TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 11,644
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
These interactive short stories are too bold and surprising to stay secret.
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Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Rick and Ted have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
There is a place, deep beneath the earth, where the narrative wranglers behind our favourite games come together. Writers who helped deliver the perfect ending for Destiny in The Final Shape, or make sense of Stellaris' irresistible mix of strategy and story. Who spun up the Tim Curry sass of Baldur's Gate 3 companion Astarion, and scribbled the funny ambient dialogue that shows up in Borderlands 4 compilation videos.
They all tangle in Fallen London, the marvellous and sprawling text-based RPG from the makers of Sunless Sea. And there, they do their bravest, smartest, most depraved and moving work.
You play Fallen London in your browser, but it helps to abandon your expectations about how slight, forgettable or exploitative browser games can be. Failbetter's RPG is a near-bottomless brunch of comic and cosmic horror—an interlaced network of choice-driven, literary stories that have been woven together over a decade and a half. It is a regularly updated and living world, riddled with intriguing mysteries and set against the backdrop of a sunken Victorian capital city.
Most Fallen London players are in pursuit of some overarching main quest that swallows up their resources as a gadabout-slash-magnate. These adventures, put together in episodic installments by Failbetter, take you far across the unterzee and eventually up to the cavern roof where the false-stars shift and glitter. They take months and years to see through; Fallen London is a game you might prod at in spare moments on your phone, but gradually becomes a slow-burn and deeply rewarding parallel existence.
In between these major plotlines, however, come Exceptional Stories. Reserved for subscribers, these are bite-sized, entry-level quests that show up every month, as regular as a ratwork watch. They're not typically written in-house, but rather handed off to freelance contributors, and this fact is crucial. It's the reason that Exceptional Stories feel like unpredictable entries in an anthology series. They're self-contained, often introducing new characters whose fates are decided by the story's end. And they reflect the tastes and personalities of their writers in unique ways.
Take Baudelaire Welch, for instance: the architect of Baldur's Gate 3's Dark Urge path, which makes your protagonist responsible for a string of murders they don't remember. Their contribution to Fallen London has been The Goblin Poet—a potently sinister story in which you follow a cult of BDSM bohemians through the mirror to the Reddest Keep, where they toil to capture the beauty of the Red-Handed Queen, using their own lifeblood as paint.
The Keep itself is viscerally horrible, its very floors made up of taxidermied beasts tied together in a carpet of rodent death. But it's the attitudes of the infatuated artists that lend the story its lasting unease. Their hapless adoration of the queen is conditional; the moment she reveals the slightest imperfection, they turn on her in misogynistic rage.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
"The vision I presented to you—that is who I am," argues the queen. "Who is not a different person when they turn to bed for the night? When they are in their own company? It is no different than wearing a fine suit! All of you will age and wither: why must I be confined to one skin alone?" Yet the artists reject this argument; their impossible ideals of womanhood ...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Rick and Ted have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
There is a place, deep beneath the earth, where the narrative wranglers behind our favourite games come together. Writers who helped deliver the perfect ending for Destiny in The Final Shape, or make sense of Stellaris' irresistible mix of strategy and story. Who spun up the Tim Curry sass of Baldur's Gate 3 companion Astarion, and scribbled the funny ambient dialogue that shows up in Borderlands 4 compilation videos.
They all tangle in Fallen London, the marvellous and sprawling text-based RPG from the makers of Sunless Sea. And there, they do their bravest, smartest, most depraved and moving work.
You play Fallen London in your browser, but it helps to abandon your expectations about how slight, forgettable or exploitative browser games can be. Failbetter's RPG is a near-bottomless brunch of comic and cosmic horror—an interlaced network of choice-driven, literary stories that have been woven together over a decade and a half. It is a regularly updated and living world, riddled with intriguing mysteries and set against the backdrop of a sunken Victorian capital city.
Most Fallen London players are in pursuit of some overarching main quest that swallows up their resources as a gadabout-slash-magnate. These adventures, put together in episodic installments by Failbetter, take you far across the unterzee and eventually up to the cavern roof where the false-stars shift and glitter. They take months and years to see through; Fallen London is a game you might prod at in spare moments on your phone, but gradually becomes a slow-burn and deeply rewarding parallel existence.
In between these major plotlines, however, come Exceptional Stories. Reserved for subscribers, these are bite-sized, entry-level quests that show up every month, as regular as a ratwork watch. They're not typically written in-house, but rather handed off to freelance contributors, and this fact is crucial. It's the reason that Exceptional Stories feel like unpredictable entries in an anthology series. They're self-contained, often introducing new characters whose fates are decided by the story's end. And they reflect the tastes and personalities of their writers in unique ways.
Take Baudelaire Welch, for instance: the architect of Baldur's Gate 3's Dark Urge path, which makes your protagonist responsible for a string of murders they don't remember. Their contribution to Fallen London has been The Goblin Poet—a potently sinister story in which you follow a cult of BDSM bohemians through the mirror to the Reddest Keep, where they toil to capture the beauty of the Red-Handed Queen, using their own lifeblood as paint.
The Keep itself is viscerally horrible, its very floors made up of taxidermied beasts tied together in a carpet of rodent death. But it's the attitudes of the infatuated artists that lend the story its lasting unease. Their hapless adoration of the queen is conditional; the moment she reveals the slightest imperfection, they turn on her in misogynistic rage.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
"The vision I presented to you—that is who I am," argues the queen. "Who is not a different person when they turn to bed for the night? When they are in their own company? It is no different than wearing a fine suit! All of you will age and wither: why must I be confined to one skin alone?" Yet the artists reject this argument; their impossible ideals of womanhood ...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?