Sunless Skies wouldn't be part of the Fallen London setting without some of this fuel
Warning: unmarked spoilers below!
- What happens to Whitlock in the Prologue is a particularly brutal example of what Correspondence can do to a person. Highlights include your doctor mentioning that her internal organs have been branded by the Word of fire that nearly destroyed your locomotive, and Whitlock at one point vomiting liquid fire.
- When taking the more precipitous route in checking the wrecked locomotive, you remember asking the Captain what would happen if you slipped while outside. "You'd fall", she'd replied. When you ask her where to, she simply replies "Away." You can hear fear in her voice when she answers.
- Several of the Horror Spectacles qualify; just a glimpse and you quickly learn that something horrible happened there. For example, take the Grave of the Silent Saint
. - Unsurprisingly, the four Nightmares are examples of this. You Are Not Yourself has your Captain slowly succumbing to Loss of Identity and becoming convinced they're actually a devil (and in the Non-Standard Game Over ends up removing their skin to reveal what may be an actual Chorister-Bee) and You Are Being Watched has them slowly become convinced the Judgements have developed a personal grudge against them.
- Eleutheria has its share, especially since the infamous Liberation of Night is in full swing around those parts. As the lights go out, some nasty things start crawling into the new darkness.
- A YouTube comment sums it up rather neatly:
AAAAAAAGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! OH GOD! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! - The Domain of The Halved Horror Spectacle. Remember the eye at the bottom of the Unterzee. Now you get to see it up close and it's even worse. It's now a huge eyeshaped black hole with a twitching pupil.
- On the same note Mr. Barleycorn's office in The House of Rods and Chains. It's the same room where you ended up when you dove your zubmarine into the Eye in the last game, you can get back from the office side and nearly drown via teleporting to the zeefloor.
- Visiting the Well of Wonders will reveal that the Halved is a Judgement who has completely lost its shit and is now actively making things more chaotic and dark out of spite for other Judgements.
- One of Eleutheria's native creatures, the Undeparted, is a hooded monstrosity that attacks by extending its clawed hands and hurling homing sawblades at you. Examining its corpse implies it might not be actually dead and the crew decides to just take what it can and run before the thing reanimates. Oh, and it's invisible unless you shine your light on it, which you well could be trying not to do to avoid angering Dousers; more likely than not, it'll sneak up on you. And once you learn what they are, things get worse: They aren't merely undead, they are the breaching of the universal laws of life and death, given form. As in, each Undeparted is the result of a breaching of these universal laws of reality itself, embodying itself into a form that only sort of exists (explaining their invisibility as simply not existing enough until light shines on them). You are fighting mistakes of reality, and you cannot put them down forever.
- Worlebury-juxta-Mare. Who would've guessed a semi-competent attempt at replicating a British beach could be so horrible?
- Seas that are actually white mists and sand that is actually ground glass with wormy tendrils, that isn't too bad. "Fish" that look horribly warped, not like fish at all, and seem to have human hair for gills are pretty damned bad. "Donkeys" that apparently reproduce/bud from eggs, are misshapen enough you can ride on their bellies, keep spewing tumorous innards all over the place and never stop screaming, that's the worst. There's a reason why all options that amount to "actually ponder this for a second" raise your Terror meter so much.
- The Cult. Right off the bat you can end up speaking to someone whose mouth looks like the inside of an intestine, all with little fleshy hairs rather than a tongue, and it gets worse from there. You get to see more of them in the Off Season, which is the same old Worlebury-Juxta-Mare but abandoned and filthy, somehow separated from the one tourists get to visit so the workers can maintain and clean up from there without being seen.
- The seas themselves have their share of horrific encounters too. Pondering them already lets you see something like the tendrils of something huge writhing within the mist. And if you're driving over them, occasionally you'll get to see an Eldritch Abomination of the sea urchin-y type pop up and briefly glare at you with a very human eye — both descriptions extremely familiar to anyone who has dealt with Rubbery Men or fought them in the Unterzee. Yep, this entire operation is being directed by a Lorn-Fluke; the fact that Flukes aren't innately malevolent makes the thing even more eerie, since you have no idea what it's doing here, and why a cult dedicted to "Those Who Must Grieve" started around it (and why is it grieving?). You can be clued in to the aforementioned revelation during your visit to Worlebury-juxta-Mare, too, when you find out the Rubbery Lumps aren't yet another awful imitation, and are actually the good stuff. People familiar with what "the good stuff" is when it comes to Rubbery Lumps thanks to past games should quickly catch on.
- Remember the Dawn Machine and all the nightmares it could provide? The exodus to the stars hasn't done its temperament any good at all: The Clockwork Sun of Albion has replaced the region's star, and it reigns over all within. And once again, props to the Art Department of Failbetter for making this gigantic machine actually look eerie from the get go.
