Deep Sixed Reviews

A unique and fun game; but whether you’ll enjoy it is probably dependent on a few unusual factors. I personally loved it, but I think I might’ve gotten very, very lucky.   Yes, it’s a “everything is breaking and you need to keep fixing stuff” kind of game, but perhaps more importantly it’s a roguelike with a story. As in, there is permadeath but also an event-driven plot. This setup is a double-edged sword. I managed to beat the game on my first “run” (this is a bit of a misnomer, that just means I haven’t died a single time), and while the experience was harrowing, it was also an explosion of emotional satisfaction - my stakes and the main character’s stakes were equally high.   That said, I imagine if I died, I’d get pissed off to no end. But hey, you can turn off permadeath! You won’t get achievements that way - and if the stats are to be believed, only ~10% of players go with permadeath on. I personally like it - but as I understand I’m a bit of a freak in that regard. I don’t think the game’s plot would hit that hard if you weren’t playing on permadeath, though.   The gameplay is mostly what you expect. Stuff breaks, sometimes randomly. But you have a mission to do. So you need to operate your station-ship in a specific way while also making sure it keeps functioning. Developing personal protocols, making sure that tools are in specific places, all that stuff is pretty much mandatory if you want to get anywhere in this game. Frustrating, maybe, but oh so satisfying - and you get awarded with resources, which add another layer of complexity but also fun.   Finally, there’s the plot. You’re stuck on a malfunctioning tin can with an unhelpful, badly-coded AI as a punishment from a corporation. Why? Well, the main character talks to her AI companion, and slowly but surely you learn all about her. Also why you’re here in particular, and what is the deal with this sector of space.   But the most interesting part is the relationship that develops between the protagonist and the AI. Now, how can you develop a real relationship with a crappy bot? Okay, there was this guy who developed a relationship with a volleyball, but you know what I mean. Well, let’s say that not everything is set in stone, and… you know what, just play the game.   No, really. I think it’s great. It’s definitely not relaxing, but it’s engaging and exciting to play. Chances are it’s not for you, and I totally get that. But if you think you can handle some heat and aren’t afraid to try playing with permadeath on - I dare you. Try Deep Sixed, and if you get as lucky as I did, you’ll have an experience that will etch itself onto your soul. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42922988/]Curator Page[/url]

I wanted to like this game, and at first I did. The begining plot is interesting and entertaining the first time you go through it, but by the fifth time it gets old. Also, I've run into multiple bugs and impossible missions, which can be very frustrating when it results in your spaceship exploding because you can no longer afford repairs, and then you get to start again and watch the intro again. It all got tedius very fast. I do think this game will become a good one once more bugs are fixed and more features are added, but it's not there yet. So for now I give it a thumbs down. I'll probably rerate it eventually, because the core is good and I have hope they'll get it to work eventually.

A great game for a modern grease monkey. I'm really on the fence about this game. I really want to give it a thumbs up, but that might be misleading since I'm writing this right after requesting a refund. Don't misunderstand, there's alot to like about this game. More importantly, this game truly is unique, which is a rare thing to find. Not everyone would like this game, but those that do would love it. You're on a spaceship with traditional quests you'd see in a space game. However, in this game, you're doing it on an old rustbucket spaceship that's falling apart. The game is largely about dong rapid repairs on the ship to try to survive. The ship is impressively complex with lots of systems and different failure types -- electrical, mechanical, software -- and you spend alot of time in the manual. Like that's part of the design. You are supposed to reference the manual as you play, a little like 'keep talking and noone explodes'. Remember the scene in the old starwars where han's trying to fix the hyperdrive so they can escape? It's like a whole game of that (not in that you're constantly escaping, but in that you're constantly doing repairs). As an engineer, I really thought the ship maintenance was very believable, which was both highly impressive and a major turn off. I played it and thought "wow, this is so much like the work I do! It's really cool that they captured it so accurately... but at the same time, this is all the stuff I'm sick of doing!" So I requested a refund. This game is really about learning and maintaining a ship. If you play this game, you'll learn the systems of this ship inside and out. If you want the gory details of what that means, glance at their online manual (https://www.littlereddoggames.com/deep-sixed chapters 3 and 4). If that looks interesting, you'll probably love this game. If not, then maybe you should avoid it, because there isn't a ton of other stuff.

