Why Am I Dead At Sea

(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.