Sunless Skies

Look I'm late to the party but this is...maybe the best game I have ever played?

It's gorgeous. It's complex, the writing is sharp and funny/devastating as required.

It's not AAA but so many AAA games could learn from how well the designers understand how to construct a game.

it's sunless sea but with trains and a dodge mechanic. autism paradise.

Tread not thee lightly in these horrifying skies!
Having hugely enjoyed while being slightly over-whelmed by it's predecessor Sunless Seas, I've committed mine own soul and that of all my crew to this, it's really excellent.
It's a kinda uniquely presented roguelike explorer, extremely heavy in story and Lovecraft-adjacent lore, with many many choices and consequences along the way, and one of the best implemented die-and-improve mechanics I've come across. Every little element of this game, including your demise, evolves around the deep and spectacularly well written background story and ever-evolving events.
I wasn't kidding on my first line though. There is NO short way to play this game, you are looking at dozens of (thankfully absorbing and addictive) hours to get anywhere, although your reward is just how much content there is and how big this game becomes compared to your starting point.
The amount of different things that need you attention and management just to stay safe and alive remains somewhat overwhelming at times, and caution in planning is always recommended, but mechanically it's a big improvement on Seas.
Thoroughly recommended for those who dont mind depth and spending time and effort, not great for ADHD moments or if you're allergic to Victorian literary styles or high fantasy

Sunless sea has better writing but this has much better gameplay. I really liked it and wish it was a bit longer.

Recommend for its unique atmosphere and beautiful writings. A great novel ruined by its gameplay. Doing chores to earn resources that unlocks some lore you like and, more chores nobody likes.
Don't get fooled by the game trailer. It appears to be focusing exploring and battle. But it's not true. Most of your time is spent reading things at ports and doing repetitive fetching quests. Battles occur way less often than it looks in the trailer. And it's not fun because you're forced to use the weakest weapons and ships in the first 5 to 8 hours ! Traveling in exotic areas is fun, but not fun when you go here and there delivering the same goods over years just for a tier 2 cannon.

It's worth playing for the writing alone: its hilariously satirical with an absurdist bent. Imagine if Douglas Adams wrote a book about Victorian Era space trains.

That said, I have two critiques. The first is the gameplay. The majority of your playtime will be spent watching your engine travel (SLOWLY, even with the best engines) from point A to point B, mostly retracing routes you've traveled many times before. Occasionally this will be interrupted by an enemy you need to fight, but the combat mechanics just aren't that entertaining. Partly, this is because the game encourages you to grind/farm make-work quests (deliver X good to Y port!). Even for the quests that aren't procedurally generated, you'll be revisiting the same cities over and over because you keep getting new quests that link back to them. There are a handful of quests that can be completed entirely within a single port, but even those force you to retread the same circuits because they have time gates ("you must come back in two weeks to continue this quest..." sometimes a dozen times or more). That leads to a high percentage of low-entertainment play time, even if there are some real gems in there.

The other problem is that the game really gives you very little agency, for a role-playing game. You make tons of choices, certainly, many of which even have at least the appearance of significant moral valence. But at the end of the day, very little of what your captain does makes a meaningful difference. You might favor this faction or that faction, but neither of them have a defined, relatable philosophy to make your choice anything but arbitrary and regardless of which you choose they'll either end up in a permanent stalemate (e.g. tacketies vs stove pipes) or else victory by one side or the other changes nothing on the ground (e.g. Psalmists vs Widows at the Wellmouth). Time and again, your character is faced with systemic injustice, and has the same three options: 1) Get on the bandwagon and grind others beneath their feet; 2) push again and again for incremental changes that make no difference whatever in the actual problem; or 3) start violent revolutions that only make matters worse. You can't fix anything. You can't save anyone. All you can do is wallow in suffering as the world decays toward its inevitable death. For a novel, that would be a reasonable artistic choice. You could use that philosophy/setting to explore all sorts of fascinating things about the human condition. But for an RPG, categorically denying the possibility of real agency produces a deeply unsatisfying experience.

Any game that allows me to recruit a brigade of talking rats with derringers as my flying space train's engineer deserves only the most heartfelt recommendation.

If you like space trucking sims this is a fun little twist on the formula. Fallen London's dense lore seems impenetrable at first but it's full of weird little talking animals and creepy eldritch horrors that I never get tired of meeting. Play if you're literate and like exploring.