4/5 ★ – PassiveAgressive's review of Overboard!.

Hello friends, 2021 saw a surprising emergence of games that made the choice to experiment with the time loop gimmick, and many of those games ended up on numerous game of the year lists published by various magazines and critics. Among them are titles like Deathloop, 12 minutes, The Forgotten City, and, of course, Overboard. It might be evident to you that Overboard is the game that generated the least hype out of the ones I listed, and that comes as no surprise for several reasons: 1. Inkle Entertainment is a relatively niche studio that focuses on text-based experiences, and not triple-A titles with rich graphics. 2. Unlike other time loop games of 2021, Overboard holds its cards close to its chest. In fact, the game was marketed as a reverse murder mystery, rather than a time loop game (and, truthfully, it was barely marketed at all). Nevertheless, this little text-based indie game now finds itself on my personal Game of The Year list for 2021, contending with giants like RE8: Village and Hitman 3. So, what is so special about Overboard, and why should (or shouldn’t) you play it? The setting and dialogue evoke an Agatha Christie-ish vibe, with the narrative centered around a murder and a limited list of suspects. However, the game throws a major twist into the formula: YOU are the killer, and have to do everything in your power to get away from the vengenful hand of justice. The genre of Overboard’s gameplay is hard to pinpoint. I guess, it can be best described as a trial and error puzzle: the player only has so little time to interact with multiple moving variables to set up favorable outcomes, and escape their precarious position on the ship with money, man, and freedom. The first playthrough will take about 20-40 minutes, and see the player rush to acquaintance themselves with the list of “suspects”, attempt to cover up their wrongdoing, and very likely fail miserably at doing so. With the heroine of the story in prison, the player can attempt to beat the game again with the KNOWLEDGE of what went wrong the last time around. As you learn more and more about which tracks require covering, what each NPC does in the short timeframe, and how fellow passengers react to the protagonist’s shenanigans, step-by-step, you get closer to that perfect course of action that sees Mrs. (Ms?) Villensey avoid the blame for the killing of her husband. What starts off as a simple and seemingly straightforward experience soon evolves into a high-stakes powderkeg: NPCs are free to interact with the ship and each other, finding evidence, coming to their own conclusions, and scheming. While without any interference from the player each NPC will stick to a specific routine, even minor actions from the protagonist will see them adapt and change their behavior. The characters themselves are delightful: initially represented as stereotypical participants of an early 20th century whodunnit story, under appropriate pressure from Veronica Villensey they will soon reveal multiple skeletons in each of their closets. Affairs, stolen identities, murders, and radical ideologies of the hand-drawn cast await discovery! To summarize, Overboard is a beautiful little indie-game that does not bite off more than it can chew. It does not attempt to do much, but executes masterfully all that it does set out to achieve. It is a text-based title, and while the writing is amazing, I can not deny that it might not strike the fancy of every potential player. Personally, I highly recommend this game: it is short, simple, and beautiful. Even if you don’t like it as much as I do, the game would have likely already done its magic and conveyed its story by the time you put it down. A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets, I hate dolphins, PassiveAgressive