Why Am I Dead At Sea

When the dialogue was specifically written to indicate how the white character wasn't quite pronouncing the chinese character's name correctly (due to English not having that consonant) I knew the writing was the real stuff. Great story.

(think I fell asleep with this on once - playing time is a little inflated prob more like 4-5 hours) Will start out by saying - I don't really think this is my cup of tea. I spent more time frustrated than having fun, but I still want to leave a positive review here because perhaps someone else who doesn't have the same gaming quirks I do will find some enjoyment in it. Most of the game is really well done. Great concept. The art is great, the faux-retro pixel art style popular with a lot of indie titles. The music is in the same style, nice and crunchy, different characters have different themes which is cool. The Ship has a lot of character, and the actual characters are all well designed and distinct. Their personal stories vary in quality (none are bad per se, some just really cliche) but the good ones are good. The mystery itself is intriguing. Now here's where it started being more frustrating than fun to me, and where other's opinions may differ. The actual gameplay is straight out of 90s adventure games in the sense that you have to rub everything on everything, but in this sense rubbing everything on everything is just talking to people over and over with different people until you finally find a fresh, precious morsel of new dialogue. The perceptive shifts sound cool until you realize instead of exhausting all dialogue options with a character and then moving on to the next, you now have to do that with every character you can possibly control. Then later you unlock full possessions which just means you now have a whole new thing to rub on everything. Most of your time will be spent wondering around the ship as different characters, trying to figure out just who in the hell you're supposed to talk to to trigger progression. It's not so bad early, when your possessions are limited, but by Chapter 4 it just becomes a mess of guess work and walking. Speaking of walking, most of the characters are painfully slow. No sprint. Your ghost form is way faster than anything else, but characters hang out in specific locations, meaning most of the time to interact with a character as a character, you have some walking to do. One character goes faster with his ability, but it's drugs so it makes your screen all fuzzy and annoying to look at. Which segways me into the abilities, which I feel are wasted potential. Other than one allowing you to sequence break (Gwen's peeking ability unlocks the room for you as a ghost, allowing you to enter rooms a chapter early) they're all fairly useless or have very specific uses. Finally, the ending is such "you have to do these specific things in this specific order" 90s adventure game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I was pulling my hair out. I don't care, I used a guide. You will too, because the entire game trains you to exhaust every dialogue option, but now, at the very end, the solution is to use specific dialogue in a specific order with specific characters, AFTER making sure you get the easily missable dialogue that could make it impossible to get the good ending. It's so 90s it hurts. Ultimately, that's why this review is a recommend. If you love 90s adventure game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ minus moon logic but with an extra heaping of rub everything on everything followed by a side of "do this specific thing in this specific order or else. and better make sure you found all the missable stuff!" then you will probably love this. I hate that kind of thing, so the back half of the game became a slog to me. The mystery was interesting enough that I wanted to see what happened, and the art and music was good, so I powered through, but I was very close to quitting at points. Also, save often, characters can become stuck and you can fly out of the map.

Decent mystery game. Possess people, talk to other people, investigate surroundings. Investigation and mystery solving is complicated by the existence of 2 different modes of possession, which will alter the dialog options available. Also the kind of game you might want to take notes for, as you have to often remember and follow a chain of interactions between people based on what they learn to make progress.

Really cool experience, slowly figuring out the narrative threads - both the overarching murder mystery, but also each person's own stories, personal demons and reasons for acting the way they do. I also love the different views on morality and being alive - with some of the people being optimistic and believing in the good of mankind even in the face of malevolence, while others were deeply pessimistic, or nihilistic. I did basically all the game without looking stuff up - up until the very end, where getting the different endings tripped me up a little bit. But still - really great game.

Good story, good mystery.

