the ship
the ship was part of the indie royale graduation bundle, but i'd previously heard of it through the numerous giveaways of it on steamgifts. i thought it was like one of those murder mystery games (normally played without a computer) where one of the players is the murderer and everyone is trying to figure out who that is. i wasn’t particularly impressed with that idea, but that turned out to be irrelevant because it’s actually that the murder hasn’t happened yet and each player is given a target they have to hunt down while also avoiding being murdered by whoever is hunting them. this is along the lines of what i understand the assassin’s creed multiplayer to be, though on a cruise ship rather than city rooftops.
for some reason, the ship complete comes with three separate games to install: multiplayer, single player, and tutorial. i started with the tutorial, which does a decent job of introducing you to how the game works (though some real examples would have made it even better). the downside is that it’s over a gigabyte and is essentially a 5-minute in-game tutorial. when i moved onto single player, my custom control mappings didn’t carry over, so that work configuring the tutorial had to be done again on single player and yet again for multiplayer.
as i usually do in games that have both single player and multiplayer, i tried single player next. it starts off with a story that seems to fit what i knew of the multiplayer, but then you get help throwing off your hunter to free you up to do other jobs for the staff / other passengers. it took me about 3 hours to play through single player. while it was somewhat interesting, i found not having someone secretly trying to murder me made it a lot more relaxed. it does however feature the possibility of being thrown in the brig if seen holding a “weapon” and sims-like needs to eat, drink, sleep, pee, etc. this adds a question like “maybe i should eat something before i hunt down and murder this dude,” which probably would have had a better sense of urgency if someone was still trying to murder me.
if you do want someone trying to murder you (which seems to be the point), play multiplayer. you might even get killed “for no reason” by someone who wasn’t assigned to murder you. you can play arcade mode which is you and a bunch of bots who in my one round didn’t attempt to kill their target unless i was involved. the real fun is playing with other people, where everyone’s worried that whoever’s walking up to them is plotting their demise. if you get too paranoid and start taking out everyone you see in a demented form of self-defense, you end up getting fined. you actually win through reaching a certain dollar amount, so getting fined is bad for you. you make money through kills, with random ranking of which weapon is worth the most (you can easily look this up before choosing your weapon).
since the best part of the ship is multiplayer against other humans, you’re going to need people to play against. looking at servers without a password in steam shows me only 15, a handful of which are empty. luckily, the ship comes with two extra copies you can give to friends you’ve convinced to play with you. when they add the ship to their accounts, they each get one extra copy to give to yet another friend, so you could pay once and get five people with the game. that might not be enough to really fill up a server and make it interesting, but it’s a good start.
even though i find the tutorial and single player unnecessary, the ship is only available on steam as the complete pack for about $20 regular price. considering you get 5 copies, that’s only $4 a copy and worth it if you have 4 friends who would play it with you, or at least split the cost. if you’re on your own i still recommend it if you see it on sale for $5. as for me, i still have the extra copies sitting in my inventory but am hoping to give them out next time i’m at a lan party and get a game going!
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