Simulator games are a dime a dozen on Steam, and you can find a variation of the formula in practically any flavor you could ever want. Lovecraftian naval repair simulators, on the other hand, is a niche market in which I believe Sunken Engine may be the only player in town. It’s on Steam in Early Access if anyone wants to give it a try.
Plot Ahoy!
In Sunken Engine, your father disappeared some time before the events of the game, leaving you his old shipyard for you to manage. You begin fixing up boats and doing basic cleaning and maintenance, but it doesn’t take long for your sanity to fade as creepy and unexplainable events and creatures pop up all around you. There is an overall mystery about the player’s father and his mysterious absence, but you’re not going to be able to see the conclusion of that tale during the short run time of the available content right now, as the full game is not yet complete. But what is here is really worth playing.
Review Notes
Sunken Engine is pretty unique in that it has a lot of the hallmarks of the simulator genre. You’ll pull out a brush to clean paint, blood, and other gunk off the deck or walls, but doing that kind of manual labor is sanity-draining work. We’ve all been there, right? While working in Sunken Engine, your sanity will slowly decrease causing you to have visual and auditory hallucinations. You may see a creature stalking you while you clean a boat, forcing you to stay on the move while handling your tasks plus various frightening noises like the scariest sounds of all: children.
Players receive messages via fax machine and will have to perform basic upkeep tasks like scraping barnacles and clams off the hull, cleaning the deck, and repairing structural damage, which will earn them some cash. The money earned can be spent on new supplies and upgrades, which in turn will allow players to be more efficient in tasks or to accept jobs for larger ships that pay even more. You can also sell items accrued from cleaning to locals on the island, which in turn will make you more money to earn upgrades faster.
You have a pipe that can be smoked to manage some of your sanity, though I imagine there has to be a cooldown or something for this in the full release of Sunken Engine. You can just use the pipe repeatedly in Early Access, meaning that any interactions with scares are entirely optional. This means you can pretty much take as long as you like to handle cleanup and repair so long as you’re managing your sanity; the game has a nice “just one more ship” vibe in this way. As with most simulator titles, if the gameplay loop gets its hooks into you, you can wind up quite addicted to cleaning and repairing ships.
You do all your movement and navigation through your shop in first person, moving around with the WSAD keys. Controllers sort of work for playing Sunken Engine, as you can move around and navigate menus, but quite often the controls would bug out, and I wasn’t able to exit menus. Other times, pressing forward on the analog stick wouldn’t work, or things of that nature that made playing with a controller challenging. Due to this, it’s recommended to play with a keyboard and mouse at least until controller functionality is more fleshed out by the development team (though this could be an issue that only plagues this early version of the simulation adventure).
The visuals of Sunken Engine bring to mind other eerie, nautical titles like Dredge, with thick paint strokes making up the various characters who give you information and context for the events happening all around. There is great use of ambient noise in Sunken Engine, with the plodding sounds of footsteps and the cry of crows from outside your shipyard. I don’t believe there is any music at all, however, so don’t expect any relaxing backing tracks while you’re being jump scared with static and images of eyeballs.
TLDR
Sunken Engine is a phenomenally unique idea that marries Lovecraftian horror with repair shop simulator gameplay. Due to the fact that it’s still in early access, it’s very likely that the full version of Sunken Engine will change considerably over time. But as far as the demo is concerned, it’s very chill with lots of little tasks you can check off, and you’ll really feel like you’ve earned every upgrade as the world gets increasingly strange. Give Sunken Engine a try if you are looking for something really different and more than a bit scary in the simulation genre.