Ship of Fools [Review]

Quick, grab a cannonball and load the cannon! Quick, move the cannon to the other side of the ship! Quick, look at all of the questionable slithering creatures on the ship!!! Hit all of them with your ore! QUICK, STOP THOSE TENTACLES FROM DESTROYING THE SHIP. QUICK, GRAB THE BOARDS AND REPAIR THE SHIP BEFORE WE FAIL! Good job, you failed. Welcome back to the shore. You washed up again. Now dust yourself off, get some upgrades, and get back to the grind. Phew. Sorry, we just had a disastrous run on Ship of Fools, a new roguelite Survival game by FIKA and published by Team17 where 2 players can work together to survive the murky waters of the archipelago. Many others have failed at the very job you have been tasked with stopping the Aquapocalypse. As you shoot, load, and destroy your enemies you will find many shipwrecked or hidden crew mates and maybe people who will help you with ship upgrades and maintenance back at the main hub.

Once you’ve finished upgrades you can embark once more on your ship to try and find more people lost at sea and get to the giant monster at the end of the board. Yes, “board”. This game takes elements from a board game and the level select has hexagon spaces that you can move your ship to. Each move on the board triggers the count down and the darkness takes over the spaces you have yet to land on ahead. Ship of Fools has a fantastic atmosphere and seems like it takes small inspirations from other games and forms of media, for example, board games weren’t the only inspiration for this game. The music and the way characters talk remind me a lot of Banjo Kazooie, though the way the game plays and the aesthetic is nothing like that game, so I’m not entirely sure it wasn’t a coincidence.

Because of the board game element, there is a surprising amount of strategy in this game. Once you move spaces that entire row is grayed out and you can no longer go there. So, you have to be deliberate in your choice if you want to head for jellyfish for more upgrades or if you want to go to the pink spaces to further the plot. Or you could just go straight and get to as far as you can before the darkness starts to creep in. After three rounds the right side of the board starts to move towards you with a storm. Once you get to these spaces, you have to fight off kraken tentacles that damage your ship. Unfortunately, I was unable to beat this level despite getting very close, the fight lasted just too long for the kind of equipment we had.

I personally love the aesthetic this game has, the colors are dull and green and give off the vibe of actually being in a swamp. The characters are great as well, everyone is some sort of big bug-eyed amphibious creature that looks like they crawled out of the marsh. It’s a pleasant art style that fits the game very well due to the nature of the game and the enemies. It makes sense to have a grungier style when you fight enemies like a giant fly that practically gives birth to smaller ones. When fighting these it’s best to go after the big one to stop the constant spawn of smaller and weaker enemies, after all, it is very easy to become overwhelmed in this game. Luckily there are things you can get to help prevent this. Our ship setup was to have one of our cannons be automatic. While it fired slowly, it shot cannons at enemies without us. This way one person was able to focus on shooting while the other was able to manually attack all the smaller enemies that jumped aboard the ship. The ones that get on the boat are the dangerous ones as they go straight to attacking the ship and once the ship takes enough hits it’s back to the shore once more.

The game is pretty tough, it certainly helps to have another player with you. However, you do have to be careful as friendly fire is a thing (that cannot be turned off), and getting knocked back with an oar can be pretty detrimental when you’re scrambling. If you are looking for a strong setup for fighting bosses and getting through the spaces I recommend going to the spaces with question marks and treasure chests on them. These spaces can give you ammo and wood, the wood is to repair the ship and get health back, and the ammo can be anything from ammo that slows enemies down or burns them. It would have been helpful against the tentacle boss as the only thing we had was the default ammo. Keep in mind that you can only hold onto so many items though, your ship starts off with three inventory slots and if something isn’t bolted down here it will be flying off the ship once you move. The first run we played we had actually managed to take our ammo off the pedestal without realizing and we had to go the rest of the run without any ammo! Luckily we could still defend ourselves with melee attacks. We could also attack any bird that landed on the ship and shove them into the cannon, they were even stronger than the basic ammo we had lost. Don’t worry though, your default ammo will come back at the start of the next run, but any extra ammo you picked up along the way will be lost. I personally love this game and we had a lot of fun playing it. There is a physical copy of the game coming out soon and it will be available for purchase here https://superraregames.com/products/srg-104-ship-of-fools-switch

I certainly will be grabbing a switch copy physically myself. This game is definitely good enough to be put on the shelf and played for years. At times it was very stressful, but like any roguelite the longer you play the more upgrades you get, thus making the game easier to tackle. Just note that when things get hectic you won’t be able to sit still. You will be constantly moving. Anyone looking for a fun co-op should definitely check out Ship of Fools.