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May 12, 2016 2:41 PM

Victorian London has Fallen... into the Earth. Or perhaps it was stolen?

FailBetter Games have made The Last Court and Sunless Sea (discussed here previously), but their first and arguably best work contains 1.5 million words of creepy, funny text: Fallen London. (Now available on iOS)

A two part interview with Alexis Kennedy at Existential Gamer: One, Two.

Reddit AMA with Failbetter.

posted by anotherpanacea (36 comments total)

Gah, I keep forgetting I'm playing this, but then I remember and spend all day getting distracted by it. At one point I had a problem with my nightmares and got stuck somewhere where I had to make friends with a lot of lizards. It was a difficult time.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:43 PM on May 12, 2016 [7 favorites]

Also, if anyone is a fan of Emily Short she contributed a story a few months ago for Fates.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 3:04 PM on May 12, 2016 [4 favorites]

Wonderful and fantastic stuff. My partner and I have traded many updates and stories back and forth of our adventures in the Neath. (The finding and forging of our in-game rings was quite the tale)

CrystalDave on there as well, in case anyone wants to link up.
posted by CrystalDave at 3:07 PM on May 12, 2016

It's very good, but at some point (after several months of casual play) advancing along certain lines seemed to get a lot more grindy if you weren't interested in paying for any of the optional extras. Which is perfectly reasonable, and I'd still definitely recommend it.
posted by figurant at 3:08 PM on May 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm in Polythreme right now and it is a serious grind but I have to know where the Unfinished come from...
posted by solotoro at 3:09 PM on May 12, 2016

Polythreme is definitely the grindiest portion, I think. That said though, the true secret of Jack (Not any of those false or incomplete secrets, nay!) is worth the reveal.
posted by CrystalDave at 3:12 PM on May 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

I really liked FL until I made POSI and suddenly everything was super complex and opaque and rerunning the tutorial didn't much seem to help.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:20 PM on May 12, 2016

Fallen London is a gem. It's been at least a decade since I last encountered a *world* so thoughtfully and thoroughly populated. It's also the finest example of "show, don't tell" I've seen in a game. Where most games with worlds are enthusiastic to the point of pedantry with their exposition and built-in encyclopedias, Fallen London operates in media res, and leaves it to you to piece together a nuanced view of how it all fits together. As a result, you not only get to know the world in a deeper, more memorable way, but you also feel like that knowledge was earned because it unfolded gradually over a protracted interval.
posted by belarius at 3:22 PM on May 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

I've reached the end of almost every story except a few of the dreams, but I keep coming back for the monthly stories (like the two by Emily Short!) which are almost always really, really great.

I'm anotherpanacea there, though I don't have a good sense of the usefulness of social actions, except to say "No Affluent Photographer requests please!" :-)
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:24 PM on May 12, 2016

I haven't really played lately, but Emily Short's Exceptional Story was delightful. I do feel that the grinding element somewhat detracts from gameplay. I'm sure there's an extensive theory of grinding as an element out there somewhere, but I can only say that it gets particularly tedious when you've played for a good while.
posted by praemunire at 3:38 PM on May 12, 2016

I played about 18 hours. It never stopped being grindy, and semi-permadeath really got on my nerves.
posted by musofire at 3:42 PM on May 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm now humming to myself "Londontown has fallen down, fallen down, fallen down" so I wanted to share the earworm with you.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:43 PM on May 12, 2016

It never stopped being grindy, and semi-permadeath really got on my nerves.

Eh? There's no permadeath at all: one the important aspects of the setting is that no one can die, which is often inconvenient. Are you thinking of Sunless Sea?
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:45 PM on May 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm Canageek on there, signed up back when it was Twitter only. I barely remember what was going on there though. What killed it for me was no easy way to cull your freinds list, and there was a time when a lot of people on twitter were playing it, and now very few of them are, but they are still on my list to invite to tea and such. Makes it hard to use most of the actions in your house. Also, it got more confusing once I started visiting the forbidden palace and other teir-2 areas. I'd love to get back into that if they fixed it.

I have enjoyed Sunless Sea, kickstarted it, but it feels more oppressive then Fallen London ever did. I enjoy it, but not as much as I did playing my hedonistic, bisexual doo-gooder.
posted by Canageek at 3:56 PM on May 12, 2016

Oh, and also the fact people I knew started playing, but with Facebook linked accounts, so at the time there wasn't a way for us to interact. :(
posted by Canageek at 3:58 PM on May 12, 2016

Eat your crew. Watch the lights. Burn the candles.
posted by RolandOfEld at 4:03 PM on May 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm in Polythreme right now and it is a serious grind but I have to know where the Unfinished come from...

ugh polythreme. That's where i bailed on it the last time around. I reset my account now that the mobile app is out though.
posted by juv3nal at 4:54 PM on May 12, 2016

I started playing it, but it was (a) way too grindy; and (b) far too opaque. It's like one of Ye Old Timey Adventures where you need a goat and a hatband to make a catapult to collect the gum with which to affix a painting to the submarine. And then I remember I was in something where I had to keep repeating similar actions for hours so I just rage quit and never regretted it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:43 PM on May 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

Sunless Sea = SOOOO GOOOOOD. And I say this as someone who does not have the capacity or brain for computer games. Pretty pretty pretty
posted by Kitteh at 6:17 PM on May 12, 2016

I also go through cycles of obsessiveness and forgetting I'm even playing. Currently in the latter, but maybe the IOS version will re-spark my interest.

Because I keep getting distracted and wandering off, I can't seem to figure out how to progress to Level 3 POSI, which I gather is where the interesting stuff happens.
posted by Superplin at 6:23 PM on May 12, 2016

They've just released a phone app for it, so I've just started playing Fallen London after having torn through Sunless Sea in an obsessive frenzy. Not sure if I'll keep up with it, though.
posted by Jilder at 6:41 PM on May 12, 2016

I liked Black Crown a lot but last time I went back to it after an absence found that the site is now just a parked domain. (Link goes to the RPS review.) What happened?

