Dead Sea

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, they say, before blushing in shame from having wasted their first impression on such a cliché. Dead Sea could stood to listen though, as it had two strikes against it five minutes after I started it up: one, the silly genAI cover art, which just looks insipid upon first glance but seems sillier and sillier the more you try to work out what the waves, clouds, and light are doing, and two, the initial puzzle, which has you make a Fanta for a gravedigger by zapping a sapient monster-orange with a freeze ray and then dismembering it until it fits in a bottle. After those first five minutes, it’s clear that some actual care did go into making the game and it settles down to tell a dark-fantasy story with an occasional hint of whimsy rather than the wearying zaniness that opening challenge seemed to presage – so that’s all good news, but it’s still frustrating to see an author start off in a ditch due to such avoidable missteps.

What we’ve got here is a parser-like choice game that tasks you with uncovering the secrets of the ruler of the island called Necropolis – there’s Bluebeard-y backstory, Moby Dick references, souls being harvested and used to animate golems… The vibes are dour, though the compressed prose style largely gestures at mood rather than wallowing in it, in service of keeping things moving. That isn’t to say there aren’t any good images – I liked the use of color here, for example:

Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.

No way up found.

An injured White Whale is beached, reddening nearby water.

But as you can see, it’s nothing too fancy, it makes its points and then shuts up. This relative terseness puts the focus on the puzzles, and I’d say they’re serviceable. Most are inventory-based and fairly well signposted, with a few boasting multiple solutions. It’s clear that some of the systems are a bit hacked together – in particular, the inventory system doesn’t allow you to drop things, picking up something new will often just mean replacing what you previously carried, which silently goes back to where you first found it in case you need it again – but this winds up being intuitive enough, and I can’t complain too much since it does reduce the amount of inventory-juggling you might need to engage in. The other mechanic I wasn’t sure how to engage with were the small statues you run into every few minutes – you’re told that praying at one will “reset chapter parameters”, which seemed like it could potentially mean losing progress, so I steered clear. At any rate, what you’re called upon to do is typically straightforward, and you typically just have a small segment of the gameworld unlocked at any point in time, which means I found it hard to get too stuck; again, the pacing is enjoyably quick.

As for the plot, once you uncover enough secrets to understand the main conflict that’s playing out on the island, it’s reasonably engaging; there are a few nicely-observed elements, like how the girl betrothed to the dark, melancholy Duke dreads the arranged marriage but is still looking forward to the wedding. And while it’s clear how this will all be resolved, the option to make suboptimal choices to get premature game-overs makes the player’s input feel more impactful. On the flip side, there’s some bonus content you can access just as you win the game which slathers the functional story with a thick coating of proper-noun fantasy bollocks:

That was before the God fell.

Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here.

This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt.

Even angels fell because of it.

Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’

I suppose that means that Dead Sea’s last impression is just as dodgy as its first, but at least the stuff in the middle goes down easy!