Concept of this game is rather simple yet ingenious and brilliantly executed. You're dropped on the titular ghost ship with a crew manifest (containing names, nationalities and roles) and sketches by an on-board artist depicting all of them. Your only job is to determine what happened to every single one of those 60 individuals. To make things more interesting, you got this magic pocket watch which, upon finding a corpse, allows to witness and explore a static scene of one's death. This should make the task easy, right? Well, despite the ubiquity of death, dead giveaways are a rare luxury. Vast majority of identities must be deduced by means such as language, accent, appearance, bits of dialogue and minute details found across the memories, or a process of elimination to succeed. Every time any three fates get correctly established, game confirms it - which makes brute-forcing harder while saving you time should you err. There are no stages or detached sections; it's a singular, giant puzzle and it will feel overwhelming. Screenshots don't do justice to how good it looks in action. These minimalistic graphics combined with fantastic music, sound design and voice acting make for such an incredible atmosphere that it's nothing short of an audiovisual masterpiece. I finished it twice over a week. First time around I missed many clues and ended up gaming the validating system a bit by taking educated, but still, guesses. I wasn't entirely satisfied with that and during the second run decided to never identify anyone until I found a solid evidence to back it up. Despite knowing the solutions beforehand, it proved to be no less enjoyable in addition to allowing me to fully appreciate how intricately woven the whole thing is, which is easy to miss when relying on guesswork. Indeed, turns out everybody can be pinpointed based only on logical reasoning rather than broad assumptions. And I bet there aren't many games to make you feel more like a genius by figuring it out.
Mutazione is a "talking simulator" with essentially no gameplay. Each of the in-game days consists of talking to the same handful of characters until you find one who allows you to proceed to the next stage. And then you do exactly the same routine, multiple times a day, until the day's over - rinse and repeat for a week. Other than talking, there's also gardening which is foreshadowed as some kind of a big deal and vital part of the game but really isn't and feels lackluster. You could just plant whatever, play a song until it's grown, harvest the fruit you need, and never look back at that garden ever again. It's baffling because the devs evidently put a lot of work into it by adding dozens of different plants and even making a separate mode just for gardening, yet I never felt any incentive to play around with that. Even if you like this sort of thing, it seems rather limited and interface is not that great. I felt like half the playtime was spent on wandering the same locations over and over to check if there's a person to talk to. Writing-wise everything felt tepid. It's occasionally funny, but you won't be bursting out laughing. It's sometimes sad, but you won't be crying. Story was intriguing enough that I finished it in two days, but it's not particularly memorable. All characters, albeit likable and sympathetic, are rather dull. Despite heavy use of magical realism, it's quite mundane. I get that authors went for this down-to-earth vibe and it's totally fine. Refreshing and bold even. Not everything has to be flashy and sensational. It's just that I personally couldn't really fully connect with neither those characters nor the story. There are also a few moments that can make you raise your brow. Like a senile old hippie giving psychedelic drugs to his teenage granddaughter. Or a pregnant woman who can barely tell who the father of her child is, and then decides... Well, I'm not gonna spoil the conclusion to one of the major subplots; see for yourself.
At first I was close to disregard HO as yet another overrated hipster indie trash and uninstall it after a few minutes. Like, what the hell is it? Am I really supposed to comb through all those horribly looking and poorly written blogs by some old boomers and kids? God, why there are so many of them?! At the beginning I was just impatiently skimming through available pages, looking for what they wanted me to. But that's not the way to enjoy it. I'm not sure when that moment came exactly, but at one point I found myself much more invested in reading some randos musings about some random topics, checking for updates on known pages and discovering new ones than completing the tasks I was assigned. Randos became the names I recognize, either because I was already familiar with them or I read about them somewhere else. Initially annoying songs and jingles became irresistible earworms. Pointless at first glance drivel became captivating read when I started noticing all the more or less evident connections between various parties and overlapping themes. The illusion of authentic, living social network in an alternative version of the world they created is really quite impressive, and the experience of exploring its vast and widely varied contents (there is a TON of content, a big part of which entirely optional and/or hidden) surprisingly rewarding for those who decide to take a deep dive and immerse themselves in it. There is a storyline that kicks in later on. Gameplay reminds a bit the "Orwell" games. Basically doing a detective job by piecing together clues found across websites. Early tasks are rather simple and obvious, but down the line they can become quite devious when figuring out passwords or accessing nonpublic parts of the network comes into play. Hints can be subtle and scattered in random places, so being thorough while browsing, paying attention, bookmarking conspicuous pages beforehand, and having a good memory for details can help immensely.
