Hello, I have a very broad question for those who have more gaming experience than myself: could you compare FL to another game? Similarities, differences - a comparison worth drawing? To me FL looks pretty much like an unicum, but perhaps it isn’t? Thank you!
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I don’t know anything quite like it. The only comparable browser game I can name - in terms of breadth, depth, lifespan and so on - is Kingdom of Loathing, and that’s more of a combat-based RPG.
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Thanks for your reply!
Very good question!
I don’t know any comparable browser game either, and frankly, for me the quality of worldbuilding and writing are good enough to warrant playing for over ten years, paying much more than I ever did for any AAA title, just to help this game and its postmodern literary qualities flourish.
Among non-browser genres, I feel that other games created by Alexis Kennedy, the original author of Fallen London, deserve a mention. Both Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours, set in the same early 1900s occultism-inspired universe, are really great and strike a pretty similar chord in me at least. Mechanically, they’re of course quite different, but the writing and the feel bear comparison with FL, which I was happy to find out.
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It may also be worth mentioning that some of FL’s current and past writers have other games to their names – if it’s the quality of the writing a player values rather than the medium. Emily Short, for instance or Harry Tuffs.
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Diptych took the words outta my mouth with KOL. It’s rare to find a world as lovingly crafted and intricate as the ones failbetter creates, though perhaps WOW would fit the bill? Text-based RPGs are damn rare, though. Diso Elysium pops to mind for a dialogue-focused game that isn’t a visual novel of some sort. There’s also the political/leadership games like Suzerian, or Yes, your grace. The fallen london universe is for sure a unicorn though, sometime next year will hit a decade of me playing the game. I also have a couple hundred hours in seas and skies both.
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Thanks everybody!
I have recently read an article (by Jeremy Peel, on PC Gamer) suggesting that FL came up “during the golden age of browser games a decade and a half ago”. So I began wondering what browser games Peel was thinking of and how FL might be part of such a scene (which I don’t think I ever experienced).
On the other hand, like you guys, I also tend to mentally relate FL to other text-based, “writerly” work. I have been reading stuff by Emily Short, Chandler Groover, Nessa Cannon - I am a literary person, so this is a rather natural inclination for me, and also what drew me to FL in the first place! The Twine scene also comes to my mind, with its interactive fiction and author-conscious tendency, though works written in Twine, as far as I can see, cannot compete with FL in terms of scope (I guess the tool wouldn’t allow it?).
Last but not least, being much more of a reader than a gamer in terms of experience, I wondered whether I was missing a more mainstream, AAA-oriented scene that might also offer interesting, comparable case studies - of a more “gaming” quality, if I may say so…?
Again, thanks!
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I don’t think anything can compare with FL in terms of scope, just by the virtue of the volume alone. There isn’t a game that invested so much in writing and writing and writing new content for so many years.
I’d like to add one more recommendation to this thread, something I’m surprised wasn’t mentioned before. There’s this publisher called Choice of Games, and they’ve been steadily releasing text-only games (that are more of choose-your-adventure books with RPG statistics) for the last decade or so. They’re written by many different writers, they cover many different universes and moods, they vary in quality, but I think everyone can find something for themselves there. There’s at least a few that are well written and complicated enough that I’m happy to recommend them and I’m certain Fallen London players would appreciate:
- Jeffrey Dean’s Vampire: The Masquerade — Parliament of Knives - for me, top of the top; it’s really worth playing at least a few times to uncover a complicated Game of Thrones-y plot from many points of view. I was genuinely surprised about many discoveries made that way, because they weren’t even suggested at all in my other playthroughs, and still they made perfect sense in the context of what I already knew about the story and characters.
- Kyle Marquis’ Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Book of Hungry Names - very dense, maximalist prose and a very cool and dark take on the setting, I was genuinely nauseous at some point and I think that’s awesome.
- Jeffrey Dean’s Werewolves: Haven Rising and its two sequels - it’s not as stellar as Parliament of Knives IMO, but it’s still very solid with a well-directed adventure story and a ton of likeable characters.
- and also there’s Harris Powell-Smith Crème de la Crème and its sequels, it’s extremely well-liked, but personally I didn’t appreciate its light tone and straightforward stories, to each their own I guess.
If you wanted to explore for yourself, I recommend the Choice of Games mobile app for browsing, and their forums or reddit for reviews. Every single game has a couple first chapters available for free, so you can always suss out the vibe before purchasing. You can also check out XYZZY Awards if you want some external inspirations.
