Sunless Skies casts you as the captain of a spacefaring steam locomotive in a Victorian empire expanding into a hostile, uncanny cosmos. The High Wilderness is shaped by dying stars, strange celestial regions and a struggle between imperial rule and rebellion. This is a self-contained story set in the Fallen London universe, with no need to play Sunless Sea first.
The locomotive is both your means of travel and your protection: outfit and maintain it, trade or smuggle goods, and face rival engines and other celestial threats in real-time combat. Exploration carries practical and psychological risks, so weigh fuel and supplies against the desire to press farther, while managing crew morale and your captain’s nightmares. Narrative progression also draws on your character’s chosen past, which gains further facets as the journey unfolds.
Sunless Skies frames its story around recurring captains: you can build a lineage as characters die, leaving marks and inheritances, or reload the most recent captain and continue. That choice gives the game’s single-player format a distinctive shape, balancing the consequences of loss with the option to resume a particular journey.
