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.