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I've been playing Sunless Skies again after playing Sunless Sea for the first time and deducing it's just an inferior early version of Skies, really, and the Gaiman influence shows strongly there too.
The game play is much better in sunless skies, but the writing was way better in sunless sea. Funny enough I think the OG writer, Alexis Kennedy, got pushed out of the company in between games for sleeping around the office.
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I played Sunless Sea some time after it came out, and found it epochal.
Sunless Skies was fine, I guess. Better than 'a house of many doors', which was also ok.
But going from "you and your crew are living on some steam boat on a subterranean ocean" to "you and your crew are living on a steam locomotive driving through the void without tracks" somehow broke my suspension of disbelief.
House of many doors felt like a first draft of a game. I liked the world and the characters a lot, but so much of the game just plain old lacked polish. The combat was very rough, and the mechanics barely made sense. The vibes powerful at least, though not as good as Sunless Sea.
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