Sunless Sea
Step into the gaming world with Sunless Sea, one of the top $9.99 games in the App Store! Crafted with creativity and innovation by Failbetter Games Ltd, this captivating Role Playing game is bound to grab your attention. With its content rating of 12+, it caters to a wide audience. Ever since its release on 22nd March 2017, it has been constantly updated, with the latest version rolled out on 26th May 2017.
Whether you have a liking for Role Playing, Adventure, games, Sunless Sea is sure to keep you hooked!
User Ratings
Join the crowd of 92 gamers who have given their verdict on Sunless Sea.
Ready to take on the adventure? Get Sunless Sea now from the APP STORE.
Dive into Sunless Sea
LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE.
Failbetter’s award-winning PC game is now on iOS! 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.
If the giant crabs, sentient icebergs and swarms of bats don’t get you, madness and cannibalism certainly will. But that old black ocean beckons, and there’s loot for the brave souls who dare to sail her.
Betray your crew, sell your soul to a Devil, marry your sweetheart. Survive long enough and you’ll achieve your life’s ambition.
You will die, but your legacy will live on…
KEY FEATURES
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A deep, compelling world packed with 350,000+ words of stories and secrets. Find your father’s bones. Determine London’s destiny. Defy the gods of the deep sea.
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Beautiful, hand drawn art: castles of sparkling ice, prisons perched on lily pads, fog-shrouded lighthouses and the DAWN MACHINE.
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Your captain will die. But you can pass on resources from one generation to the next. Acquire a family home and a hoard of heirlooms. Build up your own story across generations of zailors who braved the sea and lost – or won…
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Real-time combat against ships and Zee-beasts, spider-crewed dreadnoughts and sentient icebergs.
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Light and dark, terror and madness: stray too far from the gas-lamps of civilisation and your crew will grow fearful and eventually lose their sanity.
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Upgrade your steamship with powerful engines, cannons and pneumatic torpedo guns. (Or buy a bigger, better ship.)
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Hire unique officers like the Haunted Doctor and the Irrepressible Cannoneer. Each has a story to tell, if you can draw it out of them.
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Choose a ship’s mascot: the Comatose Ferret, the Wretched Mog, the Elegiac Cockatoo, and more!
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Trade or smuggle silk and souls, mushroom wine and hallucinogenic honey.
REVIEWS
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“Absolutely the best writing in any video game since, well, as long as I can remember.” (10/10 – PCGamesN)
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“A very compelling and satisfying adventure… The realm of possibilities seems endless, and every time I set sail I find something new.” (9/10 – Destructoid)
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“Sunless Sea’s method of storytelling isn’t unique, but it has never been realised with such impact and elegance.” (10/10 – Eurogamer)
What’s Fresh in the Latest Update?
Discover what’s new in the recent update of Sunless Sea on 26th May 2017:
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.
- storylets now showing in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen now fixed
- fuel bar no longer resets to 0 after loading manual save
- no Zubmariner-specific ports should now appear on the chart
Hear from the Players – Sunless Sea Reviews
Find out what gamers are saying about Sunless Sea:
Amazing game, Im about halfway through we think, havent died once. Love the open world, resource gathering, battles, great value, no brainer.
We really love this game. We will say its not for everyone, like how we love all the reading, and the feeling of being a captain of a very small ship. But our friend doesnt care for it because of those reasons. It is a little pricey for 10$ but it is a PC game. Would recommend!
We played this game on Steam, and now on our iPad. It’s still excellent. Yes, the game CAN be unforgiving (that’s the entire point), so it makes you extra cautious when you exploring a new area. The slowness of the ship (at FIRST) can add to this sense of vulnerability, which is why this game is fun in the first place. Once you upgrade your engines, or do the quests to get 1 of 2 very good engines, the world opens up. Note: to the dude below (like all reviews) who says "Game crashes immediately." Not true. They are A. Using an old model that the game doesn’t even support. B. Are at the max on memory so the tablet can’t even provide resources to actually run the game. Or C. They are lying. You see this in EVERY review section. And it’s never true, unless backed up by a LOT of similar sentiments. To this day, we haven’t yet had an app game crash repeatedly. Don’t give that nonsense below ANY credence at all.
You have to be patient with this one. Also we recommend reading about how to sell sunlight. The money it brings in will make this one bearable.