This game plays quite like the space combat portion of SunDog: Frozen Legacy if anyone remembers that title, and the bones of the story and AI companion could be taken from the movie "Moon." Deep Sixed is an interesting game with a lot of clever ideas and potential, but ultimately I wouldn't recommend it. The user interface and gameplay issues are just too frustrating for the price. I am playing after the 1.2 update and I bought it for 25% off (US$9.74). I'm a big fan of indie games, roguelikes, and games that are hard. I don't need great graphics. I like space games. FTL is a recent favorite and this game reminds me of it a little bit. Another fave from the last few years is TIS-100, which (like this game) requires that you page through a PDF manual for clues and is unashamedly hard. Yet TIS-100 is hard because the puzzles are hard. This game is often hard because the game does not seem well-designed. I had to search the forums not for gameplay help but for user interface help. (How the heck do I release the repellent? How do you skip the dialogue when you restart?) It seemed somewhat puzzle-driven to me at first but the more I played I think the challenges are not actually about puzzles they are about learning sequences of clicks. About 4 hours in I stopped playing out of frustration when I realized that on easy mode the game was offering me missions that were impossible to complete. (If you are offered a mission beyond your capability and you accept it, I can't find a way to recover since you can't switch missions.) Also I found it much too likely to get into a kind of "spare parts death spiral" where it is not possible to earn any more currency to buy parts, but every time you take your ship out you lose parts. These non-recoverable paths that don't depend on any choices you made are not a good game design. What I want is a feeling of challenge and a sense that my choices matter. Sometimes I felt it, but after a while I felt more like I was up against a random number generator, not a challenge. It felt like no one had sufficiently tested and implemented guardrails to be sure my playthough was... well, playable. There's a good sense of tension and as others have pointed out the game does well at creating atmosphere with just a few minimal ingredients. But when the same malfunction hits me over and over AND OVER AND OVER again and the AI gives me the same dialogue over and OVER AND OVER again and I memorize the series of clicks to repair it I don't really feel a sense of accomplishment, I just get bored. Click click click click.

This is an okay game for people who like concepts in engineering. I played this game on a ubuntu linux desktop with radeon mesa drivers, and other linux gamers are going to like this game, too. It has the feel of the board games "Space Alert" or "Space Cadets", where mini-puzzles must be completed to keep the ship running. It also reminded me of troubleshooting a computer server, while being shot with laserblasts. The Deep Sixed challenges feel realistic, while also being completely absurd. For example, when the power goes out, you reference a fifteen tile flowchart, reference the instructions, run down to the power room, flip off the electrical breaker, examine the oscillioscope for the faulty wire color, find some wire cutters, open the wire panel, cut and replace the faulty wire, and then turn on the electrical breaker. Oh, and you have to do this between the times when things are really needing your attention, because really the lights going out is not a big problem. The world building - the narrative story - is why I really like this game. The world seems interesting in a hard scifi way. The voice acting is excellent. And the game keeps a journal of the information that you have gathered - firsthand - about this world. The player is being sent out to these far away places to find out this information, which is also very useful for surviving, too. That quest for knowledge about this interesting place is what motivates me to keep fixing all the problems. It makes me feel like I am in the middle of a 1950s pulp scifi paperback book, and I love it! Pro tip... I highly recommend keeping a copy of your local save file duplicated ("save scumming"), because there is no way to skip the lengthy tutorial speeches, during the first mission. These jokes are not entertaining, after restarting the game, and the game is restarted over and over, when playing on Normal Difficulty. The game's story is incredibly hard to complete, without cheating, and less than 10% of owners obtained the achievement of making it half-way through.

On the surface, Deep Sixed is a bit of a 90s CD-rom throwback, but looks can be deceiving. In a nutshell, Deep Sixed is a game with interesting pedigree, a mix of point and click adventure (fortunately with a hotkey to light up points of interest), manual-consulting "Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes"-style troubleshooting, FTL-style power management, and (remarkably) an open universe exploring game. Comparisons have been made with VGA-era Sierra games as well as classics such as Psi-5 Trading Company, but I would say that this is just nostalgia reaching, and Deep Sixed is very much its own thing, complete with tongue-in-cheek humor and somewhat modern multimedia presentation. The basic gameplay is a cycle of survival and expansion. You start at the space station, where you can pick a mission, order parts, and upgrade your ship. Then you deploy in your ship, choosing one of the sectors you scanned in the past, and the game begins in earnest. Your ship is made up of just eight rooms: five of them "viewing" rooms to see out of the sides of your ship, a reactor room, a hyperdrive room, and a scanner room. You move between these rooms at will, poking around point and click adventure style to manipulate the various gadgets on the ship as well as move things between ship storage and your personal inventory. Your ship is a literal space jalopy, and things will inevitably go wrong. At that point, you need to crack open the PDA and navigate the in-game manual to learn how to fix it. Depending on the severity of what's happening, you could be in a race against time to survive. Eventually, you might get skilled enough at this game that there's few things you need to consult the PDA for anymore, but then the game turns into a game of seeing how quickly you can do it. I hope you like routine active maintenence, you'll be doing a lot of it. It might take multiple foreys from the space station to complete your current mission, but successful completion earns you some nice requisition tokens that can be used to upgrade your ship or replenish your ever-dwindling supplies. Completing missions also has a tendency to move the story along, one of multiple tones. The protagonist ain't on no pleasure cruise, but rather has been railroaded by a shady corporation into doing a dirty job, and you can expect the direness of the situation to piece her sarcastic veneer at times. There's two difficulty modes that I have seen: "easy" which makes things a lot less threatening and provides an easy-to-find bullet list of what's currently malfunctioning on your ship, and "normal," without such creature comforts. It is very much possible for your adventure to end spectacularly; the developers have researched a great many ways to die in space. You can also suffer a slow death of logistics creep, simply not having the supplies or luck to shoulder on. Either way, this is a permadeath game, there are no additional save slots to go back to, so you can expect a bit of roguelike impermanence to manifest. I highly recommend running on "easy" to learn the ropes and then switch to "normal" to get the real experience, as the game is at its best when everything is going the worst. Though Deep Sixed is fairly solidly-built product with high production values for its chosen medium, and is pretty much bug free, I have encountered at least one real bug where the retrieval probe gets stuck. I was able to get around that by just leaving and restarting the game, but it begs a certain question as to how you're supposed to cope with real bugs when the game itself is about debugging? Ironically, I spent quite some time trying to find somewhere in the in-game manual which explains how to get my probe moving again. Hopefully, the developers will show commitment to quashing these bugs, few as they are. All things considered, what little flaws Deep Sixed has are vindicated by its low price tag. It's a novel experience that itches a number of nice places related to simulation, immersion, and adventure. In a sea of clones, a well-crafted novel experience is invaluable. I hope this is not the last I see of this developer.

