8.2 /10 1 Votes
4.5/5 TouchArcade Engine StoryNexus Genre Adventure game Platforms Android, Web browser, iOS | 3.7/5 Google Play Developer(s) Failbetter Games Initial release date 2009 Mode Single-player video game | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Release date(s) Browser
WW: 2009
iOS
WW: 2016
Android
WW: 2016 Similar Sunless Sea, Gothic Universe, FTL: Faster Than Light | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fallen london starter s guide to browser game excellence
Fallen London, originally titled Echo Bazaar and developed by Failbetter Games, is a browser-based choose-your-own-adventure game set in "Fallen London", an alternative Victorian London with gothic overtones. The franchise subsequently expanded to other games, including a PC game of "survival, discovery and loneliness", Sunless Sea.
Contents
The game won The Escapist "Best Browser-Based Game" award for the year 2009.
Setting
The eponymous bazaar of the game is a sentient being. It is curated by several Masters, each with their own control over Fallen London's business (Mr Apples, for instance, controlling agriculture, while Mr Fires rules industry). The monarch of the city, Her Enduring Majesty the Traitor Empress, sold the city to the bazaar to spare the life of her husband Albert, Prince Consort in 1861. The entire city was then taken a mile beneath the surface by a swarm of bats, where it has remained for over thirty years.
London is only the latest, fifth city to be taken underground in a pattern stretching across thousands of years, although certain storylines show that it has not lost contact with the outside world. Surrounding Fallen London is the Unterzee, a subterranean ocean with many islets and infested with monstrous sea life; experienced players may sail across it to visit other locations in connection with story lines based in Fallen London. Among these is Polythreme, a country where inanimate objects become alive and sentient (and source of Clay Men, the golems used as cheap labor in London), the Iron Republic, a devil-ruled place in which even reality is subject to the capricious and constantly changing written laws, and the Khanate, a rival nation to Fallen London made up of the descendents of the fourth city that was taken, Karakorum.
Fallen London has also found itself much closer to Hell: devils appear constantly and casually in various storylines, and even maintain an embassy in the city itself. A dream-realm, Parabola, is closer to London than to surface locations, and is sometimes visible through mirrors.
Gameplay
Players take the role of new arrivals to the underground down on their luck, and make their way to the cream of the crop of the city's various legal and illegal activities. Players are gentlebeings of leisure, plumbing the vices and secrets of Fallen London. They have no living expenses, and though players may choose a profession for a weekly payment, they can publish a newspaper, serve out repeated prison sentences and feed coalmen to a man-eating plant without harming their job security.
Release
Fallen London was released in 2009 as a browser game. An iOS and Android version was released in 2016.
Successors
A tabletop game titled Knife & Candle (named for the competitive sport within the setting that combines elements of tag and a free-for-all murder spree) was in development. However, as of May 30, 2013, John Harper has stated that the game "didn't come together."
Tales of Fallen London: The Silver Tree, a prequel to Fallen London, was released on October 23, 2012. The Silver Tree is also a browser-based choose-your-own-adventure game, but occurs roughly five hundred years before the time of Fallen London and focuses on the events surrounding the fall of the Fourth City, Karakorum, capital of the Mongol Empire.
Sunless Sea is a roguelike spin-off of Fallen London that takes place in the same universe and around the same time period. The game was officially released on 6 February 2015.