Excellent game. Beautiful, clever puzzles, quick advancement to ever more interesting challenges if one is bold and clever. We’ve had this game for several months and we are still finding whole new adventures, new avenues. It is cool that the way the game evolves as an experience, it continually opens new perspectives of play. At first, it is a simple exploration, figuring out how the boat works, finding strange, and sometimes finding unbeatable opponents (I remember how proud we were for fierce sea [I mean zea] battles… Backing up a very damaged ship through a narrow curving channel, while shooting at an opponent four times our size). Then it was learning the commerce of the zea and how to improve our ship, thrive, and then excel. The stories are a lot of fun, the choices are clever, and bring in some self reflection about the ethics in games decisions. The scoring and rewards is clever and subtle. One can create interesting characters through the choices, and thereby attract unique challenges and rewards. Clever interface. The writing is good. Clever. Funny. Once in a while we have to look a word up. That is surprising. :)
We picked this game up on a whim, not knowing anything about it other than what the reviews said. Having sunk maybe 100+ hours into it so far, its honestly one of the best written games we’ve played in a long time, maybe ever. The world building and storytelling of this game is unique, rewarding and incredibly in depth. You end up getting addicted to this game trying to progress the storyline.
This game is great, other than that you cant link your Fallen London accounts. We hope you will be adding it soon.
What a way to indulge your wanderlust. This is a richly worded literary adventure game of the highest caliber. The writing is marvelous, and the world-building is incredible. You start slow. You fail. You will curse the game, and you will be cursed. Beasts will sink your ship. Darkness will defeat you. But surrender to the call of the dark Unterzee, and an almost unbelievably huge world is there to be discovered. Yes, we wish we sailed a bit faster. And we would love to see the journal aspect improved, with a better record of deeds and dialogues. This game had us taking notes. But we loved all of it. We dont know how many hours we’ve played. We’ve died. We’ve sailed off the map. Our scion was murdered. We’ve achieved our ambitions. We’ve retired. We’ve set sail anew. If you can dig on some comic-horror gothic literature, and if you can enjoy managing story quests and deep inventories, and if you can invest some time into a darkly twisted web of words, then this game has a world for you to love and fear and get lost in. Lo, we become one of the drownies… Rejoice..
Was definitely worth the $10. Found Fallen London afterwards and cant stop playing that as well. We wish you could connect the Fallen London to the Sunless Sea app however, but we think it is only possible with the PC and Mac versions. When is the Sunless Sky coming to apps??
For most new players, Sunless Sea can seem unforgiving and nearly impossible to play. The struggle for resources like fuel, supplies, and echos can be a seemingly dauntless challenge, especially in the face of losing your sanity. However, Sunless Sea isnt insurmountable. The Sunless Sea is a game about stories, not thrilling high octane pirate battles. Its richness is in the writing and the text. The choose-youre own-adventure-style of narrative gives a thrilling experience as you make notes to try and figure out which choices lead to glory and which lead to death. There is a deep lore here that weaves an intricate and beautifully haunting narrative. The story itself is like the underzea: dark, deep, haunting, and full of amazing beauties waiting to be discovered. Dont play this game for the action, but play it for the atmosphere. We’ve played the games countless times and sunk many hours discovering every secret. Is this game existential? This old zea captain was very surprised by the answer! We found myself actually preparing our character for death and setting up our mansion, possessions, and will so that our scion would be able to use our legacy as a jumping off point for their own adventure discover new things in the underzea. What other game makes a character actually plan for their retirement, death and ultimately how their next character would start? What a beautifully crafted idea. Note to the Developer: we know you all are busy working on Sunless Skies but please take some time to release the Zubmariner expansion for the iOS. We know your deep dark dwelling fans would appreciate it. Lots of Love -Captain Horace Gloom.
While this game is incredibly intriguing and ingenious, we would feel loss just second into the story, and as soon as we run into a monster just slightly stronger than us, we would die and have to start all over again, and have that feeling of being cluelessly lost.
Hello The game is beautiful and atmospheric like everyone else said. The writing is elegant and in-depth with a bit of humor, we feel like we’re reading Sherlock Holmes. Our cons are: The creatures/ships to battle are way too seldom. If your goal is to collect specimens it takes days. And yes the battle system is clunky but we guess that’s the point, to make it feel like a real, old ship. Like other reviewers, we’ve been playing a couple hours a day for a week, and even when not dying, have not made it even close to 5% to getting a new ship, other than that joke dinghy. We understand this is a rouge game, which is supposed to be unforgiving and repetitive, but with the slow speed of your basic ship and the ridiculous tiny payouts from your port reports, it gets aggravating. We know there are the quests but how to save for a 3000 ship with 10 echos per report? The game feels great though. We will keep at it. Update: we’ve kept at it, and we’ve given up. Getting even a few hundred echoes takes a ridiculous long time, meanwhile you have to slog back to London for usually little payback. We’re sorry but some games make us want to throw the device. It’s beautiful, but for us the advance curve or whatever is too annoying. Thanks for a game with nice music, graphics, and dialogue/writing though.
