Sunless Sea: An Existentialist Journey

Once upon a time, Role-Playing Games were hard. They had steep learning curves, bizarre rules, and took place in worlds that completely and utterly didn't care about you. The player had to dig and scrape for every advantage. The games didn't have in game journals, you either remembered everything or you learned to take notes. The in game economy existed for it's own sake, not to support the player. Everything was earned, nothing was given.

In February 2015, Failbetter Games released "Sunless Sea", a rougelike RPG that takes place in the their award winning Victorian Gothic fantasy setting of Fallen London. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure that "roguelike" is the proper description for the game, but it's what everyone seems to be using and I can't really think of anything better. I suppose that if I were to try, I'd call the game an "Independent Merchant-marine Steamship Captain Simulator in a Victorian Gothic fantasy setting", but that's an awful mouthful isn't it?

In Sunless Sea, you take on the role of an independent merchant-marine steamship captain plying your trade on the murky waters of the "Unterzee" a subterranean ocean devoid of any light and ruled by Eldritch gods. Your "zee-captain" is, beyond a very vague and limited "background" selection made at creation, a nobody. You start out with nothing but a basic steamship, a few coin in your pocket, a small crew, and a very limited amount of fuel and supplies. Beyond a small tutorial on what these things are, the game provides you with no direction or guidance, leaving you to figure out how to proceed entirely by your lonesome. When you die, and you will die, you are given an opportunity pass a tiny portion of what you achieved on to your next captain. Be warned, however, that your next captain doesn't pick up where your last one left off. Apart from what little advantage they inherit from their predecessor, the game picks up from scratch. Even the map gets rearranged, forcing you to explore the "Zee" anew.

Sunless Sea is hard in the vein of old school RPG games. It takes far more than it gives and it doesn't give squat. It's apparent from the opening splash screen, which warns you that your first captain will likely die but that later ones might succeed, that the developers knew they had made a difficult game. The thing is that I'm fairly certain that the game's difficulty and bleak setting are entirely the point, because whether or not the team at Failbetter knew it or not, the game's design Existentialist to the core.

Existentialism is a school of thought that, in very basic terms, posits that life is inherently meaningless. We humans, and everything around us, simply exists without any greater purpose or meaning than what we give to our existence. The goal of life, in the Existentialist view, is to use the freedom provided by a life devoid of meaning to create our own meaning in spite of the overwhelming horror of knowing that our lives don't really matter. To the Existentialist, making your life, which inherently doesn't matter, matter, is the whole point of existence.

I can only speak for myself, as a lower middle-class white male, but the life journey for myself and many of my peers goes something like this: We graduate from high school then join the military or go to college or both in no particular order. After that we join the workforce and try to make a living and provide for the family we have acquired along the way. If we're lucky, we manage to squirrel away enough money along the way to have a relaxing retirement, If we're even more lucky, we have enough money to help our children get through the high school, college, join the workforce gauntlet a bit easier than we did. Maybe, if we're really fortunate, we even leave them a little something when we die.

That is the only meaning that most of us will ever give our lives, that we passed something on to the next generation. Very few people make a large enough impact on the world for their lives to mean more, But even if we succeed in that mission, our children will still need to figure out their own way to succeed in the world. Even if they follow in our footsteps, life has too many uncertainties and pit falls for us to prepare the next generation for everything. Like us, they will start as nobodies and likely end as nobodies, except in the hearts and minds of their families. Maybe, if every generation succeeds in that mission, life will get just a little bit better along the way. If one of our descendants makes a real difference, our lives will have that much more meaning, wont they?

Therein, as they say, lies the rub. In Sunless Sea your zee-captain begins life as a nobody with no purpose. You don't matter to anyone but yourself, even the gods pay you no mind unless you do something to draw their attention. You have nothing and you're only way forward is to find a way to turn that nothing into something. Your life is meaningless and you have to find a way to make something of it. How you do that is entirely up to you. You can be a merchant, engage in piracy, smuggle contraband, hunt zee-monsters, or any combination of those things. None of them is a quick path to wealth. You will spend most of your hard earned money on fuel and supplies for your ship. Profits do not pour in, they trickle.

Even the inherent horror of Existential thought is simulated through the in game hazard of "terror", a resource that you will find yourself constantly struggling to get rid of. Terror is increased anytime you are out at sea or when particularly harrowing experiences happen to you and your crew. The more terror you have, the more likely it is that you or your crew will go mad from the horror of their own small, meaningless existence in the face of the eternal vastness of the great, dark zee! The darkness of the Unter-zee is, in fact, described in game as not a mere absence of light, but a physical presence which seeks to suck all joy and hope from our hearts and must be perpetually pushed back.

If an independent merchant marine steamship captain is smart, hard working, and more than a little lucky, they might just learn enough, or make enough money, to pass something down to the next generation. Maybe, if enough generations are smart, hard working, and more than a little lucky, eventually one of your zee-captains will have enough of an advantage to actually win the game. How painfully similar to real life is that?