Sunless Skies review: a glimpse of the heavens from master storytellers

Perhaps it’s the late January release date, but Sunless Skies puts me in mind of The Polar Express. In the standout scene from Robert Zemeckis’ Christmas fairy tale, the titular train steams out across a new lake that has frozen over its tracks, setting the engine loose from its predetermined route. As the Express careens across the ice, its coaches jackknifing uncontrollably, Tom Hanks shouts down instructions to the engineers (“LLLLLEFT! RRRRRIGHT!”), who steer hundreds of tonnes of screaming steel back on course to connect with the rails on the other side - like astronauts docking with the ISS, just louder. There is nothing more terrifying, little more exhilarating, than a train free of its tracks - and in Sunless Skies your locomotive only meets the rails when it reaches the engine yard of a friendly port. For the majority of your playtime, your wheels spin above countless fathoms of air as you set your own course through the unmapped heavens, one bulging eye on your fuel counter. You might have noticed that I’m skipping back and forth between the language of the railway, the stars, and the sea, and that’s because no one of them entirely encapsulates the premise of Sunless Skies. You captain what is unmistakably a steam engine, leading a crew of not-quite-cosmonauts, not-quite-pirates in a series of mercenary acts - transporting settlers to new homes, trading weapons for flowers, shooting down enemies of Her Renewed Majesty and harvesting their nameplates like scalps. By making increasingly bold trips through the sky to distant ports, you might just pull together enough coins - not only to patch over the holes in your locomotive and replace the crew you’ve lost, FTL-style, but to buy bigger locomotives, and maybe even keep your crew alive long enough to make the return trip. Maybe. Baby steps.

from PCGamesN http://bit.ly/2De99P2