TL;DR: fun game, has a lot of gameplay and UI/UX issues, get it in a sale.


I'm not sure I like the game, but it sure is addictive. It's addictive in the same sense that most unforgiving games with permadeath are: that drive to give it another shot, see if a different approach may yield better results, applying what little we learned in this round to hopefully do better in the next one. In this regard, it reminds me a lot of FTL.

The graphics are adequate and help create a fitting atmosphere. Some elements are just so-so, e.g. the vortices or what I assume represents bad weather, and the ships are merely adequate. But these small blemishes can be easily overlooked. The sound and music are also very fitting, and it appears the music reacts to both your location and present situation. Every port and their surrounding area seems to have its own soundscape. I probably should pay more attention to the sound, but I'm one of those people who automatically blocks out the music on a conscious level, although it still helps set the mood.

But the one thing every reviewer agrees on: this game is merciless, and there's a certain learning curve. While I don't mind permadeath per se, in this game, it clashes with the narrative elements. Every time you die, you start over with a new captain. The legacy mechanic allows you to retain some stats/belongings from the previous captain, but every storyline they participated in is reset. They can receive the same quests, or enlist the same officers, but the stories play out the exact same way, word for word, *from the very beginning*. And this is where the game falls a bit short for me: it wants to be two conflicting things at once. It wants to be a narrative-driven game, but because it also wants to be a merciless permadeath game, it forces you to reread paragraphs and paragraphs of narrative. So after a short while, you develop this habit of just skipping or skimming it, at which point you start to wonder why it's there to begin with since you no longer even bother reading the new text.

On to the UI. Let me start by saying I'm a couch player, so I need to enlargen the UI elements and fonts to make this game playable on the TV from 10ft away. I think it's very commendable that the authors put these options in there, although the lack of controller support is puzzling since the game would lend itself so well to being played with a controller. However, some elements could've been better. The buttons in the main menu offer too little contrast. Especially from a distance, without UI scaling. And the flow through the ingame screens lacks, well, flow... In your Gazetteer (book that serves as the ingame menu), many pages are redundant. There's this button after visiting a place "Back to the city". Clicking it, rather than taking you to the "City" menu, just shows you a page telling you that you can just click "London" at the right edge of the screen. The harbourmaster's summary of your "action items" in the form of a list of messages contains no clickable items and disappears until your next visit when dismissed. After interacting with one of your officers, you're taken back to an unrelated screen devoid of any information or relevance, rather than back to the Officers screen from where you came. All in all, the gazetteer is a jumbled mess. There are even parts of the game where it simply states that to unlock a certain interaction, a certain status "must be !", as if someone forgot to put in the template variable that will be filled in with the actual value. It's little things like this that give the game an unpolished and unfinished look.

And then there's the gameplay. It's easy to get hooked on this game, if you're the kind of person who enjoys starting over and devising ever better strategies. But some things are just boring busywork. You're supposed to report back on ports you visited, but doing so requires you to write these reports in the first place. This requires you to actually click a button when docked, nested in one of the menu items. This is a redundant gameplay element, a piece of senseless busywork. It's not like there's this situation developing at these ports, and every time you visit, the story progresses and you learn new details. The text is more along the lines of "these fishermen play their cards close to their chest and reply mostly with evasive answers, but after a while you manage to piece together enough clues to write your report". Every port has its own variation, but every time you visit the same port it's the exact same text. Filing these reports separately upon returning to London is even more tedious. And it's not the only instance of busywork in this game: the only way to obtain news is to go to your lodging and explicitly click "read the paper". These things should not require user interaction, if they have a place in the game at all.

And then there's the "everything is an item" mechanic. You can collect secrets, but it's abstract. You just receive an item called "Secret". You can have multiple, and they can be used/traded. This leads to ridiculous scenarios such as you learning a secret from an NPC, which becomes a "Secret" inventory item, which you then spend on the Cladery Heir in the form of "revealing something about your past" in order to improve your Hearts stat by 1. And literally everything in this game suffers from this illogical mechanic: read the paper in London, and you have one "News" item which several ports are interested in. But if you use it at one port, it's gone and can no longer be used at another. Secrets, news, ... are not modeled as knowledge, but as consumables which are stored in your inventory.


In summary:

Despite its shortcomings, the game is still quite addictive. Whether I find it enjoyable is something I haven't fully decided yet. Some issues with the game are easy to ignore, e.g. the "everything is an item" mechanic, while weird and illogical, is just something you have to accept and get used to. But the game suffers from a schizofrenic undecisiveness about what it wants to be: some parts (the secrets, the tales of terror, ...) are so abstract and devoid of detail, whereas other parts such as the quests drown in narrative. And this narrative clashes with the "fail often and restart from zero" approach to progression, which leads to repitition, causing the player to ignore or skim the narrative entirely.

Would I recommend it? Sure, it has enough good elements to keep things interesting. But not at full retail. It's simply too unpolished and even unfinished to justify the asking price. Especially compared to other games that cost less (e.g. FTL), and are more polished and more focused in their gameplay elements.

