Reviews from

in the past


Um jogo... Hum... "bonitinho" não é bem a palavra certa. Vamos dizer que "divertido", no sentido mais amplo possível. Me lembra bastante Cruise for a Corpse, com seu foco em saber as rotinas dos passageiros do navio e sua liberdade para andar no convés e fazer as coisas em várias ordens. Obviamente, a diferença crucial é que aqui em vez de tentar desvendar um assassinato, você quer escondê-lo. Cumprir esse objetivo básico é surpreendentemente simples, mas logo o jogo te dá outros objetivos para te motivar a jogar de novo, tentando abordagens diferentes, interagindo com outros personagens, etc.

Essa rejogabilidade acaba sendo uma faca de dois gumes, entretanto. Você precisa de bastante conhecimento prévio e informações que só descobre através de várias partidas para conseguir alguns finais e achievements. Isso acaba dando a sensação de que você está apenas decorando as melhores opções para seguir o caminho que quer no final. É um processo muito mais indutivo do que dedutivo - e uma indução às vezes feita por pura força bruta, simplesmente esgotando-se todas as possibilidades. Que de certa forma é a verdade para qualquer adventure, principalmente CYOAs, mas pelo menos alguns disfarçam melhor isso.

This is another interactive visual novel from Inkle, the studio behind 80 Days and, more recently, A Highland Song. You play the villainous Veronica Villensy, a West End actress and socialite. Victoria has recently murdered her pompous arse of a husband by pushing him over the side of the HMS Hook, the passenger ship that's ferrying her and a small cast of other 1920s types across the Atlantic to the bright lights and new beginnings of NYC. Play starts the morning after the night before. Veronica has a mere seven hours before the ship docks to destroy any evidence, deal with any witnesses, seduce any potential conspirators, and even frame one of the other passengers for her own shameless mariticide. Can you get Veronica off the Hook scot-free?

Essentially, this is a game about learning things and making the right choices at the right time. In each conversation or interaction, you're given two or three choose-your-own-adventure-style options at the bottom of the screen. It's then up to you to decide which will best help your cause. Each choice you make runs the clock down a little more, as does moving around the handful of rooms that make up the ship. You need to learn the routines of the other passengers so that you can corner them at the right time, or talk to them in a particular setting, or break into their cabins when you know they're not going to be there. Cock it up and you'll get arrested as soon as you make land. The loop then restarts and you have to try again from the beginning, albeit perhaps this time with some small kernel of knowledge that you didn't have on your previous run.

Mostly, Overboard! works well. The writing is sharp with a darkly comic edge; you feel like you learn something new each time you play; and the different ways everything can pan out depending on the choices you've made keeps things fresh. After a while, however, you reach a point where you suddenly stop feeling like you're getting somewhere, and the game is quite limited in the tools it gives you to keep track of what has and hasn't worked. You can't rewind conversations or undo actions, for example. Unlike Virtue's Last Reward, there's no flow-chart (or similar) built into the game to show you what you've done and what has led to this thing happening. There's no written record kept of the knowledge you gained from your last run, like in Outer Wilds. Compared with The Return of the Obra Dinn or The Case of the Golden Idol, you don't slowly build a schedule of which character is where and at what time as things go on.

In essence, then, the game basically just wants you to either write all of this stuff down yourself or simply try, try and try again until you get it right, and this is where it starts to get irritating, not to mention samey. The developers see fit to give you a fast-forward button, at least, so you can zip through conversations you've already read several times, but it's a pity that you're offered little else in the way of concessions to the game's roguelite nature. As a result, I was starting to get bored after a few hours and ended up stumbling over the game's 'true' ending by accident rather than design, which wasn't especially satisfying.

Really, I think this is a game that's better played on a phone or tablet than the Steam Deck. It seems like something you should probably have a go at each day for five or ten minutes only - can you get further than yesterday? - as opposed to something you 'mainline' for a few hours, which is what I did. The simple graphics and touchscreen-appropriate buttons perhaps attest to this as well. Ultimately, I wasn't impervious to Overboard!'s charms, but I would definitely have been more inspired to keep playing and seek out its different endings if the game was better at logging what I'd done already. (It's oddly similar to Cyberpunk in that regard, which is a comparison I can't say I'd ever thought I'd make.)