Love love love this game, great story, great everything. One problem we have is its too goddamn dark. We love the scary dark theme, but any amount of glare or reflection on our screen and the ocean and all its obstacles look completely black save for our boat. Tired of crashing into small rocks that are almost invisible. Just died to bats cause we didnt realize we were in a whirlpool. Would love to be able to play this outside of a pitchblack room.
The stunning uniqueness of sunless sea keeps us playing. Fascinating storyline, love the originality. Tricky to get started but once you get going it is worth the reward…
The game will always feel incomplete with the DLC being brought to IOS.
Real masterpiece but not support iPad mini 6 screen! Please add support!
We like this game, but am frustrated that it still has not received an update to run full screen on new iPads. We know it might sound petty, but it just feels weird playing a game that only takes up three quarters of the screen. Please fix this so we can enjoy the game!
We like this game so far. Its world is interesting, its unforgiving in the way Darkest Dungeon is, but it lacks balance and the control scheme used for the game isnt the best. The game difficulty ramps up quickly: venture a little to far north, south, or east and you will come across enemies that have 150-400 hp and your ship only has 75 hp. From what we’ve seen is that you will be stuck using this ship for a LONG time as you try and survive. Now we dont mind that there are very strong enemies very quick, but it would also be nice to have some weaker enemies in these places to for you to hunt as it would provide better game balance. Missions are also a bit of an issue. They can be annoyingly vague at times, with no clear direction and the journal is poorly laid out and the quest descriptions vague. This can have the issue of you wandering around aimlessly in your tiny slow ship for an hour before going back to London. This slow pace works against the game when objectives are difficult to find. We feel that it would be better if there was some type of job mechanic to the game like fishermen, bounty hunter, freighter, or explorer. This would have given you something to do rather than aimlessly wander about and would give a much more encouraging experience in exploration. Lastly is the controls are not the best. Trying to steer your ship can be very frustrating, often we find that we accidentally stop or reverse our ship, which can be deadly in combat. While it seems like touching an holding to steer the ship to where you want to go seems intuitive it actually is not for a game like this. Your ship moves to slow, turns to slow and in such a wide arc that this way of steering works against you. The game should have a dedicated joy stick control on the screen for moving your ship around. A simple on screen steering wheel and stick shift would work well for this purpose.
Pro’s: Lovely ambiance and sound design, and the characteristic Failbetter grim, quirky, mindbending writing is always a delight. Con’s: Terrible, non-intuitive interface, difficulty curve for performing even basic tasks is frustratingly steep, no tutorial section to speak of besides the occasional dropped "hint" that explains a fundamental mechanic of the game several hours in. Not for players even remotely interested in casual play. The difficulty of this game comes not because it sets challenges per se, but because everything from the interface on up seems designed to be as cumbersome and opaque as possible. It’s a full-on misery simulator. We have to suspect this was the devs’ intent, as it dovetails perfectly with the ambiance; it’s just not for us.
Love this game and hate that it randomly shuts down ALOT. Please fix this problem! Ever since iOS 11, it has been extremely glitchy with lots of lagging!
Great graphics, good storyline, but it gets boring after awhile. It takes too long to advance and you wait forever to move anywhere. Make it somewhat faster and then it will be a great game.
