Another narrative game from Inkle (80 Days etc) for PC, Switch, and iPad. Your husband has been murdered and everyone’s trying to figure out who did it. You have a slight advantage in that quest over everyone else on the ship though - because it was you.
I’ve completed a handful of playthroughs (~20m each) and this game is delightful. I have enjoyed all of Inkle’s games, but their last two have been fairly grim, tonally. Playing a flamboyant 1930’s actress cheerily trying to get away with murder is a blast. And this game has some great comic timing. I played on the TV with my spouse copiloting decisions and we were both laughing out loud.
Given some mechanical assists revealed for subsequent playthroughs, it looks like this is strictly a branching choice game with little procedural generation if any. But it is Inkle, so I could be way off. I at least expect to sink a couple of hours into solving the mysteries that the game helpfully adds to a growing checklist.
That’s not helping my resolve to hold off on this for a bit.
Alas, I enjoyed Heaven’s Vault way more than their other works. I guess I’ll accept it as the errant perfect surprise, never to be repeated by them, and adjust expectations accordingly for the rest of their works.
Jon Ingold had a great interview with Soren Johnson, back around 2019 before Heaven’s Vault released. It’s an enjoyable way to round out the experience of Inkle’s earlier games. Meg Jayant followed those two parts, and her explaining her involvement with fan fiction as a youth was absolutely hilarious.
You make it sound like they are terrible game creators for having created a wonderful game after many other wonderful but not as wonderful ones: strike me confused!
I take it from your message that you didn’t like Overboard?
Alas, you liked one of their games a lot? (I"m only maybe halfway through Heaven’s Vault, and I like it too!)
What?
I mean, the first of theirs I played was Heaven’s Vault, and it was so good. I went into 80 Days with high hopes but learned just how different of an experience it was (by design). I liked it fine, but nothing compared to Heaven’s Vault. Pendragon clicked with me more than 80 Days, with its elegiac tone and art direction complementing the choices and battles. It just didn’t offer the depth of experience and the novelty of linguistic research that recontextualized things several times over the course of the game.
I think Heaven’s Vault didn’t recoup its costs for Inkle, hence why no more games of its scope from them. What a shame.
I’ve played through Overboard! now. In theory it should be just my kind of thing, since I love both murder mysteries and clockwork schedule-optimization games. But in practice it’s pretty hard to recommend, and honestly will make me a lot more wary of future Inkle games.
I like the writing on per-scene level, particularly of Veronica who is a fun character in the way that ruthless and amoral characters can sometimes be. The graphics are serviceable.
But it’s just a complete mess in every other way.
The biggest issue is the extremely low decision density. The game is fundamentally an optimization exercise: find the right things to do, and the order in which to do them, to get away with murder and other other goals that will be revealed over time. This means you’re spending a lot of time repeating 90% of the previous run, just to change one thing + hopefully following on more plot thread. It’s like 20 minutes of busywork to change one dialogue option.
(There’s two follow-on problems: one is that there are a lot of filler decisions, with seemingly no impact on anything. Second, there’s a huge temptation to change multiple things in one run, but those secondary changes sometimes end up accidentally stopping you from testing the thing you wanted to test.)
There’s text reading speed / animation speed settings, that you could in theory use to make zipping through the repetition a bit faster. But the game only shows you a tiny amount of text on the screen at once and has no scrollback. So cranking the text speed up risks missing bits of conversation.
They’ve also tried to mitigate problem this with a “choose the same option I did last time”. It does not do the job. Sometimes it does nothing: even though the options are the same as the last time, it somehow thinks you chose none of them, and you have to make the same decision again manually. Sometimes it doesn’t remember the actual last decisions you made in the last run, but those from some earlier run. And when if it works, it still doesn’t feel like it speeds up the game enough. Especially coming off of Hadean Lands, it’s really obvious how badly the game needed some form of a “do the thing I’ve already shown in previous games I know how to do” system.
In terms of plot, there’s clearly multiple ways to win. But at least the first complete “no loose ends” victory I got was totally absurd from a plot perspective. I was exploring a story path that I didn’t expect to have anything more to go with, it turned into an opportunity for a really flimsy frame job, and somehow that one stuck where other flimsy attempts rightfully failed.
The tech has also been an issue for me. Despite being a tiny game with mostly simple branching text, no systems or simulations, simple vector graphics, and no animations, it runs like a dog. No other game (or other software) has made my phone chug this badly, or drained the battery that fast. I have no idea of where the CPU and memory is going, given this feels simpler than 80 Days. I assume this won’t be a problem on PC or high end phones.
But then again, on the PC I’d probably have been even more disappointed by the UX.