Recommended, therefore, if you're looking for a good phone game to dip in and out of, but maybe not the best choice if, like me, you enjoy playing games from start to finish and want to feel a consistent sense of momentum and progress.

Great premise. You push your husband overboard on a boat (murder) and then you have the rest of the day to set up events so not only will you be found innocent but also it will be considered a murder. The reason? Sweet sweet life insurance checks.
You will have to play many loops to find stuff out about passengers, their schedules, and how to manipulate things. However the ending felt pretty unsatisfactory for me. Why? I guess because I didn't really plan it to happen it just sort of happened during the investigation. It felt like, "oh, this is what the game wants." Cool idea. You can get it for cheap on steam sales nowadays, still worth checking out if it floats your boat.

Accidentally fell into the true ending on one of my first runs and stopped me from really wanting to experiment any further. Still an interesting and fun game


Cool premise for half an hour then gets old quick, especially when trying to get a 'good' ending

murder is ok if it's a girlboss doing it

Truly held up by an amazing soundtrack and lovely art style. The game itself is very simple and all but demands you play through it at least twice, at which point the Groundhog's Day repetitiveness might be enough to put down. It's fun to explore the characters in subsequent playthroughs, likely the main driving force to keep playing.

Wayyyyyyyyyy too short for my liking. It's barely an appetizer

Adolece de lo mismo que todos los juegos narrativos con bucles: da pereza infinita repetir todo para probar una opción diferente al final del bucle. Aun así está bien escrito, tiene situaciones muy divertidas y es cortito. Recomendable.

After playing through The Case of the Golden Idol, I was on the lookout for a detective game where the core appeal wouldn’t just last a single playthrough- and while this isn’t quite the game I’d dreamed up in my head, it’s still been one of the best surprises of the year for me.

In essence, this plays out akin to something like a VN version of Hitman; after killing your husband, you have 12 hours until you land on Liberty Island and a cruise ship full of guests with clockwork routines to leverage in order to distance yourself from the crime and secure his life insurance policy. A few attempts in, you’ll probably realize that there are so many moving pieces and so little time, that you’ll have to formulate a plan around each one of the guests- a realization helped in no small part by growing checklist of notes (an addition that’s nearly identical to the “mission stories'' system from Hitman 2016), every time you start a new attempt at the day. It's a strange, sort of quasi-time loop premise, Veronica waking up with some new shred of information that might give you the edge you need to get to freedom.

Maybe a strange game to have a host of achievements, but a glance through them, seeing how you can get the true ending within only a few hours or getting an especially grisly trophy for killing off the rest of the cast, I think speaks to the range of ways you can approach this. I managed to get the true ending twice, and although I ended up using the same basic solution to make a clean getaway, being able to do so by interacting with two totally separate characters to get everything in place feels like testament to the strength of the systems here- able to carve out a path unique to yourself. (Also think the amorality of the player character, Veronica, is a massive help here- not just a blank slate to apply your pre-existing worldview to, but someone who you can easily imagine blackmailing or bludgeoning her way to freedom, and tacitly allows you to do the same. We need more characters like her!)

In his GDC talk on Overboard!, narrative director Jon Inglold described his view of the limitations of detective games- that they’re traditionally so focused on these slotting pieces of evidence that aren’t very cathartic, or climactic, to solve. And with Eric Zimmerman’s discussion around “player entitlement” in mystery games- that they end up being “baby cribs” for the player- still rattling around in my head since playing through The Case of the Golden Idol, listening to Ingold talk about wanting to re-think the genre, make the process of formulating the argument more open ended, like working your way through a maze with a number of different exits, was certainly refreshing. Where players could refine their arguments and find different ways of coming to the same truths than with the more linear “combination lock” approach of its contemporaries. Despite still being a game that you can undercut with a quick look through a walkthrough if you really just wanted to see an ending, I think it ends up being surprisingly mechanically robust within those limitations.

Elsewhere, I semi-seriously described this as “Agatha Christie’s Sifu,” and while that was a comparison I made based on only a few hours with game, ultimately I feel like I’m left similar position as to that one- having played this to completion multiple times, but left with the sense that there’s a massive amount I’ve yet to see. In that, I think it's a remarkable title, where I’m still peeling back the layers even after coming to a cathartic resolution- comes highly recommended if you're at all curious.

