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.
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.