YMMV / Sunless Sea

• Awesome Music: Each territory you meet gets its own sort of introductory Leitmotif, and each one of them is amazing in its own right, and twice so when coupled with the land you're now meeting.
  • Khan's Heart is nothing short of delicious. A spicy Oriental tune that plays around the Khanate.
  • The music played during the approach to Port Carnelian^note Hope is an Anchor on the official soundtrack is also played when you sail to the Stars with the Merchant Venturer. Fitting that the entire track sounds like alien chanting.
  • The Surface is an uplifting tune that greatly contrasts with the generally subdued tracks found in the Neath.^note Just don't stay there too long.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • In a game where fighting enormous oceanic monstrosities is commonplace, the thing most captains really dread are Blue Prophets. These goddamn murder parrots not only do horrible damage to your hull, they're also relentless in their pursuit, will spot you sneaking around even offscreen, and they're too bloody fast to outrun on a ship. As if all that weren't bad enough, they like to park themselves just off Port Carnelian to make your life that much more painful.
  • A more widespread menace are the Bound Sharks. Because the way the monsters in the game hurt you is by ramming and coming into contact with the ship, and the character model for the sharks widely failing back and forth when attacking you, you often get hit TWICE when encountering the sharks. Factoring in that they tend charge very quickly and frequently and that they do 10+ damage per hit, you'll likely have some of the higher level ships get torn apart by the beasts, let alone your starting Limpet.
  • Glorious Dreadnoughts are very tough, possess a full complement of fore, deck and aft cannons, and frequently patrol some of the popular edge areas of the map (the Empire of Hands and Kingeater's Castle, most notably).
  • Under the surface of the Unterzee, Thalattes outdo half of the game's bosses in how much damage they can dish out before dying. Their spit attack can take off significant chunks of any ship's health, enough to sink smaller ships outright. Their charge is actually less dangerous than their spit attack, so if you're trying to hunt them, it's "safer" to stay in close and just tank the charges - but you'll still end up eating a good amount of damage due to their health (450 hitpoints). Worse still, being underwater beasts, Thalattes usually spot the player before the player has a chance to see them. The only saving graces are that they give you a ton of loot, they're one of a rare few ways to raise your Pages, and that their aim tends to be awful.
  • With the release of Zubmariner, many new terrors lurk the ocean floor. Unfortunately, one of those happens to be a quite literal demonic spider called the Constant Companion, which hunts you if your terror passes 65+. They hide on the sea floor and don't show up on sonar, so the only warning you have for when they pop out and attack you is a terrifying skittering sound before an enormous underwater spider tries to murder you. Besides that, it's got a lot of health, moves surprisingly quickly for an arachnid under several atmospheres of pressure, and does up to 40 damage per hit when ramming, comparable to Mt. Nomad's ranged damage! You know something's dangerous when there's an achievement for getting killed by it.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Similarly to its parent game Fallen London, some players find Sunless Sea's grind-to-progression ratio somewhat vexing. While exploration is touted as the heart of the game, due to the high turnover rate for captains in the early game players will often spend a lot of time rediscovering old territory and playing through old quests. If you die, it can be extremely tedious gathering resources, leveling up stats, and outfitting ships to the point where you can restart a storyline you had made a lot of progress in and were excited to see concluded. Legacies do mitigate this somewhat, but there's still a lot of grinding to be done to advance the story.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Pigmote Isle, with the right choices and a lot of luck, can be turned into a very profitable trade route. By backing the cavies and leading Pigmote Isle to independence, you gain the option to purchase scintillack, the price of which is determined by their Civilization score. At Civilisation 10, each unit costs 55 echoes, and it sells for 70 back at London. 15 profit per hold space on a fairly short run is pretty hefty, beating out every other direct (port to port) trade route in the game. Even if you fall a point short, 5 Echoes per unit still matches most trade routes with very little travel time. This can be repeated endlessly as long as the option is available. This is balanced out by actually achieving such a goal being luck-based at best, since the options are randomized and independence is hard to pull off successfully.
