Come Fly the Sunless Skies

Sunless Skies it the third entry in the Fallen London series of games.  It might seem like an odd place to start, but by all accounts it's the easiest to get into.  So, that's where I chose to start.  With regards to the narrative and setting, Sunless Skies feels like what you would get if you dropped the complete works of H.G. Wells and C.S. Lewis into a blender and set it to "eclectic"...then sprinkled in some H.P. Lovecraft and served it in a steampunk glass.  Honestly, I'm not sure if there's a better way to describe it.  Needless to say, it's a weird setting with the story conveyed entirely in-media-res.  More than once I found myself asking the computer screen "who in the what did where now?" (yes, in that exact order).  Obviously, an answer was not forthcoming.  Thankfully, the gameplay mechanics are easy to grasp, especially if you've ever played Sid Meyer's Pirates.  Of course, flying around the "High Wilderness" in an airborne steam locomotive is only half the game.  

The other half is a text-driven choose-your-own-adventure.  Sometimes these choices take the form of a percentage-based skill check or require a certain kind of item.  These items can be physical commodities such as tea, lumber, munitions or magical time-dilating rocks.  Other times they are something more abstract: a savage secret, a tale of terror, or a moment of inspiration.  There is a wide variety of these items with some being harder to come by than others.  Aside from buying/selling goods and exploration, a lot of time is spent traveling along trade routes and hauling NPCs from one place to the next.  Oftentimes these characters can serve as officers aboard the player's gravity-defying choo-choo train and provide bonuses to to skill checks.  Most can even level-up in one of several ways by completing their individual narrative arcs.  The player's character (a captain of sorts) also gains levels throughout the game, but in an interesting twist must add an element to their backstory that justifies the upgrade.  It's a neat little idea that I think more RPGs would benefit from having.

In order to break up the monotony of travel somewhat, there are things that appear at random.  Sometimes it is a sky beast.  Other times it's something that can be looted (like a drifting wreck or abandoned homestead).  Oddly enough, there never seems to be any encounters with traders such as yourself even though there's no shortage of corsairs and patrol vessels.  I find this especially bizarre considering that neutral trading vessels were a common feature of the previous game in the series - Sunless Seas.  Having finished Sunless Skies (I got the "Song of the Sky" ending), I think I'll move onto (back to?) Sunless Seas to see how it compares to it's predecessor.  I just hope it has a few less in-game bureaucracies than Sunless Skies did.