Lots of potential but too frustrating to be fun. You'll die a lot, and every time you die you have to go through the same dialogue lines and the same early missions. I liked the idea of trying to keep a clunker of a spaceship operating with lots of complicated tasks, but the practical outcome always seemed either too easy or too hard. Either you'd cruise through a mission without real danger, or you'd end up surrounded by aliens you can't see because your screens are covered in goo, with everything broken and no chance to fix it all. Needs re-balancing.

[b]TL;DR:[/b] It's got some good ideas, but it quickly becomes tedious and frustrating, and victory is at the mercy of the random number generator. The premise of Deep Sixed is like the board game [i]Space Alert[/i] combined with [i]Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes[/i]: You're involuntary labor aboard a rickety spaceship exploring a dangerous area of space. When you're not trying to fend off hostile aliens, you're trying to fix all the breakdowns that occur every few minutes, and a comprehensive troubleshooting manual and a limited supply of spare parts are all that stands between you and certain death. After each mission, you get credits to spend on ship upgrades and more spare parts. So far, so good! It's a good idea with a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it falls apart in the execution. The first problem is in how you fail. You don't fail because you don't manage to follow a complicated troubleshooting procedure, or keep up with cascading failures, or deal with multiple simultaneous issues - you fail because you simply fail a die roll when the game decides to crash the wrong system at the wrong time. Or you fail because you don't manage to complete an entirely luck-dependent mission objective before you run out of spare parts. In short, you fail because you get arbitrarily punished by the random number generator. And with the permadeath system, failing means you have to start the entire thing from the beginning. And there is AFAIK no way to skip entire conversations - you have to keep mashing the Esc button for every line to fast forward through all the story bits you have already seen. The second problem is that there really isn't that much gameplay there to begin with. There are only a handful of ship systems, all of which are fixed in pretty much the same way: whack them with a wrench, restart their drivers, click on them and switch out the component inside, or go to a console and click buttons in an order described in the manual. After 40 minutes or so, you've really seen all the game has to offer. After maybe 2 hours, there are no longer any gameplay challenges left, and the tedium starts setting in. And some of the tasks are [i]deliberately[/i] tedious to begin with. The game is also quite crash-prone, which means that you can have all your hard-earned mission progress wiped out when the game crashes as soon as you return to base. The final straw was trying to get the good ending: the first time around I had to choose the bad ending because the RNG God had placed the final objective somewhere I had to expend all my spare parts to get to, which meant that I couldn't continue. But being one of nature's completionists, I started a new game. Only to get stuck on a mission that requires a certain monster type to spawn but where the game steadfastly refuses to spawn them. Once again it was down to "watch my supplies slowly dwindle as I hope the RNG finally rolls the dice my way". After something like [i]2 hours[/i] of that I finally threw up my hands, gave up on the game and changed my recommendation from "meh, might be worth checking out if it's on sale" to "just avoid it". I [i]really[/i] tried to like this game. The idea is good. I just hope someone else takes it and makes a better game with it.