  • Frostfound has a "Something awaits you" option to dine with the locals, which grants one each of supplies and fuel, and reduces terror by 10. Unless you have a massive amount of crew, this means you can sit in port waiting for your SAY to regenerate and infinitely reduce terror while also gaining fuel and at worst remaining neutral on supply consumption. This can help dodge increasing the level of your Nightmare when you do return to London, even if Frostfound happens to spawn in the third or fourth column. This one is justified, as Frostfound's questline requires a maximum Terror rating of 20, a difficult bar not to cross if Frostfound spawns far from London, so the option exists to help you get there.
• Genius Bonus: Everywhere, from the main trade route to the Surface (via Lake Avernus, like Virgil's Aeneas) to the classes of ships (referencing, among other things, various classical spirits, monsters and deities, as well as the study of eschatology.)
  • Irem, a mysterious and mystical city residing in the Pillared Sea, is a clear reference to the legendary Iram of the Pillars.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Alcaeus-class pirate corvettes and Rat-barges, possessing middling health, low damage and meager loot and, in nearly any configuration of the Unterzee, spawning all over the central Zee, frequently in the player's path to more distant and lucrative destinations.
  • During the early game, jillyfleurs are sure to be a problem. At 50 health, they can resist a single shot from any deck or aft cannon, ensuring that they'll probably get a chance to ram you at least once. They do more damage than the other small monsters (10 average), so it'll hurt. Finally, they're really fast — without extra engine power, they're too fast to kite and too fast to run from. The only plus side is that they have a 50/50 shot of dropping a Strange Catch if you loot them.
  • Ironically enough, actual swarms of bats qualify. They die in one hit, but they're much more aggressive than other monsters and tend to charge you before you can line up a shot. They also do a fair bit of damage—eight out of seventy-five hull on the starting ship. That is ten percent of your health, right there.
• Heartwarming Moments: Helping Mr. Sacks can eventually leave you with a Noman/Snolem child. That is, a clone of a dead kid, grown from the Bazaar's frozen tears. As they run out of time, you get storylets about them pacing around in your hold, crying and melting. Unlike in Fallen London, you can save this one.
  • If you have the Snow Child and the Monkey Foundling on board at the same time, the two become friends.
  • Dropping off a blemmigan on Nuncio. As it passes over the letters, it changes their addresses to something legible, allowing at least one of the postmen to leave the island and deliver them.
  • If you sire a child and you still have the starter Lodgings, you will not be able to pursue any action relating to their storylet. The reason being that you know of couples that raise their children in similar situations, but you want better for your kid.
  • If you approach the Monkey Foundling on Ash Isthmus after finding a specific item, two of the Pentecost apes of the Empire of Hands are defending her while she sleeps. It's made pretty explicit that the spirits of the Foundling's parents are looking after her, even when unwillingly bound to soul-stealing monkeys.
    It is said, oft with a scowl, that the Pentecost apes will take anything from the souls they steal. Languages. Habits. Gestures. It is rarely considered that, sometimes, they may take the best.
  • The good ending to the Aigul storyline. You're not getting any needles anymore, sure, but seeing the captain off his deathbed at last, and the First Mate finally happy along with the crew, taking in the festive atmosphere now that they can finally leave as a crew when they desire? More than worth it. A small Awesome element in it too, as you essentially broke the spell a massive Starfish Alien had over everyone with just the right words.
• Moment of Awesome: Achieving an Ambition ending is always awesome, but there's one that is crossing from Fallen London into this: in Fallen London, one of the glimpse of future is when you and several others are near the Mountain of Light, arguing on what will they do with the immortality they will gain if they breach the Mountain of Light. One of the choice even tell that only if they can breach into the mountain and get it, since no one else has. With the Zubmariner DLC? You now have an ambition that lets you do that for real and you can win your immortality.
  • The Presbyterate Adventuress's chosen death: battling the Vake at Abbey Rock. The normally taciturn warrior-nuns are over the moon at the scar she left with her final act.
