When I posted the first trailer for Dread Nautical, one of the first comments was, "it's not a pin." And they couldn't be more of a point there. Over the past few years, new teams have launched Zen, focusing on making games that are completely different from pinball.
While we always love pinball, and we love story-driven RPGs like our recently launched Operencia: The Stolen Sun, or super genre-mashups like the upcoming CastleStorm II. Plus, we're not shy about trying things like mashing kung-fu with a huge hit on KickBeat (okay, that was crazy). So, you may know Zen in pinball, but we hope you will know us about our other passions as well.
Which brings us to Dread Nautical, a game here to learn about. The game draws a lot of its inspiration from classic themes such as Darkest Dungeon and Lovecraftian atmospheric mystery. Combining that with the appearance of the cartoon style sounds like something of a strange decision, but it's a great contradiction to the overall gameplay.
The game itself is a terrific rogue-lite survival horror game, with some RPG extras If you wonder what the word rogue-lite means, I've found it: I picked up some great game features, such as random local generation, cycle based, but introducing them with great difficulty , without permadeath, and a little planning involved.
Your goal at Dread Nautical is to solve the mystery of a boat docked on the other end, which is controlled by a mysterious business: Dread. Most of the riders are now just the original atrocities, serving as shelters for the bad king of this domain.
You will have your choice of characters in the new game, each with its own fully presented narrative and vision:
- Fargo Drexler, a detective, who spends his first vacation in years.
- Giraffes, a witch doctor, wants easy money by taking a few gigs on the ship.
- Hello Kenichi, a former member of the Yakuza, emitting slight smoke.
- Vi Nussbaum, a playwright, had no intention of being here, but his parents forced him to attend the tour. He just wanted to play at home. 🙁
Each of them has unique and practical skills, which change the course of action – and how you should approach different situations.
You will also find other survivors scattered across the ship, waiting for someone to rescue them. They are in the same boat (pun intended) as you, and all of you have a set of weapons and skills to help you find a way out of difficult situations. For example, Bill – the keeper of the battlefield – gives every member of your team an extra action point when it comes to killing with a miss.
While researching the deck below, you want to find food for yourself and the team, light up the secrets of the ship, and hire other survivors. Once you return to Deck 0 (the base of your mission), you can prepare your weapons, improve your skills, and even master the other items to use there.
All of these elements of the game fit perfectly into our sense of when we wanted to touch the horror genre. We intended to create an atmosphere where monsters could hang behind any door but have the best characters with the best personality.
As we prepare for the launch tomorrow, it's a wonderful feeling to look back and see how it all came together, and Zen has been wonderfully inspired as we look to the future with the hope and hope of bringing more topics like Dread Nautical to life.
