While scrolling YouTube one day, I noticed a really interesting short from Japanese gaming news site GameWith about games that let you play as a villain protagonist. Lovecraftian horror and political sim Marry a Deep One: Innsmouth Simulator was one of the featured titles. Since it’s not out yet, I decided to download the demo and check it out. Its unique game style and story definitely piqued my interest and I’m excited to see more of the finished product once it comes out, though I suspect you really won’t need to enjoy these kinds of text-heavy simulation games to find it fun.
In Marry a Deep One, you make a pact with the Deep Ones, aquatic eldritch abominations with an uncanny resemblance to Aquarus from Invincible. Thanks to your pact with these gods, you become something of a figurehead in your seaside community, as well as the religious leader of a cult. The “Innsmouth Simulator” of the title is from the default name of the seaside town, but you’re free to customize it, as well as your appearance and the names of the different families. In the game proper, you can convert your fellow villagers or visiting outsiders, as well as either sacrifice them to the Deep Ones or convince them to sign their souls away to unholy matrimony in the same way you did. The demo was rather short, only letting you play a few in-game days, but it gave a pretty good idea of what you can expect.
While there is a cute map complete with little sprites of everyone to look at, most of the action is conveyed via dialog or description. If you’re not trying to convert more people to your cult, you’re completing different tasks from people. For example, the Deep Ones asked me to use clues in order to pinpoint a specific villager. You’ll be spending a lot of time trying to find people for a myriad of reasons, but the game’s robust search system makes this pretty fun and easy. Aside from requests to fulfill, you might also need to complete little tasks around town to make things easier for you down the line. I spent an entire day building more houses or expanding the existing ones so the villagers would stop complaining about how cramped their living quarters were and listen to my sermons.
As a note, the demo is pretty short. I definitely didn’t experience everything the game had to offer and I didn’t have enough time to see the consequences of my decisions. It’s funny that it was so short and yet for my first playthrough, I had to fast forward through most of the year. Conversely, there was another run where I received lots of requests from the villagers and the Deep Ones. So RNG may affect your enjoyment of the game as well. I personally think more is better than less, so I hope the full version will fill up each in-game day better.
Marry a Deep One is pretty subdued and slow-paced. People who enjoy simulations but don’t want anything too difficult or stressful may enjoy this one. It’s hard to tell just how many things you’ll have to balance just from the demo though. I never had problems making new homes for my villagers. But I’m guessing that the full version will require me to prevent outsiders from discovering our disgusting cultish ways and stop visiting, since we rely on the resources they bring in. Other aspects the player needs to balance are the villagers’ despair, the believers’ faith, and the Deep Ones’ anger. Again, thanks to how short the demo was, I wasn’t able to see what happens if the Deep Ones became too angry with me, nor could I tell what the merit was in raising or lower despair.
In a game with so many parameters though, it’s fun to experiment. If only I could experiment though! My first playthrough only took about forty minutes, and I didn’t accomplish much since I was still trying to figure things out. So the next day, I tried to play a new character. Unfortunately, for some reason, the game consistently gave me a fatal error and then crashed to desktop. There was no rhyme or reason to when it would happen, so I couldn’t pinpoint any specific actions or points in the game that would cause it to break like this. This problem persisted even after I uninstalled and reinstalled the demo. Since I was still able to complete my initial run with minimal issues, I wonder if there’s something in the code that prevents people from completing the demo more than once.
It’s hard to describe what makes the game fun and what it’s like to play the game when I literally can’t play for more than fifteen minutes a run. The only time I fully finished the demo, I had to fast forward through most of the day because my RNG luck was bad with requests and I didn’t know what I was doing. Though the in-game tutorial did a good job of showing me how to navigate all the menus, I still didn’t understand a lot of the mechanics. Sigils, for example, are something you can draw on houses and each sigil has a different effect. But in my time playing the game, I didn’t know what effect they had on the residents. The one time I tried to look around the menu to see if there was an explanation, my game crashed. So I gave up.
Marry a Deep One seems to promise a slower-paced political sim with plenty of Lovecraftian elements. However, due to the demo’s short play time and difficulty in getting it to work again for a second playthrough, it’s hard to tell what the final product will be like. As a fan of these sorts of eldritch horror games though, I plan to keep an eye on the game after it comes out to see what else lies in the waters of Innsmouth.
Marry a Deep One will come out on December 8, 2024 for the Windows PC.
Published: Dec 6, 2024 03:00 pm