Sunless Skies, the sequel to Sunless Sea by Failbetter Games, will be leaving Early Access on January 31st, 2019.

Sunless Skies is a narrative heavy space exploration game set in the Fallen London universe. In the dawn of the 20th century, the British Empire has reached the stars using steam-driven flying locomotives.

Begin your spacefaring adventure as a captain in service of the Queen and choose to loyally serve the Crown, defect to the Rebels, or carve your own path in a vast galaxy full of cosmic horrors and living intergalactic gods. You can find a trailer for the game above.

Failbetter Games also released Skyfarer, a free pen-and-paper RPG set in the Fallen London world, as part of this announcement. You can read more about the RPG, and find a download link, here.

Sunless Skies is available on Windows PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam, GOG, and Humble Bundle for $24.99.

Here’s a rundown of the game:

Set a course for the heavens in your steam locomotive! Lose yourself in a changing universe where even time can be bought. It is the dawn of the 20th century, and the British Empire has taken to the stars! As the captain of a spacefaring locomotive you’ll behold wonders and battle cosmic abominations in the heavens.

The stars are alive. They are the Judgements: vast intelligences that govern all things. But they are dying. One by one, something is snuffing them out, leaving their thrones empty. Unfettered by trivial things like gravity, the Empire’s ambition is savage. They have built a new Sun. The Empress reigns from the Throne of Hours, which gives her control over time.

Your Captain and crew must carve out a life between the stars. Will you support her majesty and the establishment, or the working class rebels who yearn for freedom from the Workworlds? Learn who you are, in the dark. Die, and leave the world the way you want it for your successor…

Key Features:

• Explore space as you’ve never seen it before in a giant steam-powered locomotive engine.
• Use a bat to navigate. Survive celestial horrors and your Inconvenient Aunt.
• A world where cricket, tea and London exist at the wild edges of Victorian space colonisation. Quail in the face of the Clockwork Sun. Master the blistering language of the stars. Lead a revolution, or uphold the edicts of Queen Victoria. Trade in barrels of time, violently fertile seeds, or human souls.
• It is not safe in the skies. Defend yourself against pirates, scorn-flukes, the Cyst of Faces, and worse.
• Bathe your eyes in lush 2D art: giant fungal consciousnesses, creaking steam-driven cities, icy wastes and dizzying starfields.
• Your every foray into space is as precarious as a Polar expedition. You’ll need to balance your resources carefully and keep an eye on your crew’s Terror to avoid an exciting array of deaths.
• Build a lineage of space captains – roguish, honest, selfish, revolutionary, upstanding, cowardly – and let their actions shape the stories you discover. Die, and pass on some of your resources to your next captain.
• Make terrible decisions. Live with their outcomes. Will you run guns for the Independents? Or spies for the Empire? Choose wisely – your decisions will affect the fate of the region; not just for yourself, but for your future captains as well.
• Collect a crew of officers, each with their own stories, dreams and wants.
• Choose your captain’s term of address and customise their appearance – your character’s gender is your business.
• Unlock mascots and scouts for your vessel: bats, birds, squid, owls.
• Customisable settings enable you to tweak your locomotive’s movement and refine combat difficulty to find the level of challenge you require.
• Delight in the most delicious prose in all of gaming, from the award-winning team behind cult browser game Fallen London, indie hit Sunless Sea and Dragon Age: The Last Court
• Featuring writing by Meg Jayanth, Cassandra Khaw, Harry Tuffs, Richard Cobbett and Emily Short.
• Sunless Skies is set in the Fallen London Universe: a deep, dark and marvellous world that we’ve been creating for eight years. In our games, hand-crafted narrative and emergent gameplay create compelling stories for your character.