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  • Awesome Art: The visual design has definitely improved from the last game, and it clearly shows in many places. Impossible locales like the enormous Nature Reserve with its many asteroids full of life and the gigantic, heavily-industrialized Workworlds are given proper justice when flying over them.
  • Awesome Music:
  • Complete Monster: The Sapphir'd King, also known as the Azure, is an ancient star that rules as Judgement over the Blue Kingdom, where all souls go in death. Outwardly appearing as Heaven itself, the Blue Kingdom is in truth a vast and corrupt bureaucracy serving as a giant meat grinder to process souls to be fed to the Azure. All living mortals found trespassing are immediately killed, and souls found not to the Azure's taste are thrown into a frozen black hole to suffer for eternity trapped with the worst monsters in existence. The worst fate awaits the chosen souls that pass through Death's Door into supposed paradise, where they are skewered on spears of light and slowly dissected before what remains is fed to the Azure's gaping maw and wiped from existence. Embodying the worst aspects of the Judgements, the Sapphir'd King proves why many mortals seek to bring about the Liberation of Night.
  • Demonic Spiders: Multiple, many of whom are likely to cost you one or several captains if you're unlucky about when or where you encounter them:
    • The Guests start showing up once you start heading towards Hybras in the Reach, or just outside of Albion if you're unlucky. They're disguised as regular ships, move around in a jerky and unpredictable pattern, are faster than the early-game ships, very difficult to shake, and deal serious damage by spewing black goo at you in either a shotgun spread or as a pair of homing missiles. Your starting locomotive can be destroyed in as few as 4 hits from one Guest.
      • They also have a very high chance to spawn if you examine the remains of destroyed locomotives, which can lead to death quickly if you're not prepared for it (and even if you are): given that wrecks are quite common, have good loot, and can be encountered before you even find a port, you can be dead before you know what hit you.
      • It can get even worse; get hit by a Guest's weapons and there's a chance your locomotive will be infested with the things, triggering several nasty skill checks that can cost you crew and hull points.
    • Scribe Spinsters are nasty during the early- to mid-game, and are common both in the Reach, Albion and in Euletheria. Their long range attack is fast and does a lot of damage, their mid-range attack homes in on you and can hit you twice relatively easily, and if you get too close, they attack with an explosion that does decent damage and also rapidly boosts your Terror. They also are extremely difficult to shake due to their frustrating persistence and reluctance to let you escape. They will also periodically spawn near you should you be carrying any knowledge from their libraries.
    • Curators (who, somewhat ironically, are literally bat-like beings damned by the gods of the lore). They are faster and more agile than any ship you can obtain, have fantastic range and big projectiles that are hard to dodge in cramped conditions (one leaving behind a cloud of acid that harms you by running into it), can aggro on you from outside your screen (meaning you don't even need to have seen a Curator for one to show up and attack you), and will not quit chasing you until it's almost dead, meaning that trying to run away when you first hear one only makes things worse. While they fortunately only show up in very specific places on the map (usually near the edges), you can encounter them as early as the Reach and getting too close to an edge while exploring the map will spell your doom if you're unprepared.
  • Difficulty Spike:
    • Eleutheria is a significantly tougher place to survive than the Reach or Albion, filled with lethal enemies, sharp terror spikes, and places almost designed to cut you down to size. Not only that, getting back from it the first time is not easy. Come well prepared.
    • The Blue Kingdom wants you dead. This is the hardest area in the game, requiring endless to-ing and fro-ing along avenues overrun by lethal, extremely persistent enemies. Collect the best gear available before coming here, and even then expect no mercy.
  • Even Better Sequel: Sunless Skies fixes most of the major issues of Sunless Sea, such as the unforgiving difficulty, the exhausting grinding, uninteresting combat and lack of polish, while also being bigger, prettier, and more mechanically coherent than its predecessor.
  • Game-Breaker: The Wrath of Heaven. It is a hassle to get, has a slow projectile, requires a whopping 75 Hearts, overheats your locomotive very quickly, and will substantially damage your locomotive if you use it in close range, but it will also one-shot about half the enemies you come across, ending the fight before the poor sod knows there was even a fight. Most things you come across in the Reach and about half the things you run into in Eleutheria and Albion become essentially free EXP and loots, often dying before they are even alerted to your presence.
