What happens when you take XCom-style gameplay, send it on a cruise, and then drop it right into the Bermuda Triangle in the grasp of a Cthulu-esque being? You get Dread Nautical. First released in 2019, Zen Studio’s turn-based tactical strategy game draws elements from the titans of the genre. Throw in a dash of Lovecraftian horror and wise-cracking characters and the resulting game is one with a lot of charm but quite a few performance problems.
Sam Spade Meets Tactical Roguelike
Dread Nautical blends genres in the same way the antagonist blends reality. The game is all about tactics and strategy but includes base-building elements and an ally mechanic. As you progress through the ship, you’ll encounter various characters that will ask favors of you. If they like you enough, they may join up with you—provided you have an empty bed at your base of operations.
There are three main difficulty modes. Normal difficulty resets you back to your base with nothing lost except the items you found on your excursion, and your teammates return with you. If you die on Hard difficulty, any items in your possession are lost, and allies will be lost on the ship. Survivors you have not currently recruited will die. And finally, if you die on Insane difficulty, you lose everything and have to start from scratch.
You can choose to play as one of four main characters: Fargo Drexler, a Sam Spade-esque detective who is way too old for this; Miraje, a performer with a lot of sass; Vi Nussbaum, a geeky teenager more interested in gaming than reality; and Hatano Kenichi, a former Yakuza member with a penchant for blades.
Each character is fleshed out and has a lot of personality. Fargo Drexler is so reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart that I spent half the game waiting for him to make a crack about a dame. The primary differences between the four characters, personality aside, is the number of action points, inventory space, and HP that each starts with.
As your base grows, you can unlock areas like the Crafting Station for upgrading and repairing weapons, the Medical Station for creating more bandages, and the Occult Training Station for leveling up your character’s health, melee damage, defense, and other stats.
The goal is to progress through each floor. As the character, you aren’t sure how you wound up in this odd, frightening world, but there are books and strange monsters that might lend some clue as to your whereabouts. You must fight your way through all of the floors until you find an answer about where you are, and perhaps how to go back home.
Musical and Artistic Aspirations
While Dread Nautical won’t win any awards for its artistic approach, the blocky, polygonal style and muted color palette work well with the eerie atmosphere of the game. Each character model is distinctive, and the particle effects used throughout each floor are impressive. On the other hand, many floors have a faint golden tint that makes it hard to distinguish normal objects from pickups.
There is next to no background music in the game. Instead, the soundscape consists of distant snarling, the whispers of rain and waves against the ship, and other noises you’d associate with an abandoned, damaged cruise liner.
The impressive part of Dread Nautical’s sound design lies in the voice acting. Each character has a lot of lines and a unique accent that sets them apart from everyone else you encounter. The ship is full of a diverse lineup of individuals, and the fully-voiced dialogue adds a lot to the game that would be missing were it a quiet textbox.
Performance Pickles
The primary downside to Dread Nautical is that it doesn’t perform as well as could be hoped. When you load your save, it takes at least 60 seconds for the game to load in. The load times between levels can be inthe same ballpark. If you die and need to restart, you are stuck in a loading screen until you respawn in the lobby, at which point you choose your gear and wait for yet another loading screen to take you to the floor you want to explore.
The game also lacks anything resembling at tutorial. While there are a few hints and tooltips available near the start, many of the controls are not well-explained. The control scheme itself doesn’t always make sense; for example, when recruiting a party member, you have to hit “X” to bring them with you, unlike every other instance in the game where “A” is the button for selecting an item or command.
Despite the performance issues, Dread Nautical is an enjoyable experience. The relatively short levels make it perfect for brief gaming sessions throughout the day or on your morning commute.