A ship sails from England to America. Under the starry sky, a couple stares out into the sea, the husband, an investor on the verge of financial collapse, and the wife, a former actress growing increasingly frustrated with her marriage. She beckons him over to the edge of the deck, and as he leans over the rail, she shoves him over the edge. With the ship mere hours away from its destination, the now-widow moves to avoid suspicion from her fellow passengers so she can start a new life on the new continent.
Overboard! is a murder mystery where you’re the one whodunnit. You play as Veronica Villinsey, a woman who, tired of her marriage to Malcolm Villinsey, decides to take “until death do us part” into her own hands. As you take control of her, in the morning after her deed, the ship is eight hours away from America, eight long hours during which you must evade any suspicion from the people in the ship. Things get more complicated as it becomes clear that her crime might not have gone entirely unnoticed.
The game plays out in visual novel style, your only inputs being moving to other areas of the ship via the map and interacting with select objects or talking to people in the room via text prompts. All of these actions shave precious minutes from the clock, and as the day progresses, other characters move around the ship tending to their own schedules, and your actions — or inactions — regarding certain topics decide what sort of ending Veronica gets. It’s not possible to see every event in one go, so you must plan your movements according to the desired outcomes.
Overboard is very short, and you’ll see the conclusion of Veronica’s journey — be it good or bad — in fifteen minutes or less. However, it’s very unlikely that you will achieve the best ending right off the bat, and the game nudges you in the way of exploring all the possibilities and aim for different events in further playthroughs.
I enjoy focused games that choose to do one thing very well, and Overboard has some genuinely good ideas to go with its witty writing. I like, for instance, how some dialogue options look innocuous but are straight-up traps. For instance, if you talk about your husband in the past tense, the listener might grow suspicious of you. You're also required to keep a consistent story about his disappearance throughout the day, with dialogue trees giving you plenty of space to contradict yourself.
In theory, there's a lot that can be done with the mechanics that Overboard offers. In practice, however, I found exploring different paths incredibly annoying. For one, the UI is really unhelpful, with the fast-forward and rewind functions being unusable, and this makes repeat playthroughs a bit of a chore. But more than that, the game seems to struggle with its own scope.
Creating a game where the player has a lot of freedom to make decisions is not easy, not is one where NPCs move around and can interact. The cost of developing those things grows exponentially as you add them -- a new decision changes the scenes that succede it, and a new character's schedule and behaviour affects all the others.
Overboard's developers were aware of that, and created a game with a limited cast and not that many different choices. It's a very reasonable idea development-wise, but it means that a lot of dialogue options are pointless and funnel you to the same outcomes, and some ideas a player might have that sound reasonable are simply not possible to execute.
Furthermore, even at the limited scope of interaction the game offers, it still drops the ball a surprising amount of times. The line between a solution to a problem that works and one that doesn't is arbitrary, and sometimes, inconsistent. An example of this is seen if you decide to do additional murders to cover your tracks, where you can get away even if you're seen carrying them out depending on unknown factors.
Overboard is a low-priced game that's clearly experimental, and also one of those rare games that have you play as the villain. If you're curious about it, try it. I certainly don't regret doing so. But I also think it's unlikely that I'll be revisiting or even remembering it any time soon.
Overboard! is a murder mystery where you’re the one whodunnit. You play as Veronica Villinsey, a woman who, tired of her marriage to Malcolm Villinsey, decides to take “until death do us part” into her own hands. As you take control of her, in the morning after her deed, the ship is eight hours away from America, eight long hours during which you must evade any suspicion from the people in the ship. Things get more complicated as it becomes clear that her crime might not have gone entirely unnoticed.
The game plays out in visual novel style, your only inputs being moving to other areas of the ship via the map and interacting with select objects or talking to people in the room via text prompts. All of these actions shave precious minutes from the clock, and as the day progresses, other characters move around the ship tending to their own schedules, and your actions — or inactions — regarding certain topics decide what sort of ending Veronica gets. It’s not possible to see every event in one go, so you must plan your movements according to the desired outcomes.
Overboard is very short, and you’ll see the conclusion of Veronica’s journey — be it good or bad — in fifteen minutes or less. However, it’s very unlikely that you will achieve the best ending right off the bat, and the game nudges you in the way of exploring all the possibilities and aim for different events in further playthroughs.
I enjoy focused games that choose to do one thing very well, and Overboard has some genuinely good ideas to go with its witty writing. I like, for instance, how some dialogue options look innocuous but are straight-up traps. For instance, if you talk about your husband in the past tense, the listener might grow suspicious of you. You're also required to keep a consistent story about his disappearance throughout the day, with dialogue trees giving you plenty of space to contradict yourself.
In theory, there's a lot that can be done with the mechanics that Overboard offers. In practice, however, I found exploring different paths incredibly annoying. For one, the UI is really unhelpful, with the fast-forward and rewind functions being unusable, and this makes repeat playthroughs a bit of a chore. But more than that, the game seems to struggle with its own scope.
Creating a game where the player has a lot of freedom to make decisions is not easy, not is one where NPCs move around and can interact. The cost of developing those things grows exponentially as you add them -- a new decision changes the scenes that succede it, and a new character's schedule and behaviour affects all the others.
Overboard's developers were aware of that, and created a game with a limited cast and not that many different choices. It's a very reasonable idea development-wise, but it means that a lot of dialogue options are pointless and funnel you to the same outcomes, and some ideas a player might have that sound reasonable are simply not possible to execute.
Furthermore, even at the limited scope of interaction the game offers, it still drops the ball a surprising amount of times. The line between a solution to a problem that works and one that doesn't is arbitrary, and sometimes, inconsistent. An example of this is seen if you decide to do additional murders to cover your tracks, where you can get away even if you're seen carrying them out depending on unknown factors.
Overboard is a low-priced game that's clearly experimental, and also one of those rare games that have you play as the villain. If you're curious about it, try it. I certainly don't regret doing so. But I also think it's unlikely that I'll be revisiting or even remembering it any time soon.