What excites me the most about the SS teasers...

Sunless Skies
1

The bit about ‘the Aeginae’, the Leviathans that may appear in the backgrond.

Specifically that, once you get to a point nothing in Sunless Seas is actually scary. This isn’t unique to SS for sure, pretty much any horror game falls into the problem that ‘if it bleeds, I can kill it.’

Or less dramatically, ‘if it bleeds, players will find a way to cheesily kite it whilst firing torpedoes until it dies in a really anticlimatic fashion’.

When I look back on what terrified me most playing SSeas, it was either encountering The Dawn Machine whilst pootling about trying to explore the map, or encountering the Constant Companion for the first time. Neither of those things you can fight by using a silly combat exploit (until you get the Bandersnatch for the CC.) You can only run, be afraid, and hope to never meet them again.

The other problem is that basically all the enemies were pretty small compared to the ship. I mean sure when you think about how big the Tree of Ages or Mount Nomad actually is then it’s bl__dy terrifying, but on the screen you’re confronted with a sprite about 1.5/2 times as long as your ship.

It’s certainly not practical to have the player fight an enemy that takes up half the screen, but that doesn’t stop em feeling a bit ‘meh’ once you get over the shock value of the amazingly creepy artwork.

The Aeginae solve both these problems. You get to create the same sense of horror that SS is so good at creating in it’s textboxes in the actual game. Something ancient, malevolent, and bl__dy massive, something that could kill you as easily as batting an eye. But you don’t have to go through the effort of accounting for the player:

A) having their game ended by an impossible enemy

B) having their atmosphere ruined because they just killed a cosmic entity with a 19th century explosive

C) complaining that it looks stupid when the AI does some weird maneuvre in combat.

Anyway, I just wanted to get these toughts down somewhere because I’ve been in awe of the kickstarter ideas since it launched and this seems a more appropriate place to talk about them than to spring into an enthusiastic ramble about a cool video game

2

Well maybe space train bullet hell could be interesting as well

3

Cthulhu was also temporarily sent back to sleep via application of steamboat to head.

4

And you technically don’t kill Mt. Nomad with 19th Century explosives.
You only wound her. And don’t most people try and find a source of healing after getting one Wound? Same principle. Submerges, downs some apple or a cider or makes the right skill check to get the Wound Menace removed and comes back up to be shot again.
The fact that you can wound Mt. Nomad should be a miracle of its own.

5

Also, it’s 20th century explosives now!

6

You mean 19th century explosives. Because the main explosive associated with the 20th century is the atomic bomb. Doesn’t matter if it’s set in the 20th century.

Unless you’re saying that now we get to nuke the horrors of the Sunless Skies…

7

We do have nice available dying sources of nuclear fusion. :P

8

It would be nice if the space trains ran off fusion. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about fuel so much.

9

Nonsense, Marsha Glade! We’ll use the unclear bombs instead!

10

But if you don’t have to worry about fuel, then you’re taking away an aspect of resource management. Next you’ll want supplies, because if your space train is run by fusion, why not have it also act as a replicator?
And repair your hull…

And then in a last-ditch effort you can eject the core at Space Nomad Mountain and destroy her in an unclear explosion. As in, we don’t know whether it’s nuclear or some eldritch cloud of death.

Maybe a fusion reactor should be a late-game thing requiring you to shoot the Bazaar in the face using the Memento Mori Mk.II and hoping that your Genie Warlock doesn’t die in the process (80% chance they said!)

11

I was referring to:

12

They’ve put wargaming in Sunless Skies! Wargaming! With H. G. Wells!

oh my god yesssss