I enjoyed the game a lot. It's a frantic mess of running around trying to fix things as they break, getting out in the nick of time, and just generally having to work with what you've got. The upgrade points are quite scarce, so it's really easy to become boxed into a corner because you ran out of points to use for repairs. It's really satisfying to be able to keep the hunk of junk working nicely. The narrative is also well-done even though there isn't much of it. I have a fair number of complaints, in no particular order. This is a permadeath game with some minor scripted story elements, and after your first reset (and there will be many resets), any scripted story elements you've already seen become very irritating to skip. There should be a "skip sequence" button in addition to the "skip line" button (both should be there). To use an item repeatedly, you have to go back and forth from your inventory to where you want to use it again and again. Since there are several items that you will do this all the time, it would probably be better if you just kept an item in your hands until you manually return it to your inventory instead. Or there could be a "pick up" vs. "use once" command, or it could be set on a per-item basis, or any number of things. But some change is warranted. A few things are not clear how to do. The probe has been mentioned in other reviews, though I actually found that easily. But I didn't find the "deploy cargo" button (located on the viewing room consoles) until I had been playing for well over 5 hours, because I assumed that the cargo would deploy itself and I just had to fight to finish the mission. As it happens, that's not the case: you need to actually deploy the cargo in order to win those missions, including the first story mission. There are some bugs. One that comes to mind relates to cancelling missions. The title of the cancelled mission shows up in the list but the actual content of the mission is replaced. But the devs appear to be updating very aggressively. Generally the game seems like it could use some more content. After you learn the ropes, you have a fair few resets as you fine-tune learning how to not get pinned, and more generally learn how you should spend your points. After all of that, actually finishing the game is a bit anticlimactic, especially since all of the story missions are rather easy. (To put it another way, the main difficulty of the game is doing the random missions in between the story missions, not actually doing the story missions.) The upgrades and replacement parts are not properly balanced. Some of the parts never get used; some of them should never get used because they break in 100% preventable situations. Some of the upgrades are vastly more powerful than others. For example, there is very little reason to want an increased number of local jumps because there is almost no penalty for going back to base with an incomplete mission (you just waste a tiny bit of power). The game is less random than it seems at first. Typically a perk of more traditional roguelikes is that they're fun to play many times even after you've beaten them. I don't think I'll replay Deep Sixed (unless there are content updates), because I've seen most of what there is to see. One of the prominently listed features is the fancy creature behavior. I never observed this in-game, and even after I read about it out-of-game, I see no reason to bother with exploiting it. If the player doesn't see it in regular play and a player that knows about it does not feel incentivized to exploit it, then it really doesn't need to be there at all. There are some reasons that you might want to power systems down when you have ample power. You need to power your targeting system down in order to reinstall its drivers, and you need to partially power your lasers down in order to mine asteroids. And supposedly you can calm certain creatures down by powering down your scanner or hyperdrive. But if your power storage is full, you have to consume the power, probably using your lasers, in order to power things down. It seems like you should be able to just "vent" energy instead. (Having limited storage is fine.) Still an absolute thumbs up from me.

A very interesting game, albeit with some tiny frustrating kinks. So the idea is that you play the role of a former AI engineer that, through complicated mishaps, winds up in the involuntary employ of an unsettling corporation, carrying out tasks amidst an uncharted nebula on a circular spaceship with naught but an AI for company. Murphy's Law starts to kick in and anything that can malfunction will inevitably malfunction. I've heard the FTL comparison quite a lot, but the mechanic that most resembles FTL is the idea of power management, with a limited pool of energy to make various systems function more effectively that can be replenished through a dwindling supply of cells. The comparison I would make, however, is more along the lines of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes for how much it deliberately relegates the ship function tutorials to the in-game manual, and only teaches the absolute basics through gameplay. This I quite like - frantically panicking for the right section in the manual for a given problem that comes up makes for a compelling atmosphere, and that's when you DID remember to search the lockers for every tool you may need at any moment. The sound design in both the ambient noise and the component sounds really add to this tactile feeling - you really feel like you're alone in the depths of space desperately trying to keep your decrepit ship together as you dash around the ring surrounding your main ship's body, trying to find that one creature that's been ramming cracks in your ship's portholes for the past minute. If I was to give a criticism, there are a couple of things that the manual isn't entirely clear on, such as launching probes to collect salvage (you target it on the viewing deck radar screen and hit the button - there, I just saved you a ton of stress). I'm also not too keen on there being no option to skip a dialogue scene in its entirety, when the only option is to merely skip the individual lines by repeatedly hammering the escape key. If this could be done after all, I certainly didn't see the option. Given the permadeath aspect of this game, I would have thought skipping the cutscenes and dialogue we've heard tons of times before would be common sense. Worse, I actually ran into a bug when I skipped the second major story FMV, locking the game into a black screen while the dialogue continued. However, I have faith that these will get fixed. I really enjoyed the three straight hours I spent with this game, and I really feel like it's a great game to both relax and panic over, sometimes simultaneously given the circumstances. Recommended for anyone who prefers a hands-on approach to starship maintainance. 8/10