Dead in Bermuda

Dead In Bermuda is a simple 2D survival game mainly relying on random numbers. You drag and drop your party into slots. I initially found it quite clunky (I did become more comfortable with it over time) because your camp is a fairly large horizontally scrolling area. You pan left and right with the mouse or use a snappier movement with the arrow keys. If you click the character, there is a context menu but seemed really random what it will offer you. I think it suggests 2 stations but sometimes I saw duplicates.

There's different stations in your base; some gather resources, some are for crafting, some are for recovery. The right-most area is the forest which explores.

You have a group of 8 survivors who have a variety of attributes, and a variety of needs. Their attributes determine how effective and how fatigued they get performing an action, but can also be affected by traits (which I think might be random between runs). Attributes can be improved by performing actions which levels the character up and gives you skill points (the number depends on their Intelligence attribute) which you can assign as you see fit.

The needs are Hunger, Sickness, Depression, Fatigue, Injury. Characters will die when any attribute is maxed out. These aspects also scale down the effectiveness of your attributes. The stations often work better with 2 people and they can boost (or worsen) your relationship which I think is also determined by a random number. However, a positive relationship also produces a boost.

Everything is geared to be tough. Given that the needs affect performance, and lack of performance will mean you have a lack of food, or get stuck struggling to craft a useful station; it is easy to get caught in a situation that just spirals out of control. Sleeping doesn't seem to recover fast enough and it's at the expense of not gathering resources.

Exploring slowly uncovers the map. The map is a grid of squares and each area has some kind of object you can interact with. It could be a tree to search for berries and cut for wood; an animal to hunt, a treasure chest to open and then scavenge for wood; a mysterious water fountain to drink now or fill your bottles up. When there's multiple actions, sometimes you can do some repeatedly, whereas most are single-use. The ones marked in red mean no more actions can be performed when you choose it. So you might be able to fish (several times too), but if you jump in to search, then the resource is expired (presumably because you scare away the fish).

With every interaction, there is a stealth check to see if a creature attacks you. An attack then uses your fighting ability to apply injury damage to your character. It’s a fast animation, and sometimes can be funny when a large beast suddenly appears to swipe at your character. Not sure if it is supposed to be a hit-and-run attack, but you never acquire anything like meat. I found myself often selecting the same characters, either someone with high stealth, or someone with high scavenge and would just accept the hit. Injury wasn’t as problematic as the other attributes you need to manage.

There's no travel time when moving between locations on the map (time doesn’t pass with events that see you resting, or waiting to hunt a creature). Any character can perform an action there too, even though logically you would think it would only be available to those in the exploration slots.

I didn't realise the stations degrade for a while. That can have a dramatic effect on the resources and recovery gain. These require either wood, rope or stone. You need to invest rope into the resource station to keep it effective then switch between the resources to replenish your stock. Wood is needed for the upgrade, research and sleeping area.

I was watching a playthrough and it seemed way easier for him, and I noticed that he never had to repair his stations. When reading the release notes, I saw that this feature was added in later, as well as these statements:
• Completely reworked the balancing
• The game should be a bit harder around day 10 And keep being challenging for a longer time until the end
• Using the Talk action at the firecamp has a better chance of giving positive opinions between characters. Don’t forget: depressed characters now have more chances to get negative opinions.

I suspect the developers tweaked too much and ruined the game balance. They also added an easy mode
"Easy mode: the game getting a bit more challenging, we added an easy mode that you can activate at any time in the options menu. It just decreases the negative states increases, but doesn’t touch to anything else, so you can enjoy the game as it is."

I tried the game twice and got stuck at exactly the same point. Once I saw a reply from a developer in the message board stating that Easy mode (which is weirdly in the menu AFTER starting a game), I then completed it on the first attempt. On that run, I found the needs easier to maintain, especially depression.

I think one major sticking points is that the first few stations to research have low crafting cost, but then the fishing rod and cooking pot have really high requirements.

You can assign someone to search your crashed plane which gives you all sorts of resources. You can find wood and rope, but also cooked meals, and consumable items. Searching increases depression and it is limited use. Searching just once per day, or every other day is recommended because the food doesn't spoil when it's on the plane. I think it is random on the meal quality and the number of them though, so sometimes you can be really screwed by this.

You can eat the fish and meat raw. Without the cooking pot, you can cook it directly on the fire which degrades the fire as a penalty. When you have the cooking pot, you can assign someone to turn it into a cooked meal or into jerky in the rack.

The food expires too fast, it seems to basically halve your stock each time. Since the day is split into 2 parts, you need to acquire the meat mainly on the first turn, then cook on the second (if you have the cooking pot, or the drying rack to make jerky). If you don't eat it during the night scene, then (non-jerky) will probably spoil. You'd think there would be a couple of days before it turns.

The campfire chat during the night is mainly bickering but can tweak relationships and needs positively or negatively. A few characters act suspiciously, and the achievement list looks like these stories can resolve but I didn't experience it in my playthrough.

Unless you have a couple of people with a high scavenge attribute and assign them to the gathering station assigned to wood, it's difficult to accumulate wood. It should be no problem on an island with plenty of trees but they often only get 3-5 per search. Rocks are even more of a rarity somehow. You need wood for crafting, repairing your tent, research and upgrade stations, and it is mandatory to top up your fire. The fire goes down 20-30% per day, all your stations slowly degrade over time, with a larger degrade with each use.