This is an enormous, extremely complex choose-your-path novel strapped to one of the worst games we have ever seen in our life. The story is witty and well written and engages with deep, unique lore that we really enjoy. Unfortunately, the tedious, luck-based, and shallow gameplay actively prevents you from engaging with and enjoying it. As we note, the novel portions are great, but your progress in them is limited in every direction by resources – you need money or certain trade goods or a tough enough warship to advance in virtually every storyline. But the best ways to earn money, trade goods, and better equipment require those things – money to buy goods in bulk for reselling at a markup, goods to trade, and powerful equipment to kill the few tough enemies who consistently drop valuable enough items to make them worthwhile targets. Not only that, but doing ANYTHING costs you, because moving around consumes resources you need to pay for. Thus, the early game is horrifically grindy. You have to squeeze out the same repetitive hauling runs that reward maybe one to three hundred currency, avoiding all the enemies because its not cost effective to fight them, while you save up for hours towards ships or equipment that can cost into the thousands. Even once you get to that point youre not safe, because this game made the baffling decision to be permadeath by default (theres apparently an option to change this, but we cant figure out how). And you can die FAST – text/story events with stat-influenced RNG outcomes can be triggered at random or without foreknowledge of what youre doing, and some of these will kill you instantly if you happen to roll poorly. In the worst cases, you can spend hours clawing your way out of the mindless early game slog only to randomly trigger an event and then die through no fault of your own because you didnt get a high dice roll on it (this is particularly bad with the Terror stat that functions as crew morale, because so many events can increase it in large increments, its expensive and hard to reduce, and when it caps out you get a guaranteed event with very poor odds of success that kills you instantly if you fail). We love the story here. But we’ve played about fifteen hours and havent gotten to experience hardly any of it because all our time is spent grinding out resources to set myself up and then losing them to inexperience or getting bad event RNG. The combat is shallow, the exploration becomes stale because the map remains largely static between lives, and the progression is both deeply unsatisfying and schizophrenically balanced. It feels like a freemium mobile game trying to frustrate you into paying to skip content, but its not malicious, just really stupid! Look, unless the story, writing style, and setting of the game really appeal to you, dont get it. And if those do appeal to youalso dont get it. All of the dialogue and story paths are available for free on the wiki. Just go read it there and avoid the self-sabotage of the paid product.
Stupidly difficult. Supplies are unnecessarily too expensive. The tutorial is just occasional tips that appear every now and then. No explanation as to what to do or how the mechanics of the game works. You go from port to port collecting a ton of different stuff, losing a whole ton of stuff, and you never are told what they are and what theyre for. We bought a new weapon for our ship in the hopes of having better luck in combat, only to not be able to equip it on our ship. Thanks, there went precious echoes. How about put a label on weapons saying which ships can equip them? Lost our ship to a swarm of bats… Thats right, bats can take down a ship. All because our crew couldnt aim and hit them. Horrible game. The one star is for the art design and music. Save your money for a better survival game.
After putting in a good 5 hours we just had to give up. Staring at a tiny ship putter on a black sea is just pinnacle of boring. This game is longer than Game of Thrones – and even that show knows enough NOT to make you watch them actually sail across the sea. The game needs a "Fast Mode." How much fun do they think it seriously is to watch that ship? The atmosphere, writing, and secrets were all compelling – but watching the ship… Sorry… We all have real lives to live. They need a mode for people who actually have lives but would like to enjoy their game. It would be really great to be able to experience all the content in 5-10 hours. Is it really that hard to make a "Fast Mode"?
Won’t even load the game. Crashes immediately. Great use of ten bucks!
Slow pace. Hypnotic music. Sunless Sea will steal hours of your time. Prepare to roam the Unterzee in search of fortune and glory, while avoiding being destroyed by pirate ships or swarmed by giant bats! Most of all, don’t be afraid to die. You will. Frequently. Our only issue with Sunless Sea are the speed controls. Slowing down or stopping your ship requires a fine touch. Beyond that, Sunless Sea will have you mesmerized for hours.
While the game tries to be about exploration, its really a trade simulator. You can’t ‘discover’ anything that actually impacts the gameplay; instead you buy those items at in-game shop for a hefty fee of in-game currency. That means grinding. This also means most gameplay strategies are actually superficial. When you start the game, your chances of dying at at their highest. If you launch your starting ships on suicide runs to all corners of the map, you can have most of it revealed in an hour. When you die, you can only really pass one thing on to your next character, and you’re crazy if you pick anything OTHER than the map. Its these types of choices which begin to narrow what you can actually do. You ‘can’ do a lot, but if you do anything other than the low-risk answer, you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose. Weapon upgrades? Dont bother. None of them help that much; and cost-wise, its cheaper to run from enemies. Enemies dont really drop anything of value. Engine upgrades? Dont bother with these either. Only the end-game upgrades make any noticeable difference. Even then, as we understand it, you need a bigger ship to actually install the engines, which makes speed upgrades even more out of reach. This becomes painfully obvious when it looks like the game is starting to haul items between islands. By the way, when you do upgrade to your first noticeably useful ship, it will actually be slower than your old ship, until you buy the engine upgrade that costs about the same as the new ship. By the way, this is the SAME upgrade that will NOT make your current ship faster. To recap… So you can’t actually fight, you can only run. The gameplay for running wont change until you accumulate about 14,000 echoes. The average income for any of your actions is about 200 echoes. If your ship sinks, you start over. If your crew starves, you start over. If your crew goes insane, you start over. If your crew dies (different from sinking), you start over. If you pick a seemingly random bad story option, that causes one of the above to surge past its threshold, you start over. Switching to the ‘mercy’ gameplay mitigates this problem, but it does nothing about the grind. If you ignorantly make a save in an already doomed scenario, it will take you a while to realize: you need to start over. There are no pleasant surprises, only bad. There are no clearly legendary artifacts to be found, only purchased.
