than Sea’s, still create frustration when a long-invested captain dies. The legacy system mitigates loss, but permadeath in a narrative-heavy game means losing access to in-progress storylines. Some players prefer the non-permadeath mode, which the game wisely includes as an option.
Empire Among the Stars
Sunless Skies uses its Victorian space setting to examine colonialism, industrialization, and imperial ambition with intelligence and dark humor. The British Empire’s expansion into the heavens isn’t presented as heroic conquest. It’s shown as the same extractive, hierarchical system transplanted to new territory, complete with exploitation, class warfare, and bureaucratic absurdity. The game doesn’t lecture. It presents a world where imperial logic is the air you breathe, and lets the consequences speak for themselves.
Should You Captain a Sky-Locomotive?
If you were interested in Sunless Sea but bounced off the slow travel and weak combat, Sunless Skies is the version of Failbetter’s vision that addresses those concerns. If you loved Sea, Skies is a direct improvement. If you’ve never tried either and want a literary RPG with genuine atmosphere, start here. Only avoid if you don.t enjoy reading in games, because that’s what Sunless Skies asks above all else.
The Verdict on Sunless Skies
Sunless Skies is one of the finest narrative RPGs on PC. It takes Sunless Sea’s extraordinary writing and wraps it in gameplay that’s finally worthy of the prose. The cosmic Victorian setting is inspired, the pacing improvements are substantial, and the combat is no longer a liability. Some rough edges remain in the learning curve and content distribution, but the overall package represents Failbetter Games at their best: literate, atmospheric, and committed to treating games as a legitimate literary form.