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Winston Churchill once said, “When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.” I think he left out the part about the colostomy bag though.
At it’s core, “The Ship” should be good. It should be a right-proper game about pretending to be a well-rounded dapper gentleman (or gentle-lady) enjoying himself on a cruise whilst inwardly walking the line between frantic and psychotic as you both tried to avoid your killer whilst you stalked your prey. It should have been a game that perfectly captured the essence of the board game “Clue” in digital format. It should have been a game about dashing good looks, wild costume changes and a devilish boat-owner. It should have been. It was so close.
You are one of dozens of passenger on a ship. Veered off-course and blanketed in radio silence, the ship has become an invisible island–a place where none but its inhabitants know of its location, its purpose or what happens whilst it remains such a state. The ship-owner comes online and informs you of all this, with a twist–you each have a quarry and a hunter. Kill your quarry, avoid your hunter–and don’t die. Altogether, the themeing and mood strike excitement… until you get into the game.
The problem with the Ship, is that it’s a simulator of a simulator. It simulates the experience of being a dapper gentleman on-board a ship filled with Hunger-game-like killers which in tuurn simulates the experience of being part of a Hunger-game-like-game. Confused? It’s like this. If the game had mechanics that forced you to play a bit more like you were actually a right-jolly-fellow on a Ship, whereupon cover, identity, and cunning were required in order to survive it would have been great. If you had to kill and avoid being killed in an elimination game whereas all clues were hidden and only revealed to the clever, then the game would have been fun. As it is, it only simulates this experience since everything you do in the game is dictated to you through talking heads or your quest log, and a deviation from such a tale results in a slap on the wrist and a restart at the last checkpoint. Lame. This in turn of course is the backdrop for the actual game itself which is simulating the kill-or-be-killed Hunger-like game.
There is certainly some amusement to be in exploring your character’s basic needs. You’ll need to do everything from eat, sleep and take the occasional dump to name a few. Failure results in… DEATH. No, I’m not kidding. I refused to empty my bowels in the toilet after I reached my limit and after about a minute I literally died of a “nasty disease.”
I love the concept of these player needs but sadly they weren’t enough to propel me forward long enough to get too far in the game. They’re fun but they come off as a bit Sims™-sy. And just like the Sims™-sy feeling you get from playing the Sims™ for too long, you realize that you’re managing a Sims™’s bowel movements while neglecting your own. At least there were some goofy items like the catheter and colostomy bag to keep it entertaining and… original.
I don’t know if the multiplayer is any better as there are no open servers as of today (no surprise) but I get the feeling the experience would be somewhat similar to the single player. Good for an hour or two of laughs but lacking very much sustainability and probably nothing worth taking too seriously. That being said, it’s certainly not a *bad* game–I would grade it at Tier 2™ and recommend that you at least try it out if you get the chance (preferably with a group of friends if you can)–but as it stands, the single player experience was a disappointment. I would have been much happier with the game’s “story” to end right after the opening cutscene, and then be allowed to play a simulated version of the multiplayer game, with various settings like the number of passengers on the ship, their individual or collective difficulty levels, the requirements to win, how big/small the ship was, weapons available, etc. Can you imagine how fun it would be to do a mannequin-arm-only run?
