To be fair, logistics are sometimes only half the survival battle. I will never, ever forget the time we got absolutely hammered by a behemoustache not far off Aestival and had to limp all the way back home to London for repairs with 8 hull remaining.
Firstly, a behemoustache is, as the name might indicate, a massive moustachio’d fish. A “relatively normal zee-beast resembling a huge fish with large teeth and a magnificent moustache”. I’m not even joking. It hammered the shit out of our ship. There is a certain amount of cartoon hilarity to nearly dying to a moustache fish.
Secondly, we were just off Aestival. This beautiful and deadly island of inimical light, this killing oasis of brightness in the eldritch darkness of the sunless sea. We saw the light, and nearly died for it. And then had to limp all the way home in the dark.
Because, see, Aestival at the time was at the literal opposite end of the map from London, and there was nowhere else we could repair. We had 8 hull remaining. We were holed through and through. So we had to run dark, no lights, because if anything saw us, it would only take the barest breath in our direction to sink us the rest of the way. Stealth mode. We had to run dark and damn the terror.
We were also running at half speed, because we’d lost more than half the crew in the attack, and that meant there weren’t enough crew to man the boilers for full speed. When I say we were limping home, we were limping home.
I do so often think about what that voyage must have been like in-game. The experience of it. This island of light in the distance, this strange, alien glow off the bow. Screams in the dark and the tearing of metal as this magnificently moustached leviathan tore through us. The tense days and weeks of zailing that followed, a skeleton crew of survivors on a creaking, battered, sundered hull, held together with spit and prayers, limping desperately home in the darkness and the silence, hoping against hope that none of the other myriad monsters of the sunless sea caught wind of our passing.
And the thing of it is, we didn’t starve. There was no cannibalism. I am good at logistics. We were fed and fueled the whole way, stopping off at the Isle of Cats to stock up. (What we must have looked like, zailing into port). Nobody starved on the way home, not a single one of our poor battered skeleton crew. There was tea. There were rations. There was coke for the boilers.
What damn near killed us wasn’t logistics, it was terror. (Well, terror and a moustache fish). Because we had to zail home in the dark, on a ship that was only barely still a ship, with no lights and no hope and the knowledge creeping under every skin that if anything saw us, we were done. Our terror hit 94 out of 100 before we finally made the safety of the Wolfstack Docks once more. We lost one last crew man to terror within spitting distance of London, abeam that little lightship between the two rocks. He nearly made it. But we’d just been zailing in the dark for too long.
Sunless Sea is indeed a survival horror game. And it is indeed beautiful, and logistical, and you get to imagine such things while playing it. Heh.
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