14 DAY TRIAL // 
What do you get when you combine a luxury cruise with one of the most popular occult universes in the entire pop culture? A Groundhog Day-like adventure which will aim to thrill the fans of Cthulhu, making them relive the same nightmare day after day. Is this an adventure worth the deep dive or should you sail to other waters? Read on to find out.
Dread Nautical starts by promising a leisure cruise on a ship called Hope. Soon the dream vacation turns into a recurrent nightmare since all the people aboard turn into pawns of a twisted mind-bending game. Trapped in an epic storm in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the ship becomes a playground for the occult: the laws of time and space are melting away together with the sanity of people. Most of the passengers and crew become possessed and turn into monsters from other dimensions. Not everyone goes down this rabbit hole, a handful of passengers and crew members trying to cling on to the remnants of their sanity. You are one of these unlucky survivors whose only hope is to relive the same day, again and again, trying to break the pattern and escape a terrible faith.
At the beginning of the game, you can choose from four different characters, each with its own unique traits and playstyle. If you are a fan of film noir, you can choose an old fashioned private eye skilled with handguns. If you prefer a more hands-on approach you can try your luck as a former Yakuza enforcer. If you are a gamer to the bitter end you can go for the geek, while those looking for stardom can choose a disco singer.
No matter who tickles your fancy the task remains the same: search for other survivors, fulfill their requests to be able to recruit them, and together explore the 20 decks of the ship spiraling down into insanity. On your expeditions, you will face monsters, gather resources, and inevitably sound the foghorn to end one nightmarish day after another.
Dread Nautical being a game with rogue-like elements, the levels are procedurally generated, which means that each time you revisit a deck it will change. There will be a different layout, different objects, different opponents dropping various amounts of crafting materials. Being trapped at sea you cannot expect to find outside help, so you will have to make do with what is your disposal. Being an RPG, this means that (hopefully) you will get better at surviving. You will gain new abilities and you will be able to use the scavenged materials to improve your gear and fortify your makeshift base of operations.
At first, you will have to venture alone into the belly of the ship, but later you will be able to enlist the help of two other survivors. During these scavenger hunts, you will have to look out not only for the monsters roaming the ship but also for the physical and mental needs of your heroes. A hungry, injured, or insane companion becomes a liability. The stress level felt by the player is increased also by the fact that weapons have a limited number of uses, as well as by the limited space in your inventory.
These mechanics add a management layer to the RPG based gameplay, making it a balancing act to look out for the safety of your crew while trying to make progress towards your final goal. It feels like a ropewalk routine since every little step can be fatal. There is no save during the missions, so if you die or decide that you want to try again you will have to restart the day, losing all the items you gathered and all the progress made during that particular day. Thankfully, the combat system is turn-based so you have ample time to plan each move.
Based on which character you chose as your avatar the different moves you can make will cost you different amounts of action points. As a result, you will have to adapt your tactics to the strength of your heroes. As a general rule though it is advisable to try to blindside your opponents since surprise attacks carry a hefty damage bonus. Also, watch out for the controls which are imprecise and the cursor tends to stick to a point of interest. This becomes especially annoying is you have several points of interest next to one another, and the game keeps sticking to the same one, making it difficult to gather the loot from around it.
Unfortunately, there are also other negative aspects that turn Dread Nautical into a mixed bag of horrors. Although it is a game based on the Lovecraftian universe, the atmosphere is never scary. Due to the design of the game, you will feel pressured all the time by inventory management but never terrified by the monsters or the unfolding events. Going through the levels starts pretty quickly to feel like a repetitive task.
The fact that the monsters are variations of the same few base types does not help at all, and soon finding the best position for backstabbing or counting the titles to evade incoming attacks becomes a monotonous and joyless dance. Even the thrill of discovering the tomes scattered around the ship, necessary to decipher the strange symbols of the Necronomicon, fades pretty quickly. After playing a couple of hours of Dread Nautical you feel like you are going through the same motions again and again.
The Good
- Interesting concept
- Well thought out mechanics
- Pretty challenging difficulty
The Bad
- Very long loading times
- Monotonous
- Imprecise control scheme
Conclusion
The control is imprecise and you can easily make a mistake just because the cursor jumped to a different tile out of the blue. While the visual style is somewhat original, the graphics lack in detail, making the close-up cutscenes look underwhelming. The audio part of the game is completely unremarkable, the developers missing the opportunity to create suspenseful moments by adopting an appropriate audio design.
We were hoping to find in Dread Nautical an uncut gem. In the end, we received a game that does not live up its potential and becomes monotonous pretty quickly. The lack of variety and depth turn this interesting concept into a mediocre game. The mix of RPG and tactics although well thought out, shortly turn into a routine without any joy. There is no thrill or scare, but plenty of annoying moments generated by the chores of item management. Dread Nautical wanted to be a place of madness, but it turned into another dimension of boredom.
