Video Game Review: Dread Nautical

Dread Nautical

Zen Studios

Grid-Based Tactical RPG

Nintendo Switch

I think more games should be set on cruise ships. If a game is set on a cruise ship (and it’s not a simulator or cruise line produced shovelware (if that’s even a thing) then something has gone terribly wrong on said cruise ship, and that’s great because I despise the cruise line industry.  In the case of Dread Nautical, the new semi-randomized tactical RPG from Zen Studios, the trouble takes on a good ol’ Eldritch Horror flavor, complete with tentacles, mysterious rich baritones inside your head, and The Bermuda Triangle. The only thing better than that would be seeing a golf tournament get overrun by zombies!

Jokes aside, it’s a fun concept. The enemy designs are properly freaky for the genre and the cruise ship setting allows for a wide range of characters, ranging from journalists to movie stars to members of the ship’s crew. At the start of the game the player is given a choice between four characters, each with their own special passive and active ability, and any survivors you encounter can be recruited to join your party once you curry enough favor with them. All of these survivors also have their own skills and personalities, which leaves plenty of room to get attached to your favorite ones and intentionally piss off your least favorites. To that end, it seems there is actually some difference in character dialogue between the main character and other survivors depending on who you choose at the start. Although this is a nice touch, I’m not sure it’s enough to get me personally to play through the game with all four characters, but maybe you’ll feel differently, so it’s still worth noting.

As far as the actual gameplay goes, think Fire Emblem meets Mutant Year Zero. The party of survivors has a base of operations where they’ve created a safe zone from the horrors shambling about the ship, and from there you select one of twenty decks (unlocked progressively) to explore and loot for supplies. Each expedition causes a day to pass, after which you must feed your survivors and perform maintenance on your base and gear, managing your resources between upgrading various stations for long-term survival bonuses and keeping your gear from breaking so that you can make it through your next outing. The gear durability aspect is where a lot of the game’s difficulty comes from, as having to balance between using your stronger but more fragile weapons or the weaker but more durable ones makes all the difference in the length of an encounter and how much damage you incur from it. Even though the controls are a bit wonky by virtue of being a grid-based tactics game using joysticks, it’s a fun gameplay loop, and one that makes me want to keep going out on runs just to see what sort of loot I find. There was also a stress stat to manage but I never particularly noticed it because it was really easy to keep my survivors from getting past 25%.

Dread Nautical isn’t the most punishing or complex strategy game I’ve ever played, but there’s something to be said for that. As much as I love the stressful challenge of games like X-COM, it’s nice sometimes to be able to find something which is still difficult but manageable enough that I can get through a mission more often and still feel like a badass. I think it also helps to have a more set cast to play around with because no matter how much I may get attached to my soldiers in X-COM, I’m always going to get more attached to people with real charm and personality like the survivors in this game (even if the voice acting isn’t the best at times). Dread Nautical doesn’t really have any glaring flaws but there are plenty of big and small things to love about it, right down to the ultimately-pointless-but-cute little interactions you can have characters do with aspects of the environment when there are no enemies around.