good

This game was… weird, in a lot of ways. So on the gameplay front I actually quite liked it. This is exactly what I was hoping MURDERED SOUL SUSPECT TM would be — you’re a ghost who can possess people, read minds, get into locked rooms, manipulate objects, etc. The game seems to have been made in an RPGMaker/Wolfrpg/etc. engine (I spent way too much time trying to figure out which one and couldn’t) and has the clunkiness you’d expect from that, but aside from that I enjoyed floating around and talking to people and using different people to access different areas etc. That said… well. There is a long-running meme in fandom culture known as the Eight Deadly Words, coined by SFF author Dorothy Jones Heydt: “I don’t care what happens to these people.” The idea is that a narrative has fundamentally failed when the reader stops caring about the characters. I hated everyone in this game. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a cast populated by such terrible, unlikeable, whiny-ass people. While Xu and Marcurio were the worst, everyone sucked in their own way. The only person who was sympathetic was Gwen, but she spends large swaths of the game either refusing to or unable to communicate. Xu really was the worst, just insufferable. Walking around talking about how she objectively has the hardest life, ever, and it justifies her doing as many terrible things as she wants, all while the game acts like she’s a totally normal person — I have no idea how you end up writing a character like this without a hint of irony. I initially thought the direction the game was going was that everyone was going to realize they were all so caught up in the idea that their problems were uniquely difficult only to realize that they were, literally, all in the same boat, and were better served by tackling hardship together instead of seeing each other as competition. Community as resistance etc etc. Like, this is so obviously the direction this should go that the “same boat” metaphor is right there, it literally takes place on a boat, but that just… never happens. In fact, not only do the characters never really open up to each other, they don’t grow or change or learn anything. We never even find out why Alton is so anxious and suddenly flunked school, why Donovan left the cops, why Marcurio feels like he can’t get a job anywhere else, why Paulo is psychic (???), what happened to the captain to make her take this job so suddenly, what happened to the old captain… the list goes on. And none of them learn anything from the experience — there are functionally only two endings here, and no matter how fully you solve the mystery it doesn’t change that everyone ends exactly where they started. And no one faces any consequences! Xu and Marcurio have been aiding and abetting a human trafficking operation, only technically not realizing when anyone with a functioning brainstem would have because they were sticking their fingers in their ears and going LA LA LA, and you expect me to believe they just get to walk away?? Huge swaths of the cast just repeat that they don’t care about anything that’s going on and just want to be left alone, a baffling decision, and no one seems concerned that there’s no one to drive the boat, it’s just bonkers. The only likeable person is actually the ghost, but the silent-protag thing means that we don’t really get to engage with them — the whole thing would have been better with, say, between-chapter cutscene flashbacks showing the captain investigating. She seemed cool, but her being dead before we get there means we can’t attach ourselves to her. And the endings were so annoying. There’s no way to save right before the final confrontation, you have to go through a long, unskippable sequence each time, and infuriatingly, despite claiming there are five endings, there are only two — I was SO irritated to go through all the effort of seeing the best one only to find out it was exactly the same as the other 2 partially-good endings. Though that no one reacts differently no matter what happens does feel on brand for these terrible, terrible people. More irritatingly, the game just… never follows up on Paolo and the captain, lol? In the bad ends, you see Paolo as like a vegetable or whatever, but in the good ones you don’t see him at all?? And in none of the endings do we find out what happened to the ghost. Is she still haunting the ship…? Did she just vanish after the denouement? Did she ascend into heaven? Is she with Paolo? Who the ♥♥♥♥ knows, she’s only the main character. The plot here was decent. I found it to be predictable and it was clear who the culprit was early. I continue to not enjoy sexual abuse as a way to signal a story is serious without any examination of the culture that produces it; I find it both emotionally manipulative and dismissive. The game seemed to want to say something about mental health, and its portrayal of Gwen and Darryl were good and sensitive, but it couldn’t help but edge into “you can cure PTSD with ghosts” stuff which is always irritating. But honestly the biggest problem is just how completely unlikable the characters were. The biggest disappointment for me was that in the worst ending some of them still survive, I wanted them all shot down.

Do NOT pass this game over! I was totally blown away by how compelling the characters and central mysteries were. Worth every penny and more.

Я ожидал от этой игры всё, что получил: завораживающий сюжет, интересную детективную историю, раскрытие персонажей и отличную атмосферу с музыкой! Если вы ценитель сюжетных пиксельных игр, которые цепляют именно историей и исследованием, а не экшеном и боёвкой, как в RPG, то эта игра вам идеально подойдёт. Думаю, если вам понравились игры вроде OneShot или Undertale, то стоит опробовать и эту. Очень советую.

Shockingly good and dark, probably my favorite mystery game I’ve played so far that really rewards you and puts forth a strong effort to both surprise but guide you to the correct answer. I can almost imagine this starting as an ‘Earthbound but for adults’ idea for how real it’s wiling to make moments, the sadness it’s willing to explore. For it’s cute aesthetic and art, a haunting isolation was quite to grip me as I played and wouldn’t let go until all was over. My only complaint being the lack of closure that came in most ending in regards to the main character. But don’t let that steer you away from excellent experience.