A very interesting game, albeit with some tiny frustrating kinks. So the idea is that you play the role of a former AI engineer that, through complicated mishaps, winds up in the involuntary employ of an unsettling corporation, carrying out tasks amidst an uncharted nebula on a circular spaceship with naught but an AI for company. Murphy's Law starts to kick in and anything that can malfunction will inevitably malfunction. I've heard the FTL comparison quite a lot, but the mechanic that most resembles FTL is the idea of power management, with a limited pool of energy to make various systems function more effectively that can be replenished through a dwindling supply of cells. The comparison I would make, however, is more along the lines of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes for how much it deliberately relegates the ship function tutorials to the in-game manual, and only teaches the absolute basics through gameplay. This I quite like - frantically panicking for the right section in the...

I enjoyed the game a lot. It's a frantic mess of running around trying to fix things as they break, getting out in the nick of time, and just generally having to work with what you've got. The upgrade points are quite scarce, so it's really easy to become boxed into a corner because you ran out of points to use for repairs. It's really satisfying to be able to keep the hunk of junk working nicely. The narrative is also well-done even though there isn't much of it. I have a fair number of complaints, in no particular order. This is a permadeath game with some minor scripted story elements, and after your first reset (and there will be many resets), any scripted story elements you've already seen become very irritating to skip. There should be a "skip sequence" button in addition to the "skip line" button (both should be there). To use an item repeatedly, you have to go back and forth from your inventory to where you want to use it again and again. Since there are several items that y...

[b]TL;DR:[/b] It's got some good ideas, but it quickly becomes tedious and frustrating, and victory is at the mercy of the random number generator. The premise of Deep Sixed is like the board game [i]Space Alert[/i] combined with [i]Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes[/i]: You're involuntary labor aboard a rickety spaceship exploring a dangerous area of space. When you're not trying to fend off hostile aliens, you're trying to fix all the breakdowns that occur every few minutes, and a comprehensive troubleshooting manual and a limited supply of spare parts are all that stands between you and certain death. After each mission, you get credits to spend on ship upgrades and more spare parts. So far, so good! It's a good idea with a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it falls apart in the execution. The first problem is in how you fail. You don't fail because you don't manage to follow a complicated troubleshooting procedure, or keep up with cascading failures, or deal with multiple simultan...

This is an okay game for people who like concepts in engineering. I played this game on a ubuntu linux desktop with radeon mesa drivers, and other linux gamers are going to like this game, too. It has the feel of the board games "Space Alert" or "Space Cadets", where mini-puzzles must be completed to keep the ship running. It also reminded me of troubleshooting a computer server, while being shot with laserblasts. The Deep Sixed challenges feel realistic, while also being completely absurd. For example, when the power goes out, you reference a fifteen tile flowchart, reference the instructions, run down to the power room, flip off the electrical breaker, examine the oscillioscope for the faulty wire color, find some wire cutters, open the wire panel, cut and replace the faulty wire, and then turn on the electrical breaker. Oh, and you have to do this between the times when things are really needing your attention, because really the lights going out is not a big problem. The world b...

On the surface, Deep Sixed is a bit of a 90s CD-rom throwback, but looks can be deceiving. In a nutshell, Deep Sixed is a game with interesting pedigree, a mix of point and click adventure (fortunately with a hotkey to light up points of interest), manual-consulting "Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes"-style troubleshooting, FTL-style power management, and (remarkably) an open universe exploring game. Comparisons have been made with VGA-era Sierra games as well as classics such as Psi-5 Trading Company, but I would say that this is just nostalgia reaching, and Deep Sixed is very much its own thing, complete with tongue-in-cheek humor and somewhat modern multimedia presentation. The basic gameplay is a cycle of survival and expansion. You start at the space station, where you can pick a mission, order parts, and upgrade your ship. Then you deploy in your ship, choosing one of the sectors you scanned in the past, and the game begins in earnest. Your ship is made up of just eight ro...

Lots of potential but too frustrating to be fun. You'll die a lot, and every time you die you have to go through the same dialogue lines and the same early missions. I liked the idea of trying to keep a clunker of a spaceship operating with lots of complicated tasks, but the practical outcome always seemed either too easy or too hard. Either you'd cruise through a mission without real danger, or you'd end up surrounded by aliens you can't see because your screens are covered in goo, with everything broken and no chance to fix it all. Needs re-balancing.

A great game for a modern grease monkey. I'm really on the fence about this game. I really want to give it a thumbs up, but that might be misleading since I'm writing this right after requesting a refund. Don't misunderstand, there's alot to like about this game. More importantly, this game truly is unique, which is a rare thing to find. Not everyone would like this game, but those that do would love it. You're on a spaceship with traditional quests you'd see in a space game. However, in this game, you're doing it on an old rustbucket spaceship that's falling apart. The game is largely about dong rapid repairs on the ship to try to survive. The ship is impressively complex with lots of systems and different failure types -- electrical, mechanical, software -- and you spend alot of time in the manual. Like that's part of the design. You are supposed to reference the manual as you play, a little like 'keep talking and noone explodes'. Remember the scene in the old starwars where han'...

I'm sorry but stuff breaking all the time, the clunky controls, going through all the same missions again and again if you die, no save option, how can this chore be fun for anyone? Please don't misunderstand, i have nothing against complex games and i took the time to read the manual, but only 5 minutes in and i had to fix the damn scanner three times (using up the limited amount of controller chips i had). What the hell? The shield controls are clunky, you have to run to another room to change the frequency and then the shield doesn't even work, only if you hit the shield at the exact same time you are hit. Same goes for the lasers. If you found out what frequency works best, you have to switch rooms and click the frequency together via some kind of combination game. I'm sorry, but the person who thought that these design choices sum up to a fun experience, needs to see a neurologist.

I was drawn in by the premise, and the intro video. But bad news--it's the worst bits of early 90s games, and none of the charm. In the first hour (after which I just got a refund), I'd discovered that I'd need to memorize dozens of tidbits of minutea just to keep the ship flying AT ALL (the all-knowing manual covers the screen, so you can't "reference" it--you have to jump between it and the nonsense you're using it for). It's isomorphically idential to the most mind-numbing click-based adventure games, but with just enough of a modern sci-fi allure to tempt you in. I wanted to love it. I couldn't. I returned it. Maybe I didn't wait for the learning curve long enough. If you buy it, I hope you have more fun than I did. I just want my hour back.

This game plays quite like the space combat portion of SunDog: Frozen Legacy if anyone remembers that title, and the bones of the story and AI companion could be taken from the movie "Moon." Deep Sixed is an interesting game with a lot of clever ideas and potential, but ultimately I wouldn't recommend it. The user interface and gameplay issues are just too frustrating for the price. I am playing after the 1.2 update and I bought it for 25% off (US$9.74). I'm a big fan of indie games, roguelikes, and games that are hard. I don't need great graphics. I like space games. FTL is a recent favorite and this game reminds me of it a little bit. Another fave from the last few years is TIS-100, which (like this game) requires that you page through a PDF manual for clues and is unashamedly hard. Yet TIS-100 is hard because the puzzles are hard. This game is often hard because the game does not seem well-designed. I had to search the forums not for gameplay help but for user interface help. ...