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Why has nobody made a video game of the Shipping Forecast? Because it's a five minute weather report broadcast a few times a day on Radio 4? Or because it's just too brilliant, and because it already does what most video games wish they could do - yank you out of your day-to-day life and transport you somewhere that's both coherent and completely fantastical?If you're a sailor, the Shipping Forecast probably only tells you what conditions are like around the British Isles. (Spoiler: they're rubbish.) If you're not a sailor, however, the Shipping Forecast turns you into one. Further more, you sail not to Dieppe, say, but deep into the imagination: to Dogger, which can only be a vast, Tolkienesque statue of a terrier, hundreds of meters high, feet together and snout proudly thrust into the grey skies and the driving rain. To Cromarty, a splintered island of salt crystals, slowly fragmenting in the wake of a giant eddy. To Fitzroy, where lightning sparks over cornfields filled with thousands of spinning windmills, their blades almost - but never quite - touching, alive with the tubular glow of St Elmo's Fire.
Maybe somebody is making a video game of the Shipping Forecast. Failbetter Games, best known for delicious and atmospheric read-'em-up Fallen London has recently hit Steam with its Early Access build of Sunless Sea. This is a Roguelike, of sorts, in which you commandeer a boat, gather a crew, and set off from the docks of the midnight city itself to explore the vast, subterranean ocean that lies beyond it. Failbetter's said the game's a bit like Don't Starve and a bit like FTL, but it's not really. Mostly, it's a bit like Sunless Sea. It's still coming together, but the pieces that are already in place are brilliant.
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