I’ve been playing Fallen London and Sunless Sea quite a bit the last couple of weeks. The first is a free browser game, the second is a more traditional computer game.
What they have in common is the world they are set in. Her Enduring Majesty, the Traitor Empress of London, sold her city to the bazaar save her husband in 1861. This means that the entire city was taken under ground by bats to the shore of the Unterzee, where it has been for about thirty years when the game begins. In Fallen London, the player makes a home in the Victorian, Gothic city and explores its possibilities. In Sunless Sea, the player is a Zee-captain discovering islands and zee monsters of the Unterzee.
I enjoy the dark and mysterious stories of these games immensely, and if I can manage to create an atmosphere like they did in Sunless Sea in one of my texts, I would count that as a great success.
Of course I’ll never do that if I don’t write anything, so off I go to write something.
Let’s zee how it goes…