Playing A Game Why Am I Dead At Sea PC

I'm not positive that Why Am I Dead At Sea is an RPG Maker game - it's got some UI bits that I don't exactly recognize - but it certainly has the half-baked implementation quirks that I've come to associate with the engine.

First, the good news: this game tells a compellingly dark mystery story. What initially appears to be a possession-puzzle game like Geist or Ghost Trick turns out to, in fact, be a dialog-based text-adventure thriller. Its characters are satisfyingly deep, and the interactions that you force them into weave a genuinely interesting and memorable tale.

Unfortunately the tools employed to tell that story are clunky at their best, and sometimes are outright broken.

As your ghost possesses characters aboard the ship and tries to reveal the next story beat, you'll sometimes need to search for a key item; but most often, you have to interrogate (talk to) other characters. All of these conversations have branches and sub-branches and so on, where your list of dialog choices shows options from the current branch, and a "go back" option which ... usually ends the whole conversation. That means there's a whole lot of restarting a conversation from scratch just to try another option.

If you've already heard the response to some option, it'll show as gray, instead of white. Except when it doesn't! in what I assume is a UI bug. And sometimes the reverse happens, i.e. a choice you haven't selected yet - and hence, information you haven't read yet - is incorrectly, misleadingly gray.

There are several passengers on the ship who you can take possession of, and it's a cool point of character depth that their unique personalities can elicit different responses from other characters. But this also means that some plot details are hidden deep within the matrix of specific combinations of possession-host and dialog-target, requiring you to talk to the same character and hear mostly-the-same things multiple times until hitting the right combo.

Depending on how much you learn about a passenger, your ghost can partially or fully possess them, and each possession mode has different dialog options. So, go ahead and square that combination-matrix problem.

Some of the plot's hints are so obtuse, and the work involved in its dialog gets so tiresome, that I felt no shame at all when referencing a guide. Ain't nobody got time to talk to everyone 15 times just to find the right piece of evidence to move forward.

The story is great, and I'm glad that I saw the game through to experience it. But my recommendation to others will be to find a well-edited gameplay video instead -- one that doesn't waste its time on all the pointless re-clicking and re-reading that the game essentially forces upon you.

Better than: Murdered: Soul Suspect, Red Spider: Vengeance
Not as good as: Last Word
Also not as good as: To the Moon, if only because those dialog trees - the whole point of the game - are such a pain.

Rating: Meh