This post sounds like an advertisement lol, but I really like them so much and I’m so butthurt that they aren’t more popular that I had to let you know about them!
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Thank you so much for all the recommendations and reflections!
I haven’t been playing PC games for years, so my opinion might be quite outdated.
For games with quality stories that mostly presented as words rather than voice acting, I’d think of works by Black Isle Studios and Obsidian Entertainment. For mobile game, Path to Nowhere by AISNO might be a good candidate.
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I don’t think there is anything quite like Fallen London; there are games similar to it in some aspects, but none similar in all aspects.
How would you even begin to summarize it?
Live service browser game consisting of sprawling storylet/quality-based narrative (QBN) interactive fiction set in a lore-deep gothic horror Victorian London with literary inspirations (including Invisible Cities, Lovecraft, Wodehouse) that features a broad spectrum of activities (including reading stories, roleplaying, vanity collecting, character progression, optimization, community events, and puzzle solving)?
Whew!
Comparisons
This is stating the obvious, but the closest non-Fallen London things to Fallen London were probably the other browser games made using the StoryNexus engine. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’re still playable.
Inspired both mechanically and narratively by Sunless Sea, it similarly has an opaquely explained vaguely horror setting with deep lore.
I love Sunless Sea and have 80 hours in it (which is a lot for me), but I couldn’t quite get into this game. I think it suffers from the same problem as Seas – compelling narrative shackled to/locked behind less compelling mechanics – except I found A House of Many Door’s mechanics (and graphics) to be even less compelling.
Other Fallen London players will enjoy it more.
If you love the Wodehousian bits of Fallen London (Inconvenienced by Your Aunt, the university storylines, the Young Stags Club) you’ll love Kreg Segall’s work.
Tally Ho is drawn from Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories while Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale takes more cues from Wodehouse’s Drones Club. They’re witty and enormous by non-FL standards (over 1.8 million words put together!) with plenty to explore. I recommend them in the strongest of terms.
The story feel is compatible enough I’ve played my Fallen London characters in Cakes and Ale, created my Cakes and Ale characters in Fallen London, and even written some self-indulgent crossover fanfiction.
Watchful players may spot references that would be enormously coincidental if they weren’t references to Fallen London.
It’s much smaller than Fallen London in terms of scope, but Inkle’s Victorian steampunk world is comparably well written and richly drawn.
(Inkle’s other games like Overboard! are also excellent, though not particularly similar to FL besides the text focus.)
Disclaimer: I haven’t played this game, but the setting has some similar elements:
You are one of the goblin merchants in the Untermarkt: a magical bazaar beneath Victorian London that trades in memories, wishes, secrets, and more.
This is a first person video game RPG, so mechanically quite different – but from what I’ve heard its writing, setting, and lore are comprable. Bruno Diaz, Fallen London’s former lead narrative designer (IIRC) did some work on it. I have not played it myself.
Not similar in setting or theme, but uses a card/storylet/QBN structure inspired by StoryNexus.
A rare fully text-based RPG. It didn’t end up being my thing, but I bet it would be up other Fallen London players’ alleys.
A ZPG from the height of the browser game era.
In some ways, it’s very similar: like Fallen London, it’s a massive text-based live service browser game that has steadily been adding more words for over 15 years (and how many of those can you shake a stick at?).
In some ways, it’s the opposite: Fallen London is all about consequential choices, and Godville is all about no choices (see: zero player game). Fallen London’s world and lore is meticulously crafted by FBG, while a large portion of Godville’s is crowdsourced. The playerbase writes and votes in new game text and any player can contribute new lore to the wiki, SCP style.
I won’t presume to know which games Peel was thinking of, but as someone who grew up playing a lot of browser games, I think of the browser game golden era as the pre-smartphone dominance time when casual/low-system requirement gaming took place in the browser. A time when creating your own browser MMO/flash game/Facebook game was the go to move for brands and they’d actually sink money into it. (Now the go to move is to create a mobile game.)
So, like
- Neopets (1999-Present)
- RuneScape (2001-Present)
- Gaia Online (2003-Present)
- Club Penguin (2005-2017)
- Webkinz (2005-Present)
- Poptropica (2007-Present???)
- Godville (2007-Present)
- FarmVille (2009-2020)
- The Sims Social (2011-???)
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Thanks for all the tips - this is gold! 
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It’s exactly nothing like Lode Runner.