Morbidly excellent.

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- Want to once again highlight jor_dan’s excellent The Thirty-Five Best Games I Played in 2022 list, which is where he highlighted Eric Zimmerman’s commentary on Tunic- seems especially serendipitous that this conversation was sparked by Meg Jayanth’s discussion of her work on another inkle game, 80 Days. Links to all these works down below.

- Ingold cites the text adventures Deadline and Suspect as major influences on this, mysteries with a ticking clock and cast full of characters with their own shifting agendas- maybe worth a look for those eager to broaden the scope of the Backloggd canon.

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The Burden of Proof: Narrative Deduction Mechanics for Detective Games, Jon Ingold

The Thirty-Five Best Games I played in 2022, jor_dan

Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency for 80 Days and Beyond, Meghna Jayanth

NYU Game Center Lecture Series Presents Andrew Shouldice


Enjoyable time loop visual novel that's fun to play with others. The fast forward feature removes a good amount of tedium when trying out different scenarios

Very cool concept with a very strong start - it's not actually very hard to get away with it, but the game pushes you towards more stringent goals that are harder to achieve. Unfortunately I kind of lost the flow - the game has a system where it keeps track of leads to follow up on, and presumably you're supposed to be able to dedicate a loop to solving them, then act on them later. But I found it hard to resist the compulsion to make every loop as perfect as possible - do everything I did well from the previous, in addition to following my new lead. And that got tedious fast. When I stepped away from the game and recentered, coming back felt like jumping in the deep end.

also as a lesbian i wish you didn't have to "let the captain take the wheel" but whatever its the 30s

A great take on the whodnuit(you) genre that is rarely seen on games, on a quick narrative that is easily repeatable until you are satisfied with the ending you get, unfortunately for me i got one right away but came back to make chaos happen after.

im sorry i just hate these timeloop narrative puzzle games. art style is real cute tho

it's ok! idk if it got overhyped for me or what, but i finished a flawless run after several attempts and then i was like, "was that it?"

don't get me wrong, i also could've done that first challenge run, and maybe the game expands wildly from there, but it's a choose-your-own-adventure where there is a right answer. if figuring out what that answer is sounds fun, then it is! it's fun! but i just wasn't too wowed by it overall

inkle games are just full of consistently fun writing and situations. I can't help but be charmed

Really well illustrated, excellent music and sound design, and a myriad of options lurking just beneath the default goal of "get away with murder". Overboard is a visual novel that thrives because of its sheer number of small variations, but as such can also be harmed by its repetitive nature.

Thematically it's untouchable, with the small turns added to the traditional noir femme-fatale murder story adding fresh life to tropes nearly a century old, and the many endings are satisfying and experimental, incentivizing continued play. I could really enjoy an anthology series in this style, but it stands strong on its own.

Awesome premise and genuinely impressive at times, but I found the solution to getting off scot-free disappointingly simple for as many moving parts as this game has.

Qué juego tan sencillo con una ejecución tan brillante! Si algo demuestra sin lugar a dudas juegos como Overboard! es que, si tienes una buena idea, es mejor confinarla a un espacio controlado y dejar que reluzca por sus propios méritos.

Más que un ejemplo de genialidad o de brillantez creativa, Overboard! es un ejemplo claro de que la elegancia prima sobre la abundancia. Como simulador de asesinato en el que se nos invita a adoptar el papel de la más villana más villana del lugar, el juego explorar los recovecos del escenario en una clave que se siente a ratos humorística, a otros sorprendentemente seria, pero siempre manteniendo una liviandad sobre sí mismo. Cuando algo rebosa tanta confianza, es normal que luzca tan bien.

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Such a simple game with such a brilliant execution. If there's one thing titles like Overboard! prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's that having a good idea is not enough if you don't confine it into a controlled space and let it shine by its own merits.

More than as an example of genius or creative brilliance, Overboard! is a clear example of elegance trumping abundance. As a murder simulator in which we're invited to take on the role of the most villainous villainess ever, the game explores the nooks and crannies of the setting in a way that feels at times humorous, at others quite serious, but keeping it light about itself. If you exude so much confidence, it's only natural that you'll look good.

