- There is one storyline which permanently deletes your character. It is completely optional, very long and very hard, self-destructive from the start, and basically you shouldn’t play it unless you really, really like the entire concept and are willing to spend something like a year destroying everything you previously acquired for your character.
Other than that, death isn’t permanent. The Wounds system, and in fact all four major menaces (corresponding to the four main stats - more on that in point 3), work by slowly accumulating as you do things that hurt your character; there are ways to reduce it, but if it reaches a certain point, you die. There’s some lore surrounding this, which is obviously not hard to get to since all you need to do is kill your character, but nevertheless I won’t spoil it and I’ll just say that you then need to grind your way out of death. (It’s nothing major, maybe like half a day to a day’s worth of actions or so.)
- That depends on your definition of success. There isn’t a "win" state; the only way to end the game permanently is the aforementioned destructive storyline, which is more of a loss than anything (although if that’s your goal, it could very well count as your win condition). The rest of the game basically centers on two things: acquiring resources, and reading new content. Many players also develop their characters narratively, on a sort of solo (or not necessarily, given the option to send in-game letters and other interactions) RP. There is a small element of that in sunless sea, but since your captain will die sooner or later whereas FL characters stick around for years, it’s much less pronounced.
Nothing is in real time, of course; and very few actions have irreversible consequences. Those that do are usually choices you have to make at the conclusion of major storylines. There are a few notorious actions which, if accidentally clicked, can wipe chunks of progress (usually "actually, abandon this" type actions) but that’s not really "strategy".
Overall, the focus is on the narrative. However, by the end of the game resource collection becomes a big part of it - and this is probably not what you meant by strategy, but due to the vast amount of possible actions by the end of the game, many players here spent a decent amount of time calculating optimal grinds for various purposes. Often, what’s optimal for you depends on your current situation and requirements; you then need to balance and prioritize your goals, decide how to spend your actions, etc. It’s really long-term planning at that point.
- The big one. Try out the game a bit to get a basic idea on how it works. I’ll try to summarize the main concepts here.
You are indeed dropped into a city, and free to do as you choose - within certain limitations, of course, which means that you gain access to more and more areas and storylines as you progress through the game.
You have four main stats: Watchful, Persuasive, Shadowy, and Dangerous. Many actions will be a stat check: meaning the higher your stat, the likelier you are to succeed, with a high enough stat granting 100% success rate. On failure, the most frequent consequence is that the corresponding menace rices: Nightmares, Scandal, Suspicion, and Wounds, respectively. When the menace rises too high, bad things happen - discovering this is part of the experience of starting to play FL (so skip the paragraph if you want to do that), but since you asked: you go insane, get exiled, get thrown in jail, or die, respectively, and you then need to reduce the menace to 0 before being allowed to return to London. Some of these have permanent consequences, too, which may or may not be avoidable; for instance, whenever you get imprisoned, it gets recorded in your Criminal Record, which at the current point in time can not be wiped or reduced by any means.
This is just the "typical" scenario for actions and failure, though; there can be checks for pretty much any quality (for instance, there are some checks based on the level of your Acquainted quality with certain NPCs), and there are also luck checks. The precise effects of failure and success are also completely flexible; failure could make you lose some items or money, or could do absolutely nothing. There are at least a few checks (though they’re rare and mostly clearly marked) where failure has the desirable outcome, and success makes things worse.
- Well there are of course the aforementioned Dangerous stat checks. You could consider other stat checks to also be a form of combat. But since there are no real-time (or even turn-based) components, skill-based combat doesn’t exist.
However, there are some storylines which utilise the basic stat check mechanics to create rather interesting fights. For one, you can challenge another player to a sparring bout, which results in a back-and-forth of about 4 actions total, after which a victor is decided. I also recall one of the recent monthly premium stories having an interesting combat scene, where you had the option to prepare the battlefield beforehand, and then once the battle started could use your preparations to your advantage - but of course, in the end everything came down to stat or other quality checks.
In conclusion:
FL and SS, while set in the same universe, are very different games. SS requires real-time skill, FL does not. SS provides you with extensive lore about the Neath and the more outlandish things in it; FL mostly offers vague hints of that (although I can’t tell you exactly how much less actual lore about this is in FL, since a whole lot of it is hidden in various obscure or hard-to-reach content, or is hinted at but requires putting together with other previous hints to properly understand), but it focuses a lot more on the inner workings of London and day-to-day lore (so the actual volume of lore might well be higher). SS focuses on winning the game; FL is ongoing, with no win condition: there are people around here who have been playing (with the same character) for many years.
Perhaps most importantly, SS is designed to provide immediate entertainment; you play it continuously, then stop for a while. FL, on the other hand, is meant to be played periodically - wait until some actions accumulate, spend them - but for extended periods of time. Unless you really rush things, it might take you a couple months (or more) to reach the "end-game" status; this is in quote because, if you stick around after that, it’s really only the beginning. It’s not unusual to spend a month or so to acquire some item or achievement. The very end-game grinds, that only really dedicated players ever bother with, can take a year. Of course there’s a vast amount of (much more accessible!) content before that - this is really the kind of stuff that you will only bother with if you’ve played for 2-3 years already, and are starting to run out of more sensible things to do.
This would really be the deciding factor: are you fine with playing for 5-30 minutes (depending on whether you’re clicking through a grind or reading new content), a few times each day, for a month or two? Do you like text content? Then you’ll enjoy the game, and might stick around for another month or two, or a few years.
edited by Dudebro Pyro on 10/19/2017