Overboard! is a point and click who-done-it set on a steamship voyaging from England to New York in 1935. Its setting and cast of characters could have hopped off the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. There's the actress in her twilight years, her businessman husband, a few of his associates, an elderly woman who collects secrets, a wide-eyed paramour, and a ship captain with a mysterious past. What sets this game apart is that, instead of solving a murder, you're trying to pin it on someone else.

You're Veronica Villensey, an aging actress from the West End who throws her new husband off the deck of your ship to his death in the middle of the night. Overboard! takes place the next day, the final one of your journey, as you interact with the various passengers on the boat, attempting to position yourself favorably for when it comes time to name a murderer.

The game is driven by sets of decisions and dialogue choices that lead to different outcomes depending on what time and in which location on the ship these conversations and decisions take place. Indeed, the shining mechanic of the game is its sense of time, as each action or line of dialogue Veronica chooses eats away at the precious time she has to establish her innocence, as the day plays out from 8 AM through around 3 PM. The timing of the game lends an urgency to the player's decisions that make for the kind of tension that affords Overboard! hours of entertaining plays (and replays) as you try to achieve increasingly optimal outcomes.

Because Overboard! was meant to be replayed. While a split-second decision or misremembered detail could land you in Sing-Sing, you'll soon be starting Veronica's day again, shooting for freedom, insurance money, and a clean getaway.

This loop-style play entertained me for about one and a half hours during my two-hour forty-five minute session. The story branches that vary with time of day and character location lead to interesting possibilities that begged to be explored. However, once I'd gotten away a couple times and started re-entering loops to try to pin the murder on someone else, it started to feel like a grind. While the designers include a feature that highlights choices you've made in the past, playing through the same possibilities to get to one decision point you wish you'd done differently can feel overly repetitive. Even though you're allowed to restart each scene once, oftentimes you're not sure about the implications of your decisions until the end of each loop, and by that time you'll have to start the day again to get back to the area of interest. This cycle left me with an hour and fifteen minutes of play where it wasn't the story pulling me through, but rather the nagging feeling that I knew what I had to do outside of one or two details I kept messing up.

That said, these mess-ups led to new story branches that eventually made my desired outcome easier. I was able to pin the murder on another passenger and get the life insurance money from my husband's untimely demise. Then, the game threw another win condition at me, and by this point, I was ready to hop off my computer and take my dog for a walk.

That said, I think Overboard! could occupy me for another hour or two while I pry at the last few unanswered questions in this mystery, and for a game that I was able to get on sale for $7.50, I'd consider this a fun and valuable addition to my collection.

The mechanics and story tree of this game are well thought out and handled with care. The art is solid, if cartoonish. It lends a removed-feeling levity to the idea of trying to get away with murder, which I think is what the game's designers were going for. The sound design is fairly simple and evocative of the 1930s. It hits the spot nicely.

The one point in the game that made me uncomfortable was when one of my dialogue options was to ask an old woman if she "didn't like blacks" based on her suspicion of the black captain of the ship. While the designers of Overboard! would defend themselves from this critique by saying the dialogue is meant to stay true to the time period, I think it was an unnecessary choice by the writers that took me out of the fiction. That said, this is (so far) the only moment of its kind I've found in the game.

I'd give Overboard! a solid 7/10. It will have you wanting to pick up a pen and paper and map out different loops as you attempt to optimize your villainous way to innocence, wealth, and possibility.

Where it shines:

• Handling time
• Story tree
• Novel angle for its genre

Where it fades:

• Repetitive after a time
• Generic art style