This interactive story game is fun to play and replay through as even when you succeed you may still find that there is more to the story, leaving room to go back and check for other paths and try to fix your current choices or even try to find another route. My only complaint is that some of the choices are not very clear as to the dialogue that will be given to them, for example, when it give the option to rest in your room, it would be nice to know that this means that you will sleep through the final meeting and essentially forfeit the round rather than nap until the meeting as I was attempting to do to pass the remaining 30 min or so till the final meeting. VERY daunting to have to restart and repeat all the same choices just to see if what I had would have worked >:/ ... Otherwise a great game and worth the cost.

UPDATE: Bumped up to 5 stars thanks to the recent update to optimize battery utilization. This is - like all Inkle games - an extremely well-written game with a simple premise: get away with murder on a ship. For those unfamiliar with Inkle games, this is like a choose your own adventure with great depth. The dialogue feels natural; the graphics are clean and snappy; the sound is minimal and appropriate. Most importantly, the replayability and variety of choices is vast. The challenge is quite high, as you’re dealing with a large variety of dialogue options coupled with a time crunch to meet your goals. As you take an action, time passes. Each character is on a different part of the ship at a different time of day, so you need to be strategic about what you want to say / do / when you want to go to each section. Also with each replay, you learn something new and unlock new objectives. This adds to the challenge. For me, this is another slam dunk from Inkle that I’ll be sinking hours into.

If you are coming to this app from 80 Days, lower your expectations. Lower. Lower. Keep going…Despite the high price point of $5.99, this game only lasts about 15 minutes on the first playthrough. There isn’t much variation, either. After two or three plays you’ll be experiencing more old than new material. The total word count must be roughly equivalent to a chapter of a YA novel. There’s no reason, from a user-based perspective, to fill a game with so much repetition. The advantage is entirely the designer’s. Imagine that you have to create five unique paragraphs, but that the sentences within those paragraphs don’t have to be unique. If you were lazy, you’d save yourself a lot of effort by repurposing the same sentences in different arrangements. That’s essentially what Inkle has done here. Instead of putting forth the effort to create a rich game even a fraction as good as 80 Days, they’re counting on players getting focused on slight variations to create different outcomes—even though that means that after a few short plays, most of what the players are experiencing is tired and repetitive. For some players, this is obviously working. For me, it’s a cheap trick. I thought for a moment that the story was going to continue with her life beyond the boat with new scenes—but no, it’s just that same dumb boat with the same handful of characters and rooms. If you’re going to provide so little material, fine, but drop the price several dollars.