Love this game aesthetic to bits!
The votes are in! The community's choice for a long title to play together and discuss in August 2026 is...
Developer: Failbetter Games
Genre: RPG, Adventure
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux
Why should you care: Sunless Skies is a spiritual sequel to Sunless Sea. This time, instead of navigating nightmare waters under the Fallen London in a ship, you're the captain of a flying steam locomotive. The gameplay is very similar though: heavy on exploration and text-based narrative events, light on player hand-holding. And the threat of permadeath still looms over every decision you make, making it feel all the more weighty. (if permadeath isn't your thing, Merciful mode is also offered)
The core loop is managing fuel and supplies while sailing between ports, piecing together story threads that can span the entire world map and dealing with hostile encounters - whether using guns, or full steam retreat. The action elements are not the draw though - the main reason to play titles by Failbetter Games is the worldbuilding and narrative. And from my experience of playing Sunless Seas, I'm very much looking forward to revisiting the same grim world this month!
Game of the Month is an initiative similar to a book reading club, where every month the Patient Gamers community votes for a long game (>12 hours main story per HLTB) and a short game (<12 h) to play, discuss together and share our experiences about.
If you want to learn more & participate, that's great, you can join the /r/patientgamers Discord server to do that! (link in the subreddit's sidebar) However, if you only want to discuss this month's choice in this thread, that's cool too.
August 2026's GotM theme: Unusual transportation - this theme is covering games with a focus on operating vehicles that aren't cars, and while we're at it no boats either. Let's explore all the weird vehicles gaming has to offer!
Love this game aesthetic to bits!
I have beaten this game once before. I was early into a second playthrough in 2023 when I decided to play something else, but enough time has passed that I might pick this up again. I only completed the Wealth ambition, which is to amass a large fortune and valuable objects from the skies to retire in comfort.
I played this game so much I tried looking for mods to add more stuff but I guess it's completely unmoddable besides, like, editing image files.
There's the Monarch mod, it's essentially a fan made expansion. It adds new storylines and equipment and changes the trading mechanics to be a little more like sunless sea.
I can recommend the game "A house of many doors" if yall like this kind of game!
I really wanted to like the game, the look and Lovecraftian vibes and lore of the game are top notch, but I found the actual experience of the game mind numbingly boring. While there was tension, especially while exploring a new area, everything is literally a chore, you do the same thing over and over again, no matter what the mission is it boils down to delivering cargo, and once you get the hang of a new area I found myself bored out of my mind, and any inconvenience didn't make the experience more interesting or immersive but more tedious. I rarely drop a game but this one I couldn't take anymore after ~20h.
That sucks to hear. Reminds me a bit of my experience with Cultist Simulator, where I loved the vibes and the narrative, but the actual experience of (safely) pushing through the expeditions and reaching the endgame started to feel really tedious at some point.
That sucks to hear. Reminds me a bit of my experience with Cultist Simulator, where I loved the vibes and the narrative, but the actual experience of (safely) pushing through the expeditions and reaching the endgame started to feel really tedious at some point.
I bounced off _Skies_ despite being pretty excited for it. I thought _Seas_ held together better.
I appreciate this post and plan to add it to my list, but what is the deal with trying to push people to discord? Isn't this subreddit the point here? Is there some kind of financial motivation to push people to a different platform?
I appreciate this post and plan to add it to my list, but what is the deal with trying to push people to discord? Isn't this subreddit the point here? Is there some kind of financial motivation to push people to a different platform?
There is 0 financial incentive discord is just a different kind of platform and the gotm is a good fit for it
I don't see the point as being the subreddit, I see the point as being the discussion and community around older games. Reddit's just a company; the people here make the community, and while I don't particularly trust MS more than Reddit or anything, I think it's a fine thing for that community to be more broad and not tied to a single corporate-owned platform.
Discord is just a worse replacement for forums than reddit is, and the constant push to get everything onto a discord server sucks. You can't easily search discord servers, instead of posts dedicated to topics you have a constant scroll of discussion sorted into a handful of categories, there's no way to sort/vote on/collapse comments/comment chains, and worst of all, the chatrooms constantly devolve into off topic nonsense as a handful of users tend to derail discussions in all but the most heavily moderated servers. People on discord servers complain about people asking the same questions over and over again, but what do you expect? If you weren't looking at the feed at exactly the right time, you missed when it was asked previously. Want to participate in a discussion that was initiated an hour ago? Too bad, you missed it. Necro-ing a forum thread meant adding a comment after weeks or months had passed, necro-ing a discord thread means replying to a comment from a few hours ago in some cases.
It's just a normal sequel. A bunch of characters from *sea* show up again in *Skies*, and you can visit the Avid Horizon to see the migratory fleet that came from the world of Sunless Sea. The writing is great, but I'm a little disappointed that a few of the plotlines go nowhere. Particularly the one where you're supposed to track down all the old Masters of the Bazaar and presumably get the band back together. It was actually in there since the start of Early Access, and fail better just kinda forgot to finish it. I also enjoyed *The Truth* ambition, but dear god I have no idea how you are intended to finish that honestly. There are like ten different checks that will fail the ambition by failing a single one. I ended up manually backing up my save to avoid needing to restart the game.
I've got a ton of love for these games; I don't think I can think of a game with better prose or more imaginative worldbuilding. That said, they're definitely not for everybody. Gameplay is thin at best: it's not as egregiously time-wasting in Sunless Skies as it was in the Fallen London mobile game, but it still feels like it's there to be an obstacle rather than be entertaining on its own. Some light RPG/economic sim elements, but nothing that compelling. To appreciate these games, you have to love reading at least as much as you love gaming. Plus you have to vibe with a very-British tone that walks the line between dry comedy and cosmic horror. Not everyone will. Still Sunless Sea and Skies are some of my favorite gaming hidden gems of the last decade.
The writing definitely kept me going back. Just superbly atmospheric and imaginative. But despite however many hours in, I don't think I ever truly understood the stats system. "Hearts 4 failed the challenge" might as well have been greek to me.