overbored!
Yesterday, I had one of those days where everything goes wrong.
I ended up having to format my computer and ran out of time to write the email. 😢
But well, here we are. Back again.
First of all, I wanted to mention that tomorrow Bahnsen Knights, a narrative game from a friend of the house, Nico Saraintaris, is coming out.
You might remember him from emails like “re: stretching & wildcards”.
There’s always something interesting in what Nico does, so I strongly recommend his games.
Returning to today’s topic, I wanted to talk about something I felt while playing Overboard! by Inkle some time ago.
According to its creators:
Overboard! is a tense, highly replayable detective game from the creators of 80 Days and Heaven's Vault.
It’s essentially a dialogue-based game where we have to save ourselves from being accused of murdering our partner.
I find it a bit hard to speak negatively about a game that I really wanted to like. Especially knowing the work behind launching a game like this.
But if we don’t criticize, we don’t learn, so I’m going to comment on something I felt playing the game that was interesting.
The game is based on a certain set of conditions (which character is in which part of the ship, who you talk to, etc) that unlock narrative situations.
The idea is that you play the same loop many times, choosing different options to save yourself from being accused of murder.
We have a certain amount of time before we are called to give our version of the events and it is decided whether we are murderers or not.
So far so good, the first runs feel interesting, but on the fourth or fifth loop, I felt that I was spending more time thinking about the mechanics strategically than caring about the story.
To such a strong point that I wasn’t interested in what the characters were saying, but I wanted to quickly get to the outcome to see if the options I had chosen were useful or not.
If the game was more mechanical, whatever, but this is a narrative game.
Not only that: the game encourages this kind of play through random “missions” it gives you in each run.
For example:
- Can I make a thousand pounds?
- Can I frame Clarissa?
- Can I force Carstairs to help me?
- What is Anders’ secret?
Smells familiar?
That’s right, another example of extrinsic motivation.
It makes me feel like the designers knew this game was not worth looping after 2 or 3 times that it needs to force you to find solutions that you wouldn’t care about otherwise, just so you keep playing…
When I realized what was happening, I closed the game and moved on to something else.
A shame.
The art is very nice and the story could be up to par, but the game design choices turned it into something so mechanical that the story faded behind the logic.
Did you play it? Was this your experience as well?