Overboard!

Release Date: June 2, 2021

Adventure, detective, 2D, visual novel, indie games, interwar period, singleplayer

8.8

OpenCritic

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Visual novel, in which we play the heroine trying to cover the traces of a murder she committed. Overboard! has a non-linear plot formed by our decisions.

Videos and Screens

[0:39] Overboard! launch trailer

8.8

OpenCritic Rating

Game is Recomended by 98% of Critics. There are 23 Critic Reviews.

OpenCritic

Hey Poor Player: 4.5 / 5 by Andrew Thornton

Even with multiple goals to accomplish, secrets to uncover, and potential endings to see, Overboard! isn’t going to last you months. This is a relatively short game. You might run through it thirty times, but many of those will take ten to fifteen minutes. Others might take thirty minutes to an hour on the long end, but this is an appetizer, the sort of game to be savored over a long weekend rather than obsessed over for months. That’s not a slight. That weekend will be filled with fascinating twists, especially considering you know from the very start what actually happened. Overboard! is a wonderful voyage, well worth your time. Just make sure you don’t go over the rail yourself.

Full Review

RPG Fan: 88 / 100 by Jonathan Logan

Overboard! is an outstanding time-loop game that challenges you to think like a crafty murderer out of an Agatha Christie novel!

Full Review

PC Invasion: 8 / 10 by Tim McDonald

Charming, witty, and very replayable: Overboard flips the whodunnit on its head and proves that it can, indeed, be good to be bad.

Full Review

Overboard! is a visual novel game in which we have to carry out a kind of "anti-investigation". Game was developed by independent studio inkle, which is known for such projects as 80 Days, Heaven's Vault and Pendragon.

Plot

The action of Overboard! takes place in July 1935, on board of SS Hook - a passenger ship sailing from England to New York. The main character of the game is Veronica Villensey, who at the end of the cruise decides to murder her husband. The protagonist now has eight hours to cover her tracks, wash away all suspicion and, ideally, find another culprit before she sails for America. Due to the non-linear structure of the story, which ending we see and which events we take part in depends on our actions and the choices we make.

Mechanics

At first glance, the gameplay in Overboard! does not differ too much from what we are accustomed to in other visual novels. The game involves following the story, talking to characters, and making decisions that affect the further course of the story.

What makes this game different from most other productions of this type is the fact that we have a strictly limited amount of time to conduct our "investigation" (eight hours as the title says) and every action we take causes the precious minutes to elapse. And you have to admit that there is a lot to do here. We have to talk to passengers and try to collect as much information as possible about what they know about the case, as well as explore the ship in search of evidence to get rid of. It's worth remembering that not all of the available actions and paths we can take are important or useful, and not all of them will lead us to a happy ending.

It's impossible to do everything in a single playthrough, so we have to work out the perfect crime, after which not even a shadow of a suspicion will fall on us, by trial and error. The game is also designed and encouraged for multiple playthroughs; dialogue choices or choices we've made in the past are highlighted and scenes can be scrolled through.