Overboard! Review
Do you think you could get away with murder? I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d thought about it before, and I don’t think it makes you a bad person. I would wager every person on the planet has wondered about it at least once. For the purposes of this intro, it doesn’t matter who you killed or why you did it, only whether or not you could escape consequences. Despite what TV shows like CSI might lead you to believe, authorities close fewer murder cases than you might think, so maybe you could manage it. Do you think you’d have a better chance in 1935 on a small passenger boat? Well for the morbidly adventurous people in the world, myself included, Inkle, developer of 80 days and Heaven’s Vault, have just debuted a new game to put us to the test.
Overboard! tells the story of Veronica Villensey. Veronica is traveling from Britain to America with her husband, Malcolm Villensey, aboard the SS Hook. The couple is sailing for the U.S. because, thanks to several errors of judgement on Malcolm’s part, they have very recently become penniless. Worse still, only a day before the vessel is scheduled to dock in New York harbor, Malcolm is murdered. Players take the role of his murderer, Victoria, and it is their job to pin the murder on someone else on the boat, and in only eight hours no less. To do this, players must navigate the ship and Veronica’s relationships with those on it over the course of several playthroughs in a bizarre reverse whodunnit.
Overboard! is a game defined by its limitations. The first and most defining limitation is the limited time players have in each play of the game. Veronica only has from 8 am, when she wakes up, until 4 pm, when the SS Hook docks in New York, to clear her own name, or at least throw her shipmates off her scent. Every action the player takes consumes time, whether it be talking to other passengers or retrieving items, but the one that will take the most is traveling to other parts of the ship. Players also have the option of waiting. but this option is frustratingly imprecise, unlike the exact measurements players get while moving to a new location. Another limitation is the handful of places Veronica can go on the boat. With only eight spaces to occupy, players must learn how to squeeze as much as they can out of each area, which involves discovering secrets aboard the boat.
The final limitation, and the only one that actually bothered me, is the limited capabilities of the game’s interface. For whatever reason, there are only ever three action options to select from in any given scene. An early example of this is Veronica’s bedroom. In the bedroom, players are able to interact with the bed, the bathroom, Malcolm’s desk, the cabin’s porthole, and the cabin’s door. However, players aren’t able to choose between all of these at once. Once a player has interacted with, for example, the desk, that option is removed from the list and replaced with something absent from the first one. It’s frustrating in the game’s opening area but it gets worse when, purely hypothetically, Veronica is trying to bash her way into someone’s cabin to make sure they stop running their mouth, but the only prompts the game provides are very polite and demure actions. I’m willing to believe that this is a quirk of programming, so I don’t begrudge the developers, still it was frustrating.
Separate from the game’s limitations, both positive and negative, is my favorite aspect of the game: the way the game handles information. Despite the fact that Veronica has been married to Malcolm for years and has been aboard the boat for several months, she knows next to nothing about most of the characters in the game. I figure this is to let the player enjoy learning new things, because that is something this game does marvelously. Whenever the player learns something new, a message containing the information appears at the top of the screen in a stark red font. Because Overboard! is not a time loop, Veronica doesn’t remember these pieces of information, so it’s up to the player to retain all of the clues, but the game provides assistance in two ways: Firstly, whatever choices the player made in the previous play of the game are presented in green so players can quickly retrace their steps, and the game compiles new information into important questions for players to reflect on. The questions are direct enough to give players a heading but vague enough to let them figure it out on their own, questions like “What are Clarissa’s Papers?” and “Can I make a thousand pounds?” The expert balance between guidance and independence makes sleuthing and learning that much more enjoyable.
The last thing I want to compliment Overboard! on is its writing. There is a certain polite ruthlessness to aristocratic conversation, or at least modern depictions of it, and the game’s writers managed to capture several different tones of that for this game. Anders, the ship’s captain and decorated military officer, is kind and helpful but never lacking authority, while the blue blooded Lady H is always aloof and always snooping. On top of that, the game is a delight to read. It’s not always funny, this is a murder mystery after all, but it is always entertaining.
Mystery stories were never something I was especially interested in until I saw Knives Out and read Murder on the Orient Express, and I think the fact that both of those works subvert mystery standards is why I like them so much, and part of why I’m such a fan of Overboard! It’s enthralling to try and deduce new ways of gathering and using information, made doubly thrilling by racing against the clock and getting away with something you know you shouldn’t. Because one playthrough of Overboard! can be done in less than an hour, and you’ll likely want to go back for another right away, I personally recommend picking it up on the Switch or an iOS tablet, I think a phone screen would be too small. Whether you buy it on a portable platform or on the PC, I think it’s easily worth the $15.
Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
