Newsgroup: it.comp.giochi.action
Titolo: Sunless Sea Eurogamer, 10/10.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-06-sunless-sea-review
 
 
Do you keep the trinket or cast it into the water? It would be a 
symbolic gesture, sure, but the ripples through your story will be 
genuine. Drop the keepsake back into your pocket and you'll be keeping 
the preposterous promises made to a young lover after a drunken night 
together. Drop the keepsake into the sea and, eventually, she and it 
may be forgotten. Then you will be free to find refuge in the next warm 
and welcome body (and, so long as you make to back to port, there is 
always another).
 
If a game is a series of meaningful choices, as per the designer Sid 
Meier's oft-repeated, oft-abused maxim, then Sunless Sea is more game 
than most. The choices pile up quickly, then escalate. Sure, you're a 
merchant captain now, but who were you before that? Poet? Priest? 
Veteran? Urchin? And by what measure would you consider this new life a 
success? By discovering your dead father's remains? By becoming a 
well-regarded travel writer? By dying wealthy? Who will serve as your 
crew in this endeavour? Do you care about their personal hopes and 
ambitions? Do you care enough to help them out and, when the time 
comes, free them from your trade?
 
What trade is that, anyway? Smuggling? Piracy? Exploration? Haulage? 
There's nothing so crude as a class to pick in Sunless Sea. Rather, the 
lines between each way of life are traversable. Decisions will lead you 
down certain paths, some of which cannot be returned from, but it's 
entirely possible to keep smuggled goods, stowaways and legitimate 
cargo in your hold to make the most of a trip.
 
Okay, says Sunless Sea, more gravely now. When the money runs out and 
you're 50 miles from home and the food is gone and disease is 
everywhere and your engines finally sputter out, in the darkness as you 
hear the monsters rounding, will you cook and eat your first mate? If 
you don't, your girl back home may never know whether her heart was 
already broken before it was broken.
 
It's the 1800s and London has fallen into the ground. As the soil 
overhead closed (Essex: meet Surrey), a twilight and subterranean 
archipelago landed a mile below. Here in the luminous ocean, known as 
the Unterzee, the map is unfamiliar. Gone are London's boroughs, 
replaced by islands that go by new names. Some are archaic: Pickett's 
Bluff, Watchmaker's Hill, Lick-a-Monkey Crag. Some are futuristic: 
Station III, Codex. Others are just playfully wistful: Low Barnet.
 
You'll want to visit them all, you and your crew. Regardless of whether 
you're in the business of trading goods, stories, or blows, your 
livelihood depends upon travel. Indeed, while the geography surrounding 
Fallen London is unfamiliar, the question that greets you here is 
common to all who come to the city: where are you headed?
 
This is an exploration game at its core, then, about questing into the 
unknown, penetrating the darkness of unfamiliarity in search of new 
places, stories and truths. Your range is naturally limited, however. 
Your ship is only able to carry so much fuel and supplies and, until 
you're able to afford a larger vessel, it's best to keep within 
sprinting distance of home. Run out of either and the choices you will 
face are unthinkable. The balance of risk and reward, therefore, is 
built into the geography.
 
Great stretches of water are landless so you soon learn to rely upon 
your zee-bat scout, who can be sent out like Noah's black dove to 
return with news of nearby lands. If the scout returns successful it 
will place a vague mark on your map. Find the place for yourself and 
you can dock there and meet the locals to find out more about their 
lives. This knowledge can then be sold back in London.
 
Disclaimer: Richard Cobbett, a contributor and friend of Eurogamer, is 
one of the writing team on Sunless Sea. We chose a reviewer who doesn't 
know Richard personally.
Soon the intense rhythms of long-term sea travel are established: the 
thrill of departure, the exhilaration of discovery (tempered, always, 
by the fear of the unknown), the excitement of learning new stories and 
scraps of news, the creeping dread as supplies dwindle, the relief - 
the glorious, blessed relief - of arriving home again, beleaguered but 
alive. Then, after nights drinking at bars, selling supplies, trading 
those stories, you begin again to feel the call of the sea, the draw of 
all that horror and gain it promises.
 
The story, which accumulates from a thousand fragments and diversions 
of your own choosing, is communicated by snippets of delightful text. 
There is a lot of reading to be done here, but the writing is lively, 
subtle and never indulgent. "Ah yes," says London's admiral, the first 
time you're granted an audience. "The merchant-captain of whom we hear 
such complicated things." Complicated! Yes, the perfect word.
 
Choices are often pinned to the bottom of these pieces of dialogue and 
description. Will you, for example, loot a host's home, or search for 
clues as to their past? The choices available to you depend on your 
current attributes, which quantify your aptitude for healing and 
morale, detection and perception, trickery and knowledge or blunt 
attack power. Some islands have stories that unfurl only over multiple 
visits. In time, checking in with your favourite communities en route 
to more perilous and unknown locations becomes a treat.
 
