You Must Build A Boat is a 2D Dungeon Crawler game from 2015, created by Eighty Eight Games, an independent developer.
You Must Build A Boat is defined as a hybrid puzzle, