This weekend, I wanted to start at least one game in my enormous backlog--my initial choice was The House in Fata Morgana but started Why Am I Dead At Sea instead, mostly because getting up from my PC to my Switch was too much trouble at 9PM.
And I kept playing it for 8 hours. PROS: I solved all the mysteries!!! CONS: oh god my aging body cannot handle a night of no sleep anymore. RIP me 😩
Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot. It's much darker than I anticipated--not that I expected a murder mystery at sea to be whimsical, of course, but this is a very sad game about cruel and selfish people taking advantage of those who looking for a way to escape grief, tragedy and abusive situations. The writing is excellent, and not without hope or tenderness, but it's frequently bleak as well.
Spoiler-free thoughts on game mechanics
I really enjoyed how thoughtfully the "ghostly powers" component was handled throughout. At first, your presence is so weak, you can't move between doors, and possessing people is really more of hitching a ride and eavesdropping on conversations. As you gain more insight into the people around you and regain your sense of self, your powers grow--you can explore locked rooms in your ghost form, read people's thoughts, and fully possess people and force them to do or say things they never would normally. In later portions, you can dive deep into character's psyches, to help them overcome past traumas so they can overcome the increasing dangers of the present.The thing is, at no point do you ever feel overtly powerful as a ghost. You can phase through locked doors, but not something as thick as a wall, and you can't manipulate objects, so the information you can glean from ghost investigating is limited. Full possession is not always useful either--your ghost self doesn't know anything about the relationships between characters, which lead to an early moment where I confronted someone about A Suspicious Thing they did, and promptly discovered they had blackmail on the character i possessed, which is why I couldn't approach this topic with them earlier. 💀 On top of that, fully possessed characters don't remember anything they say or hear in that state, so if you want a character to hear a specific piece of information you need to do it in the...less body-snatching mode. Half possession mode?
Mind reading never yields concrete evidence, but the 'mindscapes' you see can hint at the kind of dialog you want to pick in conversations for characters who stonewall well. They're also telling in just like...a vibes kind of way? There is one character who I immediately pegged as a culprit after seeing their mindscape, purely on the feeling of "there's no way a decent human being thinks like this all day" lmao.
In short, your array of ghostly powers creates a fascinating interplay between persuasion, force and snooping around in various forms to piece together the ugly history of the ship and its passengers.
Less interesting was the human "special abilities", unique skills characters can use while possessed. Like, the cat can slip through vents and unlock doors from the inside, the writer can hear the tone of someone's conversation, the waitress can check what's in people's pockets, etc. In theory this helps gather evidence, but in practice I only used the cat's and that because it's mandatory to advance. I totally missed that the cook can notice heavily-trafficked paths, for example, and there's a bunch that just aren't that helpful or redundant (looking through keyholes, temporary movement speed increase, even the writer and maid's abilities never led to any unique evidence.)
The only issue I have is with game is the save situation--there are save points, but you're forced to overwrite your last save each time (despite there being 3 save slots) which is awful for an adventure game with multiple endings based on how much evidence you do (or don't) acquire. Honestly, it's pure luck i didn't lock myself out an ending as it requires a specific evidence chain to be unresolved. Not allowing multiple saves within a single playthrough is rather clunky to work around.
tl;dr Why Am I Dead At Sea is worth all five of your dollars and eight hours of your time. (does not need to be done in one sitting, but maybe you'll find yourself doing that, against your better judgment, like i did)