Overboard! Reviews

Murder, Malice and Mayhem! Oh my!

Amazingly addictive game!

The concept is really cool and the game is well-designed. I was really into the game when I first started playing but then I realized too much repetition is needed to get to each ending. The excitement dropped quickly and the game was just not motivating enough to make me go through every ending.

Overboard! mostly lives up to one of Ingold's previous games, Make It Good. Overboard! is the fourth detective related game he's worked on. The first one, Insight, was made around one central twist and did it well, a good early step for the author and a good introduction to this kind of game, at least for me. The second one, Make It Good, is The detective game: a complex enough simulation of a group of witnesses/suspects and the crime scene, with a tight deadline to get everything you need. Then, The Intercept, the Inkle demo game (no longer available, it seems; not even the only lost Ingold game) about trying to hide that you were blackmailed into giving sexrets about your code breaking operation. Overboard! takes ideas from all of these and more. The things it takes from Make it Good, it improves on. Those things it doesn't, don't really work. The game is about other characters, who move around on the ship according to their schedules, remembering what's going on around them. You observe them at first, and on later attempts try to get them to do what you want. It's a pretty big cast, with enough ways interact with them, by meeting them at different places and times. There are few non-failure endings, but plenty of different ways to get to them. The first big problem is the interface. Within a scene, you always get 3 options when you have to make a choice. Often one is redundant. In complex scenes, the option you want can be excluded because the game choice to show the more interesting options over the one you want. The game also likes to show notifications about things that just happened, covering up the clock. The second big problem is that the game doesn't actually simulate people coming and going correctly. The game is inconsistent about others arriving into a scene. It's useful to move from a room to itself as a waiting move that doesn't trap you in a long action. Overboard! clearly wants to be a bigger better Make it Good. It some ways it is, but the Inkle engine and game logic are clearly struggling to hold up the simulation Overboard! tries to be.

This game is so much fun and highly addictive. Especially going for that sweet 100% of all the achievements. All the different dialogue to enjoy and secrets to find out, all while figuring out how to get away with murder, money and more! You replay the day over each time to get different endings and a lot of the time I was just having fun goofing off trying out different dialogue and shenanigans.