Why Am I Dead At Sea Review
By Dante (@videodante)
- Why Am I Dead At Sea
- Developer- Peltast Software
- Publisher- Peltast Software
- Steam
Video games as a medium are a strange and young form of expression. We’re still grappling with ways of engagement and storytelling, constantly moving and shifting our knowledge of how to tell tales. It’s unsurprising that many of our footfalls will be clumsy. Why Am I Dead At Sea is a great example of this- it’s making steps in the right direction, just doing them clumsily.
It’s not a game I didn’t enjoy- certainly, the writing has character, the characters are well written, and I ran into a minimal number of bugs- but it’s a game that consistently frustrated me. Now, I’m not exactly a fan of puzzle games. I usually give up on them as soon as I run into a puzzle that stumps me– if I am not sufficiently drawn in by the other aspects of the game. WAIDAS did the work of making me interested past the awkward puzzle sections, and for that it deserves praise.
The game is structured as an adventure-game-by-way-of-Earthbound, a mixture that occasionally works in its favor, but more than often I found myself brute-forcing the “puzzle” structure. You play as a ghost, identity initially unknown, contacted by a boy who can see ghosts. He explains to you that in order to find peace, you must uncover the facts of your death. This is done through varying levels of spectral possession of the crew and guests on the ship on which you died. Through conversation and clever sleuthing, you can move from a ‘partial control’ of characters to a ‘full control’ of characters, allowing for you to speak for yourself- as a spirit- rather than working off of the limited conversation options of the character.
Developer Peltast deserves some credit for writing a large cast of characters. The personalities of the crew and guests on the voyage are all distinct, ranging from clownish (the over-exuberant first mate Ferdinand) to Final Fantasy-villain level angst (the dark and mysterious Donovan, who rarely speaks and quickly is established as Someone You Should Keep Tabs On). As a spirit, you have the ability to ‘read minds’, offering small vignette views into each character’s ‘mind’- an ability that, disappointingly, very quickly shows itself as relatively useless.
In fact, many of the material actions you can perform as a player (as a ghost or as a possessed cruise guest) quickly show themselves to be near-useless. Every living character has unique abilities that you have access to when possessing them, that range from the “kind of useful” (Quella, the writer, can sense the ‘mood’ of conversation partners when speaking to them) to the “completely pointless” (Gwen, the traveler, can see into rooms through keyholes… while in spirit form, you can walk through walls).
Ultimately, these abilities only contribute to the feeling that the game is structured around a decent story surrounded by tacked-on, lackluster mechanics. This became more obvious as traversing the physical space of the environment quickly became my least-favorite aspect of playthrough.
Physical traversal through the ship is clumsy and awkward, and since each character has slightly different movement speed, I often found certain trips from the basement levels to the observation deck to be exercises in perseverance, listening to the same looping audio track for the thousandth time. I like chiptunes too- but any song gets a bit grating when you hear it over and over (and over, and over, and over…).
I couldn’t help but think that WAIDAS would have been more suited to a visual novel or Twine-style game, something with player attention more focused on the character interactions instead of “running around a cruise liner.”
Come to think of it, I’m sure you could finish the entire game without once using the “unique abilities” of the guests- other than the cat, Sunshine, who allows traversal in the heating vents. Good job, Sunshine.
Without revealing much about the ending of the game, I found the final chapters to be the most engaging. It’s a short game (I finished it in around 5 hours, and could have done it faster if I didn’t get stuck so often) but the ending feels like a satisfying conclusion to a long, slow burn of character discovery. Each of the ensemble cast has a character arc, of varying quality and satisfaction, and nearly every character is seen to have a moment of “finding peace with themselves,” nudged along by the player poking around in their head. It’s not a bad blueprint for an ensemble story- the structure of the experience simply holds it back.
Overall, the game is… solid. It’s far from perfect, but if you are hooked by the characters and general setting, the writing is good enough to keep you playing. The primary hangups I had with my experience were based in the fact that treading the same ground over and over with little visible progression gets tiring- which is far from a damning statement. If you are a fan of character-driven puzzle games, you will probably enjoy WAIDAS. It’s a game with a lot of heart, and is clearly aiming for a sense of ‘wonder’ that it doesn’t quite hit, but tries valiantly.