Fallen London

Players escape from prison and begin living in London. Players explore the city and try various activities, plumbing the vices and secrets of Fallen London. They have no living expenses, and though players may choose a profession for a periodic income, they can publish a newspaper, serve out repeated prison sentences and feed deliverymen to a man-eating plant.

Every action a player takes comes from an action bank that replenishes at a rate of one action per 10 real-time minutes. Paid subscriptions increase the size of the action bank from twenty to forty, enabling longer play sessions.

London is stolen from the surface into the Neath—a vast cavern beneath the earth. The city's streets twisted into a labyrinth centred on the Echo Bazaar, which serves as the centre of commerce and covets stories of love. While London retains a monarch, a parliament, and a mayor, the true power lies with the Masters of the Bazaar—cloaked inhuman beings who oversee domains of trade and enact mysterious agendas. Even physical laws lose their supremacy beyond the sunlight; clocks and maps can no longer be trusted, rats and cats gain the power of speech, and death is often a temporary inconvenience, although at the cost of never seeing sunlight again.

While the industry, poverty, and high-class society of Victorian London remain, its strict social mores have been disrupted by strange new factions roaming its streets. Hell maintains an embassy in the city and trades in souls, to the consternation of the church. Artists and academics explore new possibilities unimaginable before the fall. Urchins, criminals, and revolutionaries hide from constables in the rooftops while hidden conflicts unfold below in shadows and reflections. Across the vast ocean of the Unterzee lies the Khanate empire, the impenetrable Elder Continent, and the screaming island of Polythreme, home of the Clay Men.

Alexis Kennedy began solo development of Fallen London as an amateur project in June 2009, creating the setting, building the site and writing the initial content. "Paul came on board because I wanted to write and code but I can't draw," says Kennedy. The original plan was to pay Arendt outright for his illustration work. "I said, 'I want to pay you as I want this to be a professional thing.'

He said, 'Cut me in for a percentage,' and I said, 'Sure, that's great! I don't need to give you any money now! But you realise we're probably not going to make any actual money out of it?'" He claps his hands together.

Fallen London has received positive reviews, with much praise going to its writing and worldbuilding. Dan Zuccarelli of Gamezebo, calling the game "one of the best browser games [they'd] ever played", pointed to the game's "compelling but not overwhelming" story as its main feature. Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Adam Smith wrote in favour of its writing style along with its "inventive setting", "dripping with lore". He noted how most of the discovery comes from the player working things out for themselves.

In a review of the game as Echo Bazaar in Black Gate, Vito Excalibur called it "a fantastic diversion". Alana Joli Abbott for Black Gate also reviewed Fallen London and said "I do enjoy dabbling in the game, and I suspect that eventually, I will attain that enviable rank of Person of Some Importance. The world is extremely cool — and eerie — and I'm curious to know what happened to make London fall."