SUNLESS SKIES
Format PC
Developer/publisher Failbetter Games
Origin UK
Release 2019
The British empire never made it beyond the atmosphere, but in a way, its history is one of space conquest. Lacking landmarks, 19th-century sailors navigated using the stars. To map the heavens was thus to help expand Britain’s reach as a naval power. Victorian British ideas about outer space were also shaped by the experience of colonising other lands. “They didn’t know about the vacuum – they didn’t have any concept of what that means,” Failbetter artist Tobias Cook reflects. “They thought about outer space in terms of how they thought about other frontiers.” A game about what an astral British empire might look like, if astrophysics itself were reimagined along Victorian lines, Sunless Skies magnifies those frontier daydreams, then holds them up to a carnival mirror. “So much of the world is Victorian interpretations of X or Y, and how we could reflect and distort that,” Cook says. “Play on the naïveté, while introducing a substantial dose of horror.”
Like its predecessor, 2015’s , is a top-down naval simulator featuring procedural map generation, with key locations shuffled around every time your doughty star faring locomotive
