[STEAM] Singing sirens, angry gods and cannibalized crews: Sunless Sea is The Odyssey as an RPG

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(Image credit: Ubisoft)

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The gains you'll make by ferrying trade goods between familiar settlements are marginal, particularly when captaining a pathetic little put-put with a hold barely big enough to store your own fuel. Those are the kind of runs that end with a pirate blowing a hole in your hull. But adventures? Adventures can make you strong and rich. New sightings of land grant XP to spend on stat buffs, and new lands are stuffed with stories. Stories themselves are Sunless Sea's most reliable currency: port reports you can sell to the Admiralty in Fallen London, and villagers will hand over a crate of coal to hear Tales of Terror. If the 28-century survival of The Odyssey is testament to anything, it's the value of a good story.

Of course, Odysseus' ships aren't fueled by coal, and you'll find games that more closely match the mythical Ancient Greek setting of Homer's epic.

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. Sunless Sea, by contrast, takes place against the backdrop of a quasi-Victorian cave culture, in which Londoners are adjusting to new neighbors with gleaming yellow eyes, tentacled faces, and webbed wings. Its 'zee' isn't even an ocean, technically speaking, but an enormous, brackish pool on which the currents travel in an unnerving spiral. Its zailors navigate by false-stars on the distant cavern roof, which have a habit of rearranging themselves at short notice.

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(Image credit: Failbetter Games) As in The Odyssey, however, a catalogue of horrors is answered by a homecoming. Every successful voyage ends back in Wolfstack Docks, on the eastern edge of London. Success might only mean survival, of course; perhaps, like Odysseus, you'll be the last adventurer standing. But if there has been loss and mayhem, that means there will be stories to tell. Adventures with which you can tempt fresh-faced zailors aboard for your next outing. Money to exchange for ship repairs, as the dockhands shake their heads in wonder at the wide gash marks in your hull. Home brings renewal, catharsis, and another chance.

One morning, off the shore of Mutton Island, I cracked a tooth on a chunk of grit in a ship's biscuit. The grit turned out to be diamond. "Diamonds are sacred to Stone," said a shipmate. "Give it to the zee, captain. It'll be luck for us." I did as they said, tossing a small fortune over the side into the deep. If there's one thing I've learned from Odysseus, it's that it pays to keep the gods on side.

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: "Mythological filmmaking of the highest order"

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