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • Bull Cantankeri. Just about too tough to easily kill with early to mid-game weaponry, have a really long charge distance, and can throw you off-course on impact. On its own, an annoyance. Combined with an actual Demonic Spider, a potentially fatal distraction.
    • Maddened Sky-Explorers. They only have a shotgun, and ramming you, as attacks, but if one comes across you while you're fighting something actually nasty, the constant jostling of trying to keep the (literal) crazy train from repeatedly throwing off your aim and dodging by impacting into you gets really annoying. They also get considerably nastier in packs, when they can attack from multiple angles.
    • Grievers. An Action Bomb that usually shows up in packs of three at a time. They die quickly enough, but if a pack decides to hunt you down while you're busy with a Dowser (or lord forbid an Undeparted or a Curator), they can add real trouble.
  • Heartwarming Moments: Recruiting a dandy's pet rat Wilma at Perdurance will cause the dandy to ask for payment. He's absolutely delighted should you choose to repay him with a kiss.
    • The Inadvisably Big Dog's event "Cry Havoc!" can lead to quite a few of these as your dog goes on a delightful ramgage around your engine. Highlights include the Driver strapping a pair of goggles (doggles?) to the Dog's face, or the Clay Conductor being convinced to cradle the Dog after being convinced he won't hurt him.
  • Narm: Scrive Spinsters when they are off-screen fighting things that aren't you. The little choir noises their attacks make are unaffected by distance to the player. Hearing them up close with the screams of the spinster and the explosions of the shots? Terrifying! Hearing rapid, off-key, obnoxiously loud choir noises coming from absolutely nowhere as you drive peacefully through the empty sky, that (thanks to how enemy-enemy fights work) don't seem to ever end? Less so.
  • Nausea Fuel: If you're going to visit Worlebury-juxta-Mare after a big meal, try not to look at the "donkeys" too closely. The game is never clear on them, but every tidbit you get is more retch-inducing than the last.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Stat requirements for higher-tier locomotive equipment is not fun to deal with. For one, it can be seen as arbitrary, considering that higher-tier equipment already have the trade-off of increasing costs and fuel consumption. Second, the requirements for the highest tiers are so high that a player essentially has to have been Min-Maxing a specific stat to meet them.
    • More of a mixed bag, but the carry-over for Officer's post-questline states during a single game's lineages can be this. On one hand, you don't have to redo their quests each time you start a new lineage. On the other hand, you can potentially make things harder for yourself if you resolve their questline in a way that changes them in a way you don't like, if not cause them to leave the game entirely.
  • Shocking Moments: The game's premise serves as this for those who played Fallen London and Sunless Sea, with the Judgements being killed, the stars dying, and London essentially leaving Earth.
  • Slow-Paced Beginning:
    • While it is not dull, the Reach feels less Lovecraftian and more of a typical space adventure. It is not until the player reaches Albion and Eleutheria where the story and locations dive deep into Cosmic Horror Story territory.
    • Actually getting to Eleutheria or Albion can take quite a while. Getting the materials necessary to get a travel permit is easy (Albion requires 2 permits, which you can get with as little as 4 Port Reports delivered to the Stovepipes, and two barrels of hours, which you can buy or drill easily enough, while Eleutheria basically requires finding the travel gate). Actually surviving in the new areas will require a lot of Reach-trekking to get the money, weapons, and upgrades you'll need, as the difficulty spikes rather sharply once you're out of the Reach. Getting to Eleutheria also requires getting past Hybras, which can be very easy if you don't run into anything, or extremely difficult if the game decides to spawn some Guests or Colonized Cantankeri in the narrow passages surrounding the area.
  • Tear Jerker: The Bleak Industrialist's quest to bring back his deceased wife is, far and away, the saddest thing in the whole game. The man's grief is palpable through the interactions you're given with him, there really aren't any moments of levity or humor during the questline, and the restriction you're ultimately forced to work with (the wife only being allowed out of the Blue Kingdom for A Year and a Day) leads to a hell of a Downer Ending / "Shaggy Dog" Story if you're not careful; you can end up reducing her to salt before she even reaches her husband, having to kill the man himself when he refuses to let you take her back, or face the brutal punishment promised by The Sun's Daughter. The best outcome you can hope for is a Bittersweet Ending where you return the shade to the Blue Kingdom...and she finds the Industrialist, leaving them Together in Death. Given all that, it's wholly understandable if this is the one sidequest in the game that you don't want to complete.

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