You can find berries by exploring and some locations give you a decent yield. Since you can't rely on the random aspect of coming across them, sometimes you need to assign people to the basket to go harvest them. Just like the wood, the yield is often low like 1-4. Berries can either be eaten as a small snack but are mainly used to top up your water barrel.

There are loads of consumable items to find. Many are restoration (and some of these have a random range, sometimes can be negative too) or permanent skill boosts.
I like the concept of games like this but they can be hard to balance. I get the impression they originally made the game too easy, but then made it too hard so put the easy mode in. With some UI tweaks and rebalancing, then it could be a great game. I did find enough enjoyment in it, but find it difficult to recommend given the flaws.

[Version played: Steam v.1.1 (English)]

Dead in Bermuda is basically a management/simulation game about survival. You have 8 characters, and you pick who does what for the whole team to survive in a "deserted" island. While at it, they level up their skills, which is extremely important for things to go minimally well. As far as I could tell, there is no time limit (I finished the game on day 112, and I could have stretched it further).

The good things:

-The survival progression. From having a relatively "easy" situation where you can scavenge through the remains of the plane, to being on the constant verge of death as soon as you no longer find food in it -it's quite possible that some characters die then unless you load game dozens of times-, to having built a capable and self-sustainable sort of "tribe" that no longer has to worry so much about hunger, suicidal depression, or sickness.
I enjoyed a lot how the feeling of the game changed through this process, letting me relax and focus on exploring other elements.

-The art and sound departments. Again, for an indie company, the whole visual department is really fucking good. The music is barely there, but the few times there is, it's decent, and the sound effects are actually good and help the immersion. No complaints at all in those regards (one could say that the visual backgrounds are repetitive, yet they are cool enough to make up for it). A lot of things could have been done way cheaper or lazier, but they weren't.

-The setting and characters. The dialogues are nothing out of the ordinary but are decent and let you know and understand the characters, which are unique, personal, and believable enough. The setting is definitely above average; the more you explore the island, the less you can predict what you'll find next. It's definitely original, engaging, and pretty to look at.

One thing to criticize, though, is that the developers put heavy references about the tarot -specifically, the Marseille- all throughout the game, without making the slightest direct mention of it for the player to know. And this is important, because all the situations where the tarot cards are referenced can be solved with a better outcome if the player knows the cards and their meaning to some extent. As an enthusiast of that kind of stuff, I enjoyed it ("I see what you did there!" every now and then), but for someone that has no clue about the tarot, a lot of elements will seem random and nonsensical.

If you're gonna play this, I recommend having a sheet of the Marseille major arcana in front of you to consult whenever you see roman numerals, but unless you have a minimal knowledge about what the cards mean you will still miss some hints about what some things are for.

-The needs and results are decently balanced in most regards. The skill/trait system is very well implemented; it makes a difference having someone with low skill doing a task than someone with high skill -or having a team of madmen with low "Discussion" skill that want to kill each other vs being able to ease down their differences-, but it is never overpowered. This is also one of the reasons why progress in the game is enjoyable.

The bad things:

-The needs and results are not so decently balanced in some other regards. Some people complain that there is too much randomness in regards to results, and although I don't think it's severe, I think that the game would benefit from toning it down slightly.

But for me the worst aspects of the balancing here are the irrational elements that are hard to justify; fruit doesn't spoil (I guess they didn't want to make the game too unforgiving, but fruit not spoiling is a weird one...), you can cure yourself instantly from any level of sickness by just taking as much herbs as needed without a limit in a single day (this is the worst one; sickness becomes an absolute joke once you are able to scavenge for medicine herbs everyday), and the only resource that is not endlessly renewable through scavenging is the fabric for bandages (I have nothing against some elements being limited, but bandages being the one and only of them strikes me as odd).

Some people point out that it is absurd that the survivors have to "research" -in the middle of nowhere- how to make a basket, and then create one before they can just go forage. Also that fatigue is not lowered on sleep at night. Yep, it's a little nonsensical. But I'd say that some of it at least worked in making the game hard enough to be interesting.

-The main story itself is not that good. Not too bad either, it just unfolds into something mediocre the more it advances. It feels like the developers intended to make it underwhelming on purpose to bully the player. I don't know if they expected the player to like it or what their mindset was, but if you ask me, downgrading the plot of your own game like that for no reason is pretty dumb.

-The ending. This is what ruined the game for me; whatever you do, unless all the survivors die, you'll get the exact same ending. No variations at all. I was expecting that some of the choices I made or the results I got would matter in some way. Maybe there would be some mention of what fared to the characters that I cared for so attentively for hours and hours, related to what I made them do, how good their abilities became, the special objects they got, what was their overall state when the game ended... but no, that's not exactly what you get.

Giving the player so many things to choose and play with, so much room for improvement, and so much hardship, just to make it all matter just the same, is a really bad choice as a game developer. My rating would be considerably higher if all that was well exploited. As it is, there is no point in playing the game more than once. Yes, character traits -which are basically just bonuses- are randomized, and some map cells too, but what for? That alone doesn't add replayability.
Bad, bad choice to limit the ending in such a way.


So, all in all, Dead in Bermuda is a game that I enjoyed pretty much while it lasted, but that I wouldn't bother to play again nor I find real reasons to recommend it. There are other games of this kind far more rewarding. Cause that is the weakness here; not rewarding, no replaying value.