Interesting game mechanics, sort of like Steam , but difficult to play without dying. We suppose that is a feature of a strange, terror filled world but found it a bit depressing and not thrilling.
Since the most recent update: Loads up to the menu, but if you try to start a new game or continue, the game will crash. Really displeased since it is one of our favorite games.
We’ve put more time into this game than perhaps any other iOS game to date. Excellent story and multiple possible story lines make replayability high (which is good, because we’re on our 13th captain). After dying the 10th time we started saving it, but we would recommend holding out as long as you can because having that fear of dying is important for the feel of the game, and not being able to change your decisions once they’re made makes the game more fun. We can’t wait for the DLC stuff to make it to the app, we see there are two expansions on PC and we hope they port them over soon!
This game is very frustrating at first. Keep at it, let a few of your captains die experimenting. Once you get the hang of it it’s really fun.
We are a loyal Sunless Sea player from the PC days on Steam. We love the mobile version. There are a few wrinkles to work out but we are sure they are working on them. This is our third review now that we learned the developers are responsive and didn’t take down our previous review. We only have two questions that we would love for the devs to answer: 1. Will they be releasing the zubmarine expansion on mobile; and 2. Why isn’t this featured on the App Store or one of the Editor’s Choice games? We don’t even see it on the adventure or rpg game pages. Totally ridiculous as this blows away any other game in its category.
We should have been focusing more on the papers we were assigned in grad school; however, Sunless Sea was released on iPad. Immediately, we knew that all things would be well and all manner of things would be well.
Need to unlock the screen, so it can rotate… Annoying as hell… When they fix, (hopefully they will) it gets the five stars… Thank you, thank you, thank you… Awesome game, we love it and recommend it :)
We backed the original Kickstarter, but never really got into the game on our Mac (despite the much larger screen). Im finding it much easier to play on iPad, probably because of the simpler steering and firing. Also, reading on a book-like device is easier. And the slow pace seems better suited to the book-like form factor, too. Super rich game play. As promised, captains will die. But you can carry on in their memory. Only complaint is the inability to link to our Fallen London account.
This game is a must have. The lore is incredible and the gameplay is outstanding. We have been playing for over 20 hours and still have a ton to do. We love the story telling and the beauty of the sea is un matched.. Great game and can’t wait for the dlc…
We are unable to figure out how to make progress in this game. Nothing we have tried earns more money than it costs to do it. We have played the initial segment of this game a few times and feel like we would enjoy progressing further, but always run out of funds. The first 30 minutes of the game is probably 5 star, but being unable to get any further lowers it to 3 star at best.
This is a beautiful adaption of the PC version. The controls are fluid and built perfectly for a touch screen. One part exploration, one part horror novel, one part rogue-like gameplay. Our only disappointment is that the excellent Zubmariner DLC is not available for purchase upon release.
We adore the Fallen London / Sunless Sea universe, and Failbetter are master storytellers. We’re so glad to finally have this game on a platform where we can play it more frequently. Plays well, works great.
The game itself is great we skip this on steam and hoping we can play it on ipad and here it is Please add automatic screen orientation, it should be a very basic things that easily fixable right? And Please release the dlc as well.
We are changing our review from 1 to 4 stars because the game is just so completely awesome. We initially gave this app one star because of the screen rotation issue which we feel is critical. However after receiving assurances from the developers that this is a high priority fix we are editing this review to update the score to reflect our gameplay experiences to this point.
So we like this game. World is fun, mysteries galore, but boy oh boy is it unstable. We find myself hesitating to open the map after we do anything because it just crashes without warning or save. So, while we enjoy it, having it crash every five minutes or so will probably keep us away until it gets patched.
We can’t go Half Throttle either forward or backward. This makes combat near unplayable and annoying. Loved this game in PC, but we need better throttle control if it is going to be playable on iPad.
Great moody RPG with unique atmosphere. However was brought from PC game without properly adapted UI so doomed clicking on smallest icons to find out a price you gonna pay for your next action. The only way to figure out whether weapon in shop fit your ship earn you money hard, spend it to the best weapon you can afford, BUM! Your shiny canon doesn’t fit you junkie ship. Now sell it back half price. We guess developers were searching for any good UX designers for the project but their company has no space on the deck.