Kevin C. Wong

Apple Arcade - Dread Nautical (2019) [+]

Dread Nautical is a modern horror rogue-like set on a cruise liner that ends up in some sort of demon dimension. You play one of four survivors and explore 20 randomly generated decks.

Each deck you go into rooms which can have items (weapons, armor, misc items, food, parts, runes), the first three of which take up slots on your equipment bar, passengers which you talk to and can eventually convince them to join you, or monsters to avoid or fight.

For passengers you talk with them getting four dialog options at various points. Correct choices move their relationship bar to the right. Doing quests for them also helps. Once it goes all the way right you can recruit them to join. Back at base you need enough beds for your crew and when you go out you choose who goes with you. There's a food resource and everyone needs to eat each day (exiting a deck-level ends the day) though you can have people go hungry and they'll get weaker.

When you get close to a monster it goes to tactical mode. Each person has Action Points: moving a square is 1, attacks take 1 to 3 AP (unarmed and small weapons are 1, most weapons are 2), picking up an item is 1. Your team goes first in any order (and interleaved) then the bad guys go.

All equipment has durability and each use (weapon attack, armor defense, item use) reduces durability by one and at zero the equipment is broken (you can repair back at home using parts, you also use parts to level items and improve their stats, finally items have rarities and rarer items are more powerful).

Back home you have some work rooms you can build and improve. Beds so you can recruit more passengers. Work bench to repair and improve equipment using parts. An altar to improve people using runes.

There is plot of trying to find out why you're there and what's going on with the boat. Part of this is finding tome pages each of which has a short cryptic sentence.

For ultimate rogue there is a hardcore mode where everything is tougher and death is permanent. There is voice acting for the various characters and they have distinct personalities. Each deck-level takes like an hour if you're doing all the rooms but you can save and quit at any time.

It's a nice rogue-like game of low to medium complexity (though possibly keeps adding more things as you go along).