Attached is the transcript for my playthrough of Fireboat.
transcript of fireboat.pdf (186.5 KB)
Good God, I struggled with the directions in this game.
That out of the way- I did manage to win this, though there were moments where I contemplated throwing in the towel- you can see me absolutely flailing around with how to do what I knew needed to be done- turns out that re-visiting the passage and more carefully re-reading at what exactly I was supposed to be blasting at did fix that. Admittedly, I felt a bit silly once I realized, but man, was it frustrating, knowing I needed to interact with the cannon or its controls in some way, and not being able to!
The heads up on information from the ghosts being ephemeral and to note it down was a very generous move, though I didn’t find myself needing to do so. Thankfully, this game doesn’t appear to be on any sort of timers, judging from my captain’s incompetent thrashing and wandering around and staring at windows that don’t exist- Kent’s having a bit of a hard day, alright? He is after all, seeing ghosts. And anyway, even with me doing the equivalent of throwing him into the wall repeatedly, or almost falling off of the boat, he did manage to save NYC, yay!
I did go ahead and open up the trailer to also see the bad ending, which was kinda funny- instantaneous death is usually something I dislike in games, but it was so well signal posted that I didn’t find it unfair, and it was just an undo away from being resolved, thankfully, since I didn’t save at any point.
While a bit annoying to mash around on the controls with, given the use of maritime directions- the game wasn’t so cruel as to launch the captain into the Hudson when I misstepped, or have the bomb go off while Kent was trying to remember how to sit in chairs, or flicking switches aimlessly, so it balances out. Also, I am not an efficient or practiced puzzle solver, and I managed to finish this by sniffing after the mentioned breadcrumbs, so it is a very well written game in the sense of it gently shepherding you to fail forwards- such as wasting time by scrounging around Lady Liberty not immediately resulting in all of NYC blowing up because you just had to see all that green metal (though I did try the trawler first, because of the note mentioning boat space. I was just hopelessly lost and wondered if it might progress the story.)
My one major question is what’s the deal with the Mate being there if he’s not particularly useful in any way- unless I missed something in my playthrough- which is, of course, entirely possible. I don’t really get it. Tried talking to him, but didn’t get too far. It kind of feels like we ought to be able to talk to him about uh, commandeering the fire cannons to shoot a terrorist, or the fact that we did in fact find him? Maybe we could and I didn’t stumble across that dialog tree… The redundancy in the charts/map showing the same directions as staring at the dial is a nice touch, but I didn’t really find it useful since I could just stare at the dial for a bit and then try to figure out from context where we ought to go next.
Still, I had fun overall, and any undercutting of the pacing’s tension lies with the fact I don’t know normal cardinal directions, let alone maritime ones- not with the game itself. A bit of a campy adventure story, very action movie-ish, and good fun.