It's been many years now since I finished playing Sunless Sea, yet the experience still reverberates. In Part I of this game retrospective, I focused on my interactions with Salt and how they helped me really understand something from The Chronicles of Narnia. In this article I'm going to talk about the game's ending, and how it, too, helped me understand something … also, coincidentally, from the Narnia series.
Or perhaps it's not quite a coincidence. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader features a ship sailing for unknown islands, so its ties to Sunless Sea are immediately obvious (though most of Dawn Treader isn't nearly so alarming and gloomy). The voyage has a primary goal of recovering exiled nobles, but one crew member – the talking mouse Reepicheep – becomes obsessed with going all the way to the eastern edge of the world. To quote him,
“My own plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan's country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise …”
I accepted this plan of Reepicheep's when I read the book, but I don't think I grasped the why of it. What could make anybody want to behave like this? Then Sunless Sea managed to give me that particular bug. |
| Tell me a secret |
It started when I got my steamship to Irem. Measured from the player's home base in Fallen London, Irem is one of the most distant islands. It isn't threatening … just otherworldly. You spend your time there thinking in the future tense. You can purchase a temporary passage to the dreamworld. You can exchange stories like currency, or spend a fistful of precious Secrets to buy the soul of a star. And there's a store called Threshold which accepts some of the most rare and valuable items in the game in return for mundane supplies – food and fuel. It advertises itself with the line, “None sail East from Irem. This shop is for those who sail East from Irem.”
I decided, after only being there once or twice, that *I* was determined to sail East from Irem. My formal Ambition (the goal your player character has to meet before retiring) was to become London's greatest explorer and write a book about it … but after seeing Irem, I discovered I didn't hope for a comfortable retirement in London. I wanted to end the game by sending my boat off the right-hand edge of the map and never coming back.
It might be hard for me to verbalize why I hoped for this. The game will tell you very little about what lies in the mythical East. There's a vague promise of final frontiers and wonders beyond the imagination, but that's about all you get. The Sunless Sea itself is mighty fascinating – why not stay with it? And yet, Irem gave me a hint of something more. Something not of Earth. Without ever learning what I wanted, I wanted it very badly.
To my everlasting delight, the game anticipated this desire. But Reepicheep had it easy compared to me. In Sunless Sea, you can't just point your boat's prow eastward and expect to get somewhere. Going East will cost you. You are not told how high the cost will be.
By the time I had finished experiencing the terrors and glories of the Zee and felt strong enough to work on the arcane preparations for my Easterly voyage, I had probably put a good 40 hours of time into my character. And remember, if you play it as intended, Sunless Sea has permadeath. It was then that the game design reached one of its crowning triumphs: it stopped just frightening my character, and started frightening me.
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| This is not a safe place. Partly because you'll meet yourself. |
You have to make an excursion off all four edges of the map to have the option of going East permanently. I went North first, and it was a disaster; it could have finished me. But South had the potential to be an even more serious problem. I cheated a bit, if you want to call it that: I consulted the internet and read up on this quest before going. Then I farmed my stats high enough that I could not lose the random number roll; I was guaranteed to survive. But! Even in a best-case scenario, the Southern challenge leaves you with one crewman and one point of ship's hull. You can't take so much as a love tap from a sea monster without plunging to a watery grave. And it's a long way to the nearest port where you can get repairs[1]. Retiring my captain in Fallen London actually became a little tempting – but I shrugged that temptation off, because how insufferably dull, and how insufferably cheap. I couldn't settle for it.
One evening I came home from work knowing this would be the night I put it all on the line. Sick feelings fluttered in my stomach as I prepared to dare the Red River. I made my journey into the heart of the Elder Continent, and I limped back to a place of safety … very carefully. I'd done it. Faced with a case when pursuing the unknown imposed actual risk on me, I chose to do it anyway, and I came through.
But that hazard of my real-life time investment wasn't even the end of it; the roleplaying part of the thing remains important. My captain character brutalized herself in order to pass the gate. She stood in the sun until it made her sick … over and over and over again. She pushed herself to the brink of insanity – twice – to reach the heart of Frostfound. She wrote her name on the wall. The game implies that this action is savagely painful. I didn't experience all these sufferings myself, of course, but I was subtly internalizing the choices.
To crown it all, the passage East demands that you sever ties with the mortal world, allow half your stats to be devoured[2], and sell off all your valuable, hard-to-find items. Hours of shuttling my ship around the trade routes went up in smoke. And I enjoyed it. That was the part that was so, so weird. Going East had become such a consummate triumph that it was a pleasure to demonstrate how I valued it by throwing lesser achievements to the winds. What did I grind up those stats for, after all, except to be strong enough to sail Eastward? Go on, burn it! We're going East! Burn everything if you want to!
I realized when I reached the end of it that I had just done a virtual reenactment of the Pearl of Great Price. I still don't know if I could explain to you why Reepicheep yearned to attain the East, but I know why, in the unspeakable knowledge of experience. The World is not enough … and when you come to understand that, only things from beyond the World will do. You have to go and pursue them with everything you've got. You have to Go East.
Months down the road, the lessons I pulled out of this game – the comprehension of joy taken in suffering for a higher goal – would pay off superbly in Real Life, on more than one occasion. If anybody tries to tell you that video games are empty recreation, or worse, a waste of time, either they're playing the wrong ones or they don't know how to use them.
[1] Belatedly, I read a guide and learned that you can bring Rattus Faber Assistants to get your hull out of the danger zone right away. I didn't think of this because I'd long ago sworn off using Rattus Faber Assistants. They're a consumable item, so I assumed that sending them to fix the ship was always a suicide mission, and my RPG characters don't go in for that sort of crud.
[2] I didn't get the alternate option of losing my sweetheart because I never chose to have one.
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