TL;DR: fun game, has a lot of gameplay and UI/UX issues, get it in a sale. I'm not sure I like the game, but it sure is addictive. It's addictive in the same sense that most unforgiving games with permadeath are: that drive to give it another shot, see if a different approach may yield better results, applying what little we learned in this round to hopefully do better in the next one. In this regard, it reminds me a lot of FTL. The graphics are adequate and help create a fitting atmosphere. Some elements are just so-so, e.g. the vortices or what I assume represents bad weather, and the ships are merely adequate. But these small blemishes can be easily overlooked. The sound and music are also very fitting, and it appears the music reacts to both your location and present situation. Every port and their surrounding area seems to have its own soundscape. I probably should pay more attention to the sound, but I'm one of those people who automatically blocks out the music on a conscious level, although it still helps set the mood. But the one thing every reviewer agrees on: this game is merciless, and there's a certain learning curve. While I don't mind permadeath per se, in this game, it clashes with the narrative elements. Every time you die, you start over with a new captain. The legacy mechanic allows you to retain some stats/belongings from the previous captain, but every storyline they participated in is reset. They can receive the same quests, or enlist the same officers, but the stories play out the exact same way, word for word, *from the very beginning*. And this is where the game falls a bit short for me: it wants to be two conflicting things at once. It wants to be a narrative-driven game, but because it also wants to be a merciless permadeath game, it forces you to reread paragraphs and paragraphs of narrative. So after a short while, you develop this habit of just skipping or skimming it, at which point you start to wonder why it's there to begin with since you no longer even bother reading the new text. On to the UI. Let me start by saying I'm a couch player, so I need to enlargen the UI elements and fonts to make this game playable on the TV from 10ft away. I think it's very commendable that the authors put these options in there, although the lack of controller support is puzzling since the game would lend itself so well to being played with a controller. However, some elements could've been better. The buttons in the main menu offer too little contrast. Especially from a distance, without UI scaling. And the flow through the ingame screens lacks, well, flow... In your Gazetteer (book that serves as the ingame menu), many pages are redundant. There's this button after visiting a place "Back to the city". Clicking it, rather than taking you to the "City" menu, just shows you a page telling you that you can just click "London" at the right edge of the screen. The harbourmaster's summary of your "action items" in the form of a list of messages contains no clickable items and disappears until your next visit when dismissed. After interacting with one of your officers, you're taken back to an unrelated screen devoid of any information or relevance, rather than back to the Officers screen from where you came. All in all, the gazetteer is a jumbled mess. There are even parts of the game where it simply states that to unlock a certain interaction, a certain status "must be !", as if someone forgot to put in the template variable that will be filled in with the actual value. It's little things like this that give the game an unpolished and unfinished look. And then there's the gameplay. It's easy to get hooked on this game, if you're the kind of person who enjoys starting over and devising ever better strategies. But some things are just boring busywork. You're supposed to report back on ports you visited, but doing so requires you to write these reports in the first place. This requires you to actually click a button when docked, nested in one of the menu items. This is a redundant gameplay element, a piece of senseless busywork. It's not like there's this situation developing at these ports, and every time you visit, the story progresses and you learn new details. The text is more along the lines of "these fishermen play their cards close to their chest and reply mostly with evasive answers, but after a while you manage to piece together enough clues to write your report". Every port has its own variation, but every time you visit the same port it's the exact same text. Filing these reports separately upon returning to London is even more tedious. And it's not the only instance of busywork in this game: the only way to obtain news is to go to your lodging and explicitly click "read the paper". These things should not require user interaction, if they have a place in the game at all. And then there's the "everything is an item" mechanic. You can collect secrets, but it's abstract. You just receive an item called "Secret". You can have multiple, and they can be used/traded. This leads to ridiculous scenarios such as you learning a secret from an NPC, which becomes a "Secret" inventory item, which you then spend on the Cladery Heir in the form of "revealing something about your past" in order to improve your Hearts stat by 1. And literally everything in this game suffers from this illogical mechanic: read the paper in London, and you have one "News" item which several ports are interested in. But if you use it at one port, it's gone and can no longer be used at another. Secrets, news, ... are not modeled as knowledge, but as consumables which are stored in your inventory. In summary: Despite its shortcomings, the game is still quite addictive. Whether I find it enjoyable is something I haven't fully decided yet. Some issues with the game are easy to ignore, e.g. the "everything is an item" mechanic, while weird and illogical, is just something you have to accept and get used to. But the game suffers from a schizofrenic undecisiveness about what it wants to be: some parts (the secrets, the tales of terror, ...) are so abstract and devoid of detail, whereas other parts such as the quests drown in narrative. And this narrative clashes with the "fail often and restart from zero" approach to progression, which leads to repitition, causing the player to ignore or skim the narrative entirely. Would I recommend it? Sure, it has enough good elements to keep things interesting. But not at full retail. It's simply too unpolished and even unfinished to justify the asking price. Especially compared to other games that cost less (e.g. FTL), and are more polished and more focused in their gameplay elements.