The 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 onboard 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 you 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. The 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, the 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. The 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, I decided to never identify anyone until I found 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, it turns out everybody can be pinpointed based only on logical reasoning rather than broad assumptions. And I bet there aren't many games that make you feel more like a genius by figuring it out.
