By EMF
Sunless Sea is a text-based horror game. To put it simply: London fell into a cave in the early 1900s, there’s a sea down there, and I, the player, explore it. Over the course of the hours playing, I learned the ins and outs of the grim world everything takes place in. My boat is indescribably small in the vast darkness, but it takes me and my crew from port to port as the stories unfold in my journal. Other than puttering around or chancing the occasional fight, the journal contains everything. All the choices to be made were written in there, at the click of a button after I calculate the risks and rewards. The point was to make good choices, have luck on my side, and be rewarded with secrets, with terrible tidbits of well-worded gothic fantasy. Or choose poorly, have luck betray me, and die. As with any game, I followed the bread-crumb trails left by the developers, whether it led me to an island where retired postmen taught me what dead letters have to say and the knowledge burnt my hair off, or if it leads me to an immense, whirling machine made to look like a biblical angel and mimic the sun, whose light corrupted everything it touched.
It was wonderfully descriptive and delightfully horrifying, but I can only get from it what the developers gave. I am told what the frigid water feels like when I fall in; I am told who I am talking to, told what they say, told how they say it. The camaraderie of my crew is merely described to me, as are my major successes and massive failures. None of this is firsthand. If I fall in the water, I am given a description from the developer’s point of view (who may or may not have fallen in water, who most certainly hasn’t seen a sun machine the size of a god). From this, I can draw conclusions within the framework of the game. Any detail that could be experienced were this to happen in real life that went unsaid is unknown to me; I have only a fraction of the whole.
At Pohick Bay, in real life this time, I was by the docks and by the water. I felt the bitter wind blow in from the bay. It tugged the silky surface on its way to harass me, then headed out towards the Potomac and Maryland. Roaring along, it tore water up in white peaks, then shoved it down in divots in a never-ending motion. It yanked on tree branches until they had to choose between snapping back or snapping off. The sun sunk in the sky on the other side of the hill behind me, casting the opposite shore in golden light that looked misleadingly cozier than twenty-five degrees. Its light skimmed across the wind-made-waves like skipping stones.
The water was murky. The agitated mud, the undulating surface, and the bright glare all combined and made it opaque, hiding anything it swallowed after only a few inches. It took anything it could reach—and damn, did it reach—up the banks onto the footpaths, up the boat ramp onto the pavement, discovering that the path of least resistance meant little when power and volume were bolstered by recent storms. It seemed alive and curious, testing how far it could go, how much territory it could steal and sweep away. I found myself wondering about what was down there. How many things were obscured by the water? How many—if any—were alive? How big were they? How benevolent?
I found that in Sunless Sea (and in any other game I’ve played), the goal was to delve deeper and explore the human condition. They toyed with emotions; with wonders, curiosities, excitements, fears; with everything, to spread whatever themes that the developers wanted to share. But no matter how excellent, a video game can only approximate a real-life experience. The risk they carry is minimal; the runtime short in the grand scheme of things; the information usually limited to audio, video, and whatever detail the developer can convey. Thus, the message falls flat when compared to an experience where one is physically and emotionally present in all five senses, where their own life is involved and not a character’s. The virtual experience comes from information taken in by someone else, processed in their mindset, then reproduced and packaged for another to consume. In nature, I was directly questioning tides I could reach out to, touch, and get swept away by if I desired. I processed the raw information and formed my own opinions; whereas, in Sunless Sea, I was looking at pixelated waves on a screen and reading text that told me how they felt, drawing conclusions the developers led me to.