Sunless Skies is currently free on EGS and please for the love of god play Sunless Skies

ideally Sunless Seas, but, y'now, that one's a tall ask with how fucking jank it is

i would give away internal organs to make the Sunless games popular enough to be able to have conversations about it on the regular

please play Sunless Skies

fly a space train. go to a sanitarium to have devils clean your filthy soul. piss off bees the size of a ford focus. kill a sun. eat your crew. pet an inadvisably big dog. go to hell. go to the other hell. no, the OTHER other hell. fly past the ruins of the Great Clock of Westminster. go mad. don't stare at the sun. you'll turn to glass.

I could go on and on about the astonishing stuff that happens up in the high wilderness but I think the most important thing to say about Sunless Skies, the thing I love most, is the pace of it.

Sunless Skies is a game where you spend a long time flying from one place to another, and the places are where the story happens but you only get a little bit of it at a time at any given place, usually. so you pull into a port for the third time after tugging on little teasing strands of story the first couple times, and this time someone leans in your ear and whispers the absolute worst thing you've ever heard, or you learn some horrible truth about the world that you can't bear thinking about too hard.

But unfortunately for you, that's all you have left to do in this port right now. you sell your cargo, you buy some fuel and food, and you take off for your next stop. and there are some pretty views along the way and occasionally some other special stories but mostly there's the flying across a long, darkening sky. unfortunately, there is nothing to do but to think about it, that horrible thing you just heard. you marinate in it and it marinates in you, and in the absence of definitive answers (the game prefers the questions) you have to slowly decide for yourself how you feel about things like "the human on your crew who once wasn't" and "the plant that drinks regret" and "every star radiates law and hierarchy" and "the barrel of raw unprocessed time sitting in your hold that makes you weep to stand near" and "a really pathetic circus"

and then your meditative state breaks because hovering right outside the next port is a long thin Monitor class engine full of Ministry of Public Decency inspectors and it starts lining up its massive railgun on you so you have to stop thinking about things and instead race up aside their long flank and unload your gatling gun into it until everyone aboard stops moving. and you board the ruins and crack open the contraband safe and find a jar full of fermented starlight and you say "fuck yeah"

and then you dock in the new port where someone tells you the saddest, bleakest thing you've ever heard, and so forth. and you just think about it, and you find a way to go on living having heard it, and you still smile and laugh despite knowing it. and that's the way the game goes. please play Sunless Skies, it's so good