- Brainwashing is still happening just as badly as ever. Just trying to go and maintain the inner workings will usually result in you coming out as a brainwashed slave to its will, thinking it is Perfect. And you can see the sheer neglect the entire station around the Sun is in, because brainwashed workers are those that don't notice things like the brig being exposed, the gallery roof collapsing, or several pieces rusting to nothing because the Sun has better things to have them do. What those "better things" than basic self-maintenance are is anyone's guess.
- Its vile, amber light will also slowly turn you and anyone exposed into jagged glass, and if enough time passes, even inanimate objects will vitrify over time. You can see the effects on many that just flew by or lived in Albion for some time, and suddenly found part of themselves had gone transparent, vitreous, and ragged. Those exposed longer develop even more horrible conditions, with at least one finding themselves with half their body entirely glassed. And it's not even unwilling; going by the fact the one person that dared insult the Sun (mildly at that) aboard the station found their knee shattering under them before they could take another step, having glassed in less than a second. The Sun wants to do this, and just does it faster if you give it a reason to.
- And the worst part of this, the reason why the Clockwork Sun is so toxic and hateful? It's dying. The Machine is having a Judgement-sized Villainous Breakdown because it thought it was immortal, only for it to arrive in the High Wilderness and slowly start breaking down. It began taking out its rage by petrifying everyone in the Sun-Shattered Dome, and hasn't stopped since. The Broken Steward's quest is a horrifying exercise in futility. She can ask the player to bring her shipments of hours so she has extra years to fix the Machine… only to end up wasting away to a senile old lady and being brainwashed too for good measure. With the Steward gone, the engineers on the station can't repair the parts of it only she understood, meaning it's only a matter of time until it fails completely, plunging Albion into darkness and turning it into a second Reach. And the Similarly-Dazzled Steward insists the whole time the Sun cannot break now. Meaning it's either brainwashing and/or denial talking… or she did fix the thing and now it simply wants everyone to die.
- One fun little detail to make players nostalgic for Sunless Sea - several interactions with the Clockwork Sun, such as entering its port for the first time, will give you a point in an all-too-familiar stat: Yearning, Burning. Thankfully, in this game it doesn't drive your captain mad and eventually suicidal for sunlight, but when you see that notification for the first time, you don't know that, do you?
- Who doesn't remember the Sorrow Spiders from previous games, the eye stealing creepy crawlies made even scarier by their ability to travel through unreality via mirrors and their leaders the spider counsels, groups of a few dozen spiders merged together into a gestalt being. That's got to be horrifying enough, right? Nope! In the Blue Kingdom, you get to meet a Spider Senate, a being formed from billions upon billions of Sorrow Spiders merged together into something that can bring about the death of a sun. And you only meet this thing if you're on its side.
- And how does this giant mass of spiders kill a sun? By implanting a toxic egg that poisons it, and hatches into more spiders that will eat it from the inside out. Even for soul-eating Jerkass Gods, that's a horrific way to die.
- The aforementioned sun you can kill very much deserves such a death, however, because even by celestial standards, it is a nasty piece of work. How? Simple: The Blue Kingdom and all its standing as a titanic Celestial Bureaucracy is, more or less, a ruse. There is no afterlife. There is no Heaven. Behind Death's Door, nothing awaits but the Sapphir'd King and the Judgemental equivalent of cutlery, eager to end everything you ever were for sustenance. In the end, after you've done everything you could in life and gotten all your affairs in order in death, when you are ready to pass on to the next world, there is absolutely nothing behind the Pearly Gates other than a giant, hungry mouth.
- You're steaming through the Sky, far from any friendly port when you see, perhaps, a Tacketie scout just as lost as you are. You close the gap, hoping for the comfort of a friendly engine or an ally from whatever terrors are chasing you… until an ear splitting roar rattles your engine, and tentacles erupt from the front. Congrats, you've just met (and almost certainly just died to) The Guests.
- Running out of supplies grows more and more terrifying the longer your crew starves, going from quiet, sullen wandering the halls while trying not to think about food… to a guilt-ridden meal of a thin, meaty soup shortly after a crewman dies… to the Captain and a chosen few having a deliriously gleeful feast while the remaining holdouts take shelter in their cabins.
- The politics of the Judgements are decidedly messy in a way they've tried very hard to hide — and, once you dive into the matter (and manage to avoid being Killed to Uphold the Masquerade), you find that they have good reason to not want mortals to be privy to the embarrassing details. Suffice to say, of the five Judgements whose kingdoms are available to the people of London, three of them are already dead (and one of those has been replaced with the aforementioned Clockwork Sun), one is insane, and the remaining one is a complete and total bastard. The heavens appear to be falling into ruin at a rapid pace because of how screwed-up the Judgements' entire social order has become.
