Interesting concept for a world and game, but the actual game and gameplay are more chore than source of enjoyment. Played my first captain 'blind' aka without using the wiki and was interesting to explore with bit of tension not knowing how far I could go safely or what to expect. Beyond that initial sense of exploration the game becomes dull and vague, repeatedly stumbling around in the dark without any sense of progressing until you realise you need to have the wiki open in a browser and constantly using it to double check where you saw something for sale or where it was you needed item x, y, or z. There are many elements that hint of all sorts of options for shaping the future of the world, but feel kind of arbitrary as to why you might pick one over the other as feels lacking in info about them as many things you choose first and info gets drip fed somewhere down the line.

I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this.

When playing games like FTL: Faster Than Light the roguelike aspect makes a lot of sense. The roguelike of this game is questionable at best. I'm supposed to explore the "Zee" (underground sea) so shouldn't this be an adventure game ... about exploration? Instead ALL of my resources, my ship, my weapons, my captains, my stats, Everything gets taken away because I decided to explore ... ?

I hate seeing Lovecraftian and madness (called terror in-game) meters. Such a slap in the face to H.P. Lovecraft and his ideas and attitudes of reality. Especially how boring and uninventive it is in this game. Why not do something as your madness rises? If I was truly going mad, wouldn't I be hallucinating or having delusions? You're making a game with visual and audio feedback for your player. Why would I read about going mad? Bad game design, that's why.


The boat is sooooooo incredibly slow. If you don't lookup some guide on how to farm money for a good ship and engine to get to the speed of smell, you'll take 20+ minutes to go from 1 side of the map to the other and it's not because the map is big (literal, real life 20 minutes, not in-game time). And you know what those guides are going to tell you to do? "Take X to Y", "Get me 20 Z from A", "Go to B and buy X, then you can go to C and sell it for X+2" 🤢🤮 This game is so slow and the story is just me reading. I'm playing a video game and most of the time is reading. The combat is bugged/laughable (ships give up if you're behind them) and the exploration just leads to more reading or fetch quests. IDK about you, but if I was reading a book and I went to turn the page but a QTE came up, failed it and the whole book shut in my face, I'd be pissed. This game would have been a decent book, but that doesn't make it any less of a bad game.

There are some games that should have never seen the light of day. This is one of them.

This is a fantastic game! Really immersive and lore-heavy, while also having fun exploration and combat mechanics--an instant favorite for me! The game also has a "legacies" system where when you die, you get to keep a little bit of what you've accumulated for your next zee-captain, which incentivizes you to not die, but also not be terribly crushed by that same inevitability. I love this game (not sponsored)!!