Nantucket Reviews

The final boss battle against Mobydick ruined the experience for me. making an boss invincible is fine but allowing him to become invincible again makes it feel cheap and completely based on rng.

There are almost no whaling games out there but luckily Nantucket exists and is a great game. It can be rough at first especially when you get tag teamed by whales who stun every attack but once you find your stride everything starts to come together. It's also fun the whole time even when you're being mollywhopped by a group of whales or sharks. If I have one complaint it's that the game takes just a little too long when turns are being played out and you can't increase the speed of the messages. The tutorial teaches you the game and is short but it really takes your hand and drags you through it without giving you a moments pause. It's effective tho and teaches you enough to play but leaves you to figure things out. Also real world knowledge of whaling in New England has been useful in finding whaling spots.

The history of whaling and its role in the economy of 19th Century Atlantic countries is interesting, and this game does a very good job immersing the player in that world in many ways. You'll captain a whaling ship, sailing in search of profit and adventure; make crew decisions, take special missions, occasionally stumble on some prey, then return to port and do some upgrading. The real problem I've had with this game is that I cannot seem to get very good at playing it. There's a lot of grind to the whole thing, and even when I get lucky with some RNG, I still ultimately fail every campaign I start before I can really get too far into the story. The battle mechanic is based on dice rolls, and at lower levels of crew, these battles are usually very dangerous to undertake. The punishment for errors is grave (watery grave, if you will), and I had a tendency to rage quit after losing a critically competent crewmember to a chance encounter with some sharks or some thing. Art is actually very nice, hand-drawn aesthetic with a kind of classic card-game simulation feel to the game. I don't regret playing this game at all, and the things that I really enjoyed about it (the art, the atmosphere, the historical elements) are well done -- but I can't objectively recommend the game unless you are specifically interested in 19th Century maritime.