Overboard!

A murder mystery where you’re the murderer is ripe for intrigue and clever manipulation. Overboard! begins with a bang (not literally), pulling you into the dark web of secrets surrounding the shipmates you haven’t killed. Sadly, though, the structure of the game leads to repetition and fatigue, leaving it way less satisfying than it should have been.

Written and directed by Jon Ingold, this mystery sees you play a young socialite in 1935, whose tired of her husband and promptly deposits him into the sea. Waking up the next morning, she thinks about her upcoming freedom if she can just make it through the last day of the voyage avoiding suspicion. This is when you take over and the steward knocks on your cabin door. Your first decision is whether or not to let him into your room, and a dozen more choices await you over the course of the day that can lead to any number of conclusions.

Choices vary from whom you talk to, who you decide to make your friend, where you go on the ship and what items you have on your person. Should you act normal and go to the dining room for breakfast? Maybe scour the ship making sure you didn’t leave any clues behind? Or perhaps you should look up dirt on someone else in case they saw something. Heck, maybe forget all that and just sabotage your own fate. Each permutation of the game is a delight, replete with dramatic flare and charming dialogue. Each run-through of the game takes just five to ten minutes.

Other than the opening narration, there’s no voice acting, just some audible mumbling and sound effects with occasional light music. The graphics are simple but bright two-dimensional drawings of the ship and its characters.

Thankfully I reached about two-thirds of the potential endings within the first few hours of play, because boy does it get old fast. While you are allowed to rewind any scene once through playthrough, you cannot save your progress. So if you want to try a few different branching paths based on the same few hours of decisions, you have to go through the same dialogue and actions ad nauseum. Which would be tolerable, except many times you’ll find your ideas didn’t really change the outcome and you basically played the exact same version of the story three times in a row. There’s a fast-forward feature that will essentially push you through the same decisions you did last time (until you decide to stop it), but it’s still monotonous watching each scene play out repeatedly.

There is a hint system of sorts. You can go to the chapel and talk to a cross; God will then sarcastically answer your questions. But the hints are generally vague enough to not be particularly helpful. Once I got bored, I pulled up a walkthrough to find the final few endings and achievements. The game is so delightful that it was still fun to complete it this way. I only wish the game would have been designed to encourage me to do it on my own.