These warm interactions are valuable because the Sunless Sea is an 
otherwise relentlessly hostile place. You will often be attacked while 
sailing and, in these instances, you must choose whether to fight or 
flee. Fight and your deck gun's range is shown as a red circle with 
your ship at its centre. Shine your ship's prow lamp on to the enemy 
and the crew will ready a shot more quickly. Once you've defeated your 
enemy, be it a vast shark wrapped in belts (Lovecraft is everywhere, 
down here in the Unterzee), or a nimble pirate ship, you can salvage 
from the remains food, cargo or knowledge. As you begin to earn a 
living you can upgrade various parts of your ship according to your 
favoured style of play. Blow everything on the most expensive engine on 
the market and you'll be able to outrun most attackers. Or pick out the 
latest cannons and meet them head on. Maybe, if you're more of a family 
man, woman (or oligarch) a London penthouse might seem like a better 
way to spend your money.
 
As well as the financial choices set before you and the decisions you 
must make about what kind of captain you are there are philosophical 
choices: do you worship the Ur-gods here on the dim sea, or remain 
stoic in the temptation of superstition? Then, there's the question of 
legacy. Death is not the end in Sunless Sea. You are able to pass on 
scraps of your life to the next comer, an inheritance of your choosing: 
the chart you so carefully drew (perhaps the most valuable of all 
assets), your knowledge, cunning, strength or skill. With the passing 
of each new life there is grief but also opportunity. You are able to 
try different choices in order to see where they lead you, rejecting 
the path laid down by your predecessors, just as a child rejects the 
choices of the parent in order to create a space in which to grow 
distinct.
 
As well as your self-described ambition in the game, there are other 
secrets to unravel and settle about the Unterzee. Find the right 
mooring and it may be possible to return to England's surface ("a 
warmer place"). And what is The Dawn Machine? Who lives in the 
Kingeater's Castle? Even if you decided to chase wealth for your 
character at the expense of all else, often these peripheral conundrums 
prove irresistible distractions. They are secrets that can be 
unravelled through generations of character, each playthrough bringing 
further insight.
 
Sunless Sea's method of storytelling isn't unique, but it has never 
been realised with such impact and elegance. Every playthrough is 
singular because it's composed of the fragments of your decisions. A 
writer hasn't pre-laid a narrative for you to trace. They've simply 
created scenarios and opportunities. It's broadly up to you how your 
chosen beats of drama link together. You are the architect of your 
victory or downfall, the only one that must live or die by the 
consequences of your actions.
 
This is the video game at its most mystical and revealing. It exposes 
much human juxtapositions: our elemental longing for exploration and 
discovery, and the tension with our common desire for home and 
sanctuary. It reveals the way in which we will imperil ourselves in the 
quest to gain knowledge for the greater good, set against our selfish 
instinct to hoard and sell that knowledge for personal gain.
 
Sunless Sea is a game about transport in another way too: it takes us 
to another, currently vanished period in human history. It's fictional 
and yet it's also representative of a time when this kind of travel was 
at once essential, burdensome and perilous.
 
Through play you start to learn the ancient principles of captaincy and 
leadership. You learn how to plot a feasible voyage (for a start: don't 
waste your money on wine and women till you've first bought fuel and 
supplies for the next trip). You learn first hand the tremendous cost 
of a miscalculation, and how, on the capricious sea, you can never be 
fully in control. You become more decisive, especially of what to keep 
and what to discard (there is no time for equivocation, no room for 
hoarding, you tell yourself, as the keepsake sinks). You learn, as they 
used to say, how to run a tight ship. And in that journey, Sunless Sea 
holds a mirror up to your own temperament, character and approach to 
life.
 
'The sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a 
sunless sea,' reads Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan, from which the game 
takes its name and setting. It already knows that you will take up the 
challenge and bravely attempt to measure these caverns. The better 
question, and the one that Sunless Sea asks in countless ways is: how?

 
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-06-sunless-sea-review
 
 
Eh la madonna.
 
Questi di solito non sono cosi' di manica larga, no?

Topolaccio ha pensato forte :

Dipende dal redattore. Se non ricordo male diedero 10 anche al gioco 
coll'eskimese e il sorcio.

 coll'eskimese e il sorcio.
 
Ah, che non era affatto male, per inciso, ma e' assolutamente esagerato il 10.
Ci sono sicuramente altri lavori indie piu' meritevoli.

 coll'eskimese e il sorcio.
 
Sempre meglio che darlo ai giochi di macchinine o astronavine...
 
 
 
-- 
- I'm afraid to close my eyes, I'm afraid to open them
 
- Devi sparargli sul naso!
 
- Rivoglio il mio scellino!

 know Richard personally.
 
eh.

Sembra che interzoid abbia detto :

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/sunless-sea
 

> 
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-06-sunless-sea-review
 
[]
 
L'ho provato e l'ho trovato di una noia mortale. Ma devo ammettere che 
le storie raccontate sono molto belle e fantasiose.
 
-- 
Il Papa abbraccia un sacerdote vittima di torture. “Piano oh!”