Vessels

A short but well made story! The concept is interesting, and it was fun exploring, learning about the characters, and getting answers for the questions the story brought up. Had some nice life lessons too. Worth more then the asking price for sure! Easily recommended!

Ein Spiel was Spannung und Interesse für Charaktere innerhalb von 2 bis 3 Stunden erreicht. Man lernt die Crew mitglieder und deren Beziehungen untereinander kennen durch Unterhaltungen und Hinwiesen die überall im Schiff verteilt sind. Dafür das dieses Spiel scheinbar "nur" von ein paar Studenten entwickelt wurde bietet es eine erschreckend gute Geschichte.

A very fun little game with a good mystery behind it.

The narrative design of Vessels is just lovely. It is a game about choices. This is holistically, cohesively expressed in every facet of it design, from the great mystery to unravel, to the interactions available and the very well written dialogue. An easy recommendation as a short game of substance.

I started to like this game as a mystery game where you have to explore, find information and then use it to progress the story but it then seemed to fall into the trap of your typical detective game where you know the answer but you have to resort to having the same conversation multiple times and experimenting with the conversation branches to get the answer you are looking for as the option you chose doesn't lead where you would expect it to lead. This seemed to be handled well at the start of the game where if you gave the wrong answer you just got spaced and carried on. To speed it up when you knew you had it wrong or needed to reboot you could even space yourself. As you got out of the airlock though this began to become more and more tedious. Every time you got it wrong you have to call someone, wait for them to arrive, possess them (again), go and return to the conversation you were trying to solve, often having to trawl through large parts of the same conversation, pick your next option, tell quite obviously you got it wrong and are going to be spaced but have to trawl through the remainder of the conversation before you are actually spaced, then have to go through a number of options about what decicions you want in this timeline before respawning and starting the process again. I call games like this, try it and die games. Try it and die games can be ok if the process to get to the point of trying again is not labourious...in this game it became labourious and thus i just stopped playing. You can obviously check a guide but i knew the answer i was getting to, it was just boring getting there and if i am going to follow a guide i may aswell just read a synopsis as the point is the experience along the way.

For such a low asking price this game is more than worth it. It will take you a few hours to finish, and doing so spins you a story that will have you eager to unravel more. The premise is unique and largely character-driven, centering around themes such as grief and identity. These themes are directly represented in the mechanics... but I am trying REALLY hard here not to spoil anything, so I'll just reccomend it now and let it speak for itself.

An adventure/sleuth game with off-screen psychological horror. There are prychologically wicked endings, a not-so-certain positive ending, and a very bugged true ending where you can save everyone. The characters grow on you. At first they feel cold because you don't understand what's hapening, but as the game goes on, you realize they had good motives to be that way. Then, they get some character development from one Act to another. Unfortunately, that's just more frustrating if you want to try to save them, the game is too bugged to provide a sense of completion: - You can't reach the true ending in an immersive way, or even through using your cue logically, what looks like a bug makes the "good" route you end up on random. - The dialogues don't bring up as many options as it would make with the clues you gather. - Voices are mentionned, but in the current version (1.1) there is no voice over, jsut nice sounds during dialogues. - The game doesn't save, so if you reach a bad ending ou must do everything over again, deaths included, and that get bothersome after a while. At that price, through, well, why not? You can always remove it from your account afterwards.