• Moral Event Horizon: You can risk lives and do ambiguous things in many, many places, and there are various places where your captain can cross this one in some's eyes. Start seriously dealing with the pair from the Isle of Cats, though, and your captain is waaaaay over the line. Dealing in drugs is bad enough without the highs they provide being Powered by a Forsaken Child, and those two are just as unpleasant as you could imagine for a major drug provider for something that awful.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Limping back to London with half your crew, a few too many holes in your hull and an engine running on tinned herring? Take a deep breath on the dockside and listen to the concerto, "Wolfstack Lights", play; it's almost like they distilled "coming home" into a musical passage. Given the setting, it's entirely possible.
  • On a much more minor note, if you happen to own an extremely fast ship that lets you travel between islands faster than the Something Awaits You quality is reset, hearing the sound of bells signaling its resetting can be that if you seek to benefit from port encounters.
  • The low chime you hear whenever your zonar spots something in the depths. Even if it's some awful beast you can't help but feel a little thrilled for the chance to snag what they're carrying.
  • While most of the impact is from the very first time, the clanking and steam-venting of your vessel turning into a zubmarine, and sinking beneath the waves to explore the zeebed is always a treat.
  • Assuming you've got a ship strong enough for serious monster hunting, the distinctive rustle that Neithers make when you spot them. They're one of the most valuable monsters to hunt, risk-to-reward - a mid-level Mirrors check nets a valuable Extraordinary Implication, and the other option trades two crew for two scintillack, which assuming you have enough crew to not cripple your ship losing them is a good trade indeed.
• Narm: In The Service of Mr. Sacks is one of the more frightening sidequests, with an evil Santa Claus invading your dreams and demanding 'offerings'. You can choose to offer him your wealth, which gives you a detailed description of him taking everything you own and leaving you penniless on the streets of London... but he only takes 50 Echoes, which undermines the horror of the choice somewhat.
• Rewatch Bonus: There are many tiny little events and implications, the significance of which only becomes apparent if you've been around the Zee a few times.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Your base stats can be increased by giving Secrets to your officers. A weird quirk of this is that each officer has a maximum level they can increase stats to (usually 100), but this value is checked against your cumulative stats, not your base stats. This means reaching your actual maximum (or close to it) requires unequipping all of your officers and any other items affecting your stats, and you can't mitigate the effect your vessel has on your stats. On the plus side, if you're sailing the Dreadnaught, you can dump 25 extra points into Veils thanks to the penalty that comes with the ship. Just max out your Iron stat first.
• Stoic Woobie: Poor Scarred Sister. By the time she becomes a crewmate, she has become homeless, covered in nearly fatal burns, no longer can live with her sisters... and this is all after she was unhappily forced into living in the Neath to remain with them. Phoebe just isn't a lucky person.
• Squick: Much of the Neath's reality, even the daily life, is packed full of all kinds of Squick-factors, underlining its eldritch alien-ness. This is not a place for those of faint heart or stomach.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Maxing out the Anarchist Supremacy requires you to go all the way to Vienna to receive a MacGuffin, return it to Fallen London, and then repeat the same task another six times. It's not difficult, but it's tedious and requires a significant investment, since trips to the Surface are not cheap.
  • Getting the Touch of the South. You have to zail down Adam's Way, off the map, and pass a very difficult Veils check. Failure kills you. Success gives you the Touch of the South and dumps you back outside Apis Meet, with your hull and crew reduced to one each. Now you get to limp back to London at half speed, with Terror accumulating at double the normal rate. There's ways to make this easier (the Cladery Heart avoids the Veils check and the HP to One effect since it's a living ship, and the Lampad-class cutter with WE ARE CLAY avoids the half speed and double Terror) but either way it's still a nail-biter.
• The Woobie: The Nacreous Outcast has it bad. His kind was already discriminated against by the people London, but in addition to that, his own people shunned him as well for reasons he refuses to go into. It eventually became a servant of the Principles of Coral who more or less has the Outcast gather materials for its own death and then forces it to play a chess match where it will die if it loses. The Outcast is well aware of what is happening during the match and is visibly shaking in fear the whole time, but is powerless to stop it. Thankfully you have the option of throwing the match.

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