ISTR the author's development process involved an actual battered briefcase full of scraps and odds & ends, which were echoed in the game.
posted by El Mariachi at 8:18 PM on May 12, 2016

nm, found its tumblr which includes some answers.
posted by El Mariachi at 8:21 PM on May 12, 2016

I think it'd work better as a app vs browser game and I hope they release a android version SOON.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 8:34 PM on May 12, 2016

Emily Short also wrote the Visage and Nuncio island (post office) stories for Sunless Sea, as well as some of Station III.
posted by bonehead at 8:35 PM on May 12, 2016

I honestly enjoy Sunless Sea more, but part of that is that the high-end content in Fallen London ends up feeling pretty grindy.
posted by Archelaus at 8:40 PM on May 12, 2016

I'm in Polythreme right now and it is a serious grind but I have to know where the Unfinished come from...

ugh polythreme. That's where i bailed on it the last time around.

Have you looked at the Polythreme Guide on the wiki? It clarifies a lot of the specific mechanical stuff. But ultimately, yeah, Polythreme has grindy elements. It's pretty bearable--especially given the story payoff--if you're a Exceptional Friend, but otherwise I think it would be too slow.
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:15 PM on May 12, 2016

What I like most about Fallen London is the huge amount of world building, most of which you have to piece together from tiny hints that are easily overlooked. Without the help of this truly excellent blog, I would still know nothing about many story details. (Technically, the blog is full of spoilers, but unless you spend a lot of reading, stuff like this will just be confusing instead of a spoiler.)

I've been playing for about a year now, and even with exceptional friendship, the grind is quite noticeable. (I think I've seen about everything now, all that remains is grinding for a stack of overgoats.) In fact, it's a curious design choice that apart from exceptional friendship, spending money to gain extra actions is not really a viable choice.
posted by erdferkel at 11:51 PM on May 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh, yay! I just started playing this week and was hoping to find some way to see who else is around the Neath. Happy to receive your communications over there.
posted by oakroom at 5:03 AM on May 13, 2016

This has prompted me to go looking at it again. I gave it a brief try years ago, when I first joined twitter. But I didn't really understand Twitter, which meant I was mostly baffled by the twitter-only gameplay, and fell out despite really liking the fragments that I managed to get.

Come to think of it, this is the second or third mention that I've come across in the last week or so. Didn't Shut Up and Sit Down (or Daft Souls? Something from that team) talk about it on their podcast very recently?
posted by metaBugs at 5:15 AM on May 13, 2016

I played the living hell out of this in 2010-2011, and then some changes in circumstances led me to give it up. Now that the iOS game is out, I'm playing the hell out of it on my iPad. I started over with a new character because I remembered so little about my old character's adventures.

After about 3 weeks I'm hitting some pretty grindy parts and considering coughing up some cash. I do wish fate were cheaper. Usable amounts of fate are pretty expensive, enough that I haven't yet found myself making the transition from "free game" to "paid game." I probably will soon anyway though.
posted by edheil at 5:27 AM on May 13, 2016

Exceptional Friend is worth it; you're paying for new stories, and they're good ones.

So are several of the Fate-locked stories, to my mind: Flute Street, for instance, alongside Theological Husbandry. The Trade in Souls. The Foreign Office. Jack.

It's basically the opposite of paying to win; you're paying to play. FailBetter do a job of work and to my mind they do it well. They deserve to be paid for it. When I think of Fate and Exceptional Friendship like that, it feels like a win-win. Of course, for some it'll be out of reach, financially, to spend fifty bucks over six months play. That I certainly understand. (There is a mechanism to send Fate, though. So truly broke folks can receive charity.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:48 AM on May 13, 2016

I played it ages ago, totally forgot about it, and then remembered a couple of weeks ago when the app came out and started over again. I still haven't entirely remembered what having friends in the game is good for, but assuming it's good for something, feel free to hit me up over there.
posted by Stacey at 8:25 AM on May 13, 2016

I stopped playing it when they sort of enforced a more social requirement with the change to the new method of dueling. I also have a sense that they reset the characters at some point and I think that played into it. I know they did that with Kingdom of Loathing, and after the second reset I was like, Nope, no more pastagrind for me, thanks.
posted by klangklangston at 2:02 PM on May 13, 2016

have a clear idea what you're working towards and how

Well, I spent hours using Google and reading message boards and whatever, despite all the messages about not ruining my experience through spoilers, and I had no bloody idea what I was working towards or how. Seriously, I have never, ever, ever had such a negative experience in a game.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:44 PM on May 16, 2016

Well, I spent hours using Google and reading message boards and whatever, despite all the messages about not ruining my experience through spoilers, and I had no bloody idea what I was working towards or how. Seriously, I have never, ever, ever had such a negative experience in a game.

The endgame requires Google, but I'd skip it for the beginning. The beginning of the game is largely driven by the mysterious benefactor story and choosing an Ambition, plus the cool progress stories in each of the main locations that are pretty clearly laid out.

But if you felt the need to study, you might have had the wrong expectations. You don't play to "win," you play to read the story and that includes the bad outcomes. The company is literally called Fail Better; the idea is you progress through losses.

That said, I just hit the level cap and got POSI Level 2, so I'm thinking of hanging up my hat. Nothing left to do but play the monthly stories and grind for the crazy stuff. Even Master's Blood--though interesting--doesn't feel worth it, and trying for the Impossible Theorem seems irritating rather than fun. But that's after a year of enjoyable play.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:58 AM on May 17, 2016