I've played a handful of games that have marketed themselves as being "Like Groundhog Day," and to my delight, Overboard!, despite not marketing itself as such, does a better job than all the others. As much as I loved "The Sexy Brutale," this is a lot similar to what I expected going into it.
The scope of options at your fingertips aboard the boat are robust to an unbelievable degree; despite having what appears to be very linear choices, Overboard! is built upon beefy systems of If Then statements that continued to surprise me at how well it remembered my personal choices several hours and plays of the game. As of typing this, I've played it 81 times, and only just now feel as though I've seen everything there is to see (and I may even be wrong with that).
Of course, being able to play a game 81 Times in ~8 hours feels a little silly, but that is the point: players are expected to use knowledge they learn about their options aboard the boat and explore what happens if they try X with Y at Z O'Clock. Plus, it also doesn't do that-one-thing that these types of games does, where replays of it quickly grate on your patience. A single play can take as quick as 2-10 minutes, so you won't be spending too much of your time mashing through dialogue options to get to the next thing.
This is assisted by just how much breadth there is. For example, it's astounding how often doing the same things just 10-20 in-game minutes apart will yield different results, but it's not so so deep that you lose track of why or how it works. You'll quickly pick up on the patterns and feel like a master of the boat, expertly maneuvering each character and learning the dark secrets everyone has.
Between this and Obra Dinn, "Murder Mystery on a Boat with a Twist" has quickly become one of my favorite genres. I firmly and strongly recommend this game to anyone, no matter their experience or opinion of games. Required reading.

Well made but I just preferred Inkle's earlier game "80 days." I wish I could have enjoyed it more but watch a trailer and if you're into it i'm sure you'll love it!

Fun little game. Could be bit longer but i enjoyed my tries. will play it a couple times more to get the other endings too.

Strong writing, but mechanically quite simple, this 'getting away with murder' narrative game is great fun to play with a bunch of friends, passing around the controller and watching how each subsequent person plays.

The simplest way to find out which of your friends could get away with murder!

Replay-ability through the roof on this one. It’s essentially a dialogue heavy psychopath simulator. You’re trying to pull a ruse over the ship’s passengers to avoid being convicted for murder.

There is an extreme level of variety in how each scenario plays out. You can kill none or all of its passengers. The time mechanic adds some tension and makes your actions (once you’ve learned the movements of its characters) feel like an elaborate dance.

It's a very little game that plays around with the time loop mechanic to really make you feel like a diabolical rich lady. Enjoyable enough time, yet it doesn't feel really deep and I felt I kept getting stuck in loops. It's quite comedic and excels in this way but certainly could have been deeper.


Overboard! isn't the most mechanically compelling narrative puzzler I've played, but it is an excellent short story.

Completing an initial run is quite easy, but getting a perfectly clean getaway takes a good few loops. Unfortunately, running back through the day repeatedly looking for a tiny piece of information you're missing becomes grating quite quickly.

Still - a game worth playing, if only for its short runtime.

arte fofissima, trilha boa, uma abordagem diferente do whodunit, mas os personagens reagem de formas sem sentido às suas ações. fiz tudo certo pra incriminar a clarissa, mas o major simplesmente assumiu que alguém estava tentando incriminar ela?? sem prova alguma???? que hipótese absurda

This was short and sweet and I cracked the "perfect" ending just when I was starting to lose patience with it - perfect timing. There are just enough moving parts to give you plenty to figure out, without there being so much going on that it becomes unwieldy. It's a quick play by design but I had a great time going through my loops either trying to get it perfect or just saying fuck it, this time I'm stalking a specific character the whole time so I can figure out their deal.

I really appreciated the way the game lets you fast forward through conversations while it auto-selects your previous dialogue/action choices. For the actions I tried to take almost every single loop, it really made it better to just be able to fast forward through and know all my previous inputs were carrying over.

anders i love you

¿Cómo escapar de un barco en el que acabas de matar a tu marido? Hablando mucho y encontrando las miles de opciones que da este juego. Muy divertido y de lo que vale la pena encontrar todos sus secretos. Jugarlo en español es una maravilla.