Burly Men at Sea is a short (emphasis on short) choose your own adventure game available for PS4 and Vita. It follows a trio of bearded men who find a map in a bottle and take to the seas on an adventure. The game presents a series of three decisions for the player to make that decides the ending of the story. Note the precise number: three choices. Simpler than most flash games, and possible to summarize with a small flowchart.
You can easily get all the endings in a couple of hours if you don't fall asleep, and I say that because the game is sluggishly paced and really uneventful. Plus, although there's twelve endings to reach, there's really only two end states, both of which have the same result of looping back to the beginning for a new adventure. Apparently, the whole point of the game was for it to become a book: once you completed one of the game's paths, you were shown a code that you could input on the official website to order a hardcover book with the events of that path. For thirty dollars.
It's a novel idea that could have been interesting on a bigger, much more fleshed out game -- imagine being able to buy a graphic novel version of your Mass Effect playthrough -- but I can only get the appeal here if you're playing together with a very young child. And let's face it, I don't have kids and probably neither do you: the reason we've played this was either because it was free on PS+ or because it had one of the easiest platinum trophies ever -- likely both. On that note, it should probably have been barred from having a platinum trophy, as it pops one trophy for every time you interact with it.
Its merits are... looking kind of charming; the book idea being novel, if wasted; and being better than whatever schlock of dead multiplayer games Sony's been pushing on to PS+ these last few years. What's it going to be this time...? Fallout 76...? Jesus Christ. Anyway, you can easily get better value on point-'n-click adventures than Burly Men At Sea, so prefer those games.
You can easily get all the endings in a couple of hours if you don't fall asleep, and I say that because the game is sluggishly paced and really uneventful. Plus, although there's twelve endings to reach, there's really only two end states, both of which have the same result of looping back to the beginning for a new adventure. Apparently, the whole point of the game was for it to become a book: once you completed one of the game's paths, you were shown a code that you could input on the official website to order a hardcover book with the events of that path. For thirty dollars.
It's a novel idea that could have been interesting on a bigger, much more fleshed out game -- imagine being able to buy a graphic novel version of your Mass Effect playthrough -- but I can only get the appeal here if you're playing together with a very young child. And let's face it, I don't have kids and probably neither do you: the reason we've played this was either because it was free on PS+ or because it had one of the easiest platinum trophies ever -- likely both. On that note, it should probably have been barred from having a platinum trophy, as it pops one trophy for every time you interact with it.
Its merits are... looking kind of charming; the book idea being novel, if wasted; and being better than whatever schlock of dead multiplayer games Sony's been pushing on to PS+ these last few years. What's it going to be this time...? Fallout 76...? Jesus Christ. Anyway, you can easily get better value on point-'n-click adventures than Burly Men At Sea, so prefer those games.