Summary
- Bootleg Steamer offers a unique blend of rogue-like and trading elements set in the prohibition era, challenging players to build a successful nautical business.
- With charming visuals and jazz music, players can hire crewmates, upgrade ships, and make a profit by trading goods in a risky adventure on the open sea.
- Players can customize their experience in Bootleg Steamer, choosing to play it safe as a business simulator or embrace the thrill of illegal activities and risky encounters.
Aꦿs I made my escape from the scene of the crime, I was so preoccupied with racing across the water to lose the coast guard boat hot on my tail, afraid that they’d discover my illegal cargo of whiskey and haul me off to jail, that I accidentally fell victim to a whirlpool instead.
This was just one of many seafaring shenanigans I found myself dealing with in Bootleg Steamer. Your crew brings with them a mix of boons and burdens, the mafia are tricky customers to deal with, and you never know what you’ll face on the o🦋pen sea throughout this adventure.
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Bootleg Steamer is a top-down, roguelike nautical game in which you set sail to trade goods during the prohibition era. It channels this period with its jaunty jazz music, fading monochrome portrait art, and a grainy visual quality, as if it's being displayed through an old-school film projector. It was , with its launch coinciding with the first day of London’s WASD gamin♔g event where I got to check i꧃t out for myself.
Team Junkfish’s marketing manager Ellie Gibbs and director Adam Dart, who tell me that one of the biggest challenges was in creating a unique blend of roguelike and trading elements. “A lot of [roguelikes] are based on fast-paced hack-and-slash gameplay, whereas we're taking the route of being a nautical bag-selling trading game as well,” Dart tells me. “That's a bit of a challenge, to translate the trading elements into a rogue-like kind of structure. That's what makes it unique.”
Dart explains that Bootleg Steamer was the result of a game jam by Team Junkfish, “We try doing game jams every now and again to come up with new ideas. We have people in the team pitch games, and then we play them, prototype a few of them, and select the ones that we like. We wanted to make a roguelike nautical game set in the prohibition era. The initial game jam version was a bit more arcadey, a bit more simplistic, and didn't have a few of the features that the final game has but overall, the theme of the game stayed the same.”
The prohibition era also meant histor🎐ical research, and the team looked into incorporating certain events, such as the Great Depression, but they also took “creative liberties”, with Dart explaining,
“At the end of the day, it's supposed to be a fun, cartoony, stylised prohibition game not taking itself too seriously. We're prioritising fun over historical accuracy.”
After choosing your captain and ship, eacღh level grants you a set number of days for which to make as much money as you can by trading goods, buying them from one port and sailing to another to sell them off and make a profit. You can hire new cremates, which offer different perks at a cost. For example, they might grant you increased sale prices on a specific item, but your load times wil🍸l be slower. You can also spend hard-earned cash to upgrade your ship, too. After you complete each voyage, you’ll move onto fresh waters but keep your money, crew, and upgrades, so you slowly build the perfect set-up.
There are shipwrecks that you can loot and missions to undertake. You can evꦿen focus on improving your ship’s glamour so that you look trendy enough that other boats might want to party or trade with you wh𝓰ile at sea. Each run sees you go from nothing into a sea-faring business with its own distinct reputation. That is, if you manage to make it that far.
“You can adopt pets,” Gibbs🍌 tells me, something I didn’t see for myself. “They’ll have different skill buffs and stuff, 🏅but it’s randomised so it depends on how lucky you are [when it comes to] which one you’ll get.” They work in the same way as the crewmates do, offering perks and character to your vessel.
You can play things completely safe and not buy or sell alcohol if you really want to🍨, like the game is a relaxing business management sim where all you do is build a fancy ship and make friends amongst your crew. Nothing illegal is afoot here I promise! However, I did partake in a little tipple, but also took the calm approach of fun and fancy when I wasn’t just in it for the money.
One of the best things about Bootleg Steamer is how it can be a chi🍬ll sim game or an experience that makes you sweat as you strive to do your very best right down to the last second., With the right approach, you can become the Kingpin of the Seven Seas or the chilled-out holiday sailor eager to keep on the right side of the law. It feels odd at first, but it works. It is what you make it. You can take it easy, or you can push yourself.
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