A four-player cooperative horror game set aboard a cargo ship over a seven-night voyage. Players crew the vessel as deckhands and maintenance staff, keeping it operational while an unseen presence interferes with its digital and electrical systems.
Tension is produced by the ship's own systems rather than scripted set pieces. In development for Steam.
The problem. The first version was a functional, literal spooky game: walk around a ship, click Use on faults. It had no hook — nothing a trailer could show in three seconds, and nothing that made four friends need each other.
The decision. Build the game around going adrift. Get too close to a Presence and you separate from your body. Your body keeps looping your last five seconds of movement and voice for everyone to see, you can talk but can't hear the living, and the only way back is a teammate's lifeline: a slow, awkward grapple that starts a tug-of-war. Hard rule: the lifeline is never a weapon. The interface follows the same logic. Drift status lives on a wrist device you raise to read and can hear ticking without looking. Utility tools live on one key and the lifeline on the mouse, so nobody fumbles under pressure. The bridge map is a live render of the ship, flipped deck by deck.
What the playtest showed. First session with four friends, August 11: plenty broken, but the moment the design exists for happened — someone went adrift and didn't notice until the team started panicking. That's the clip. Next is stability, then the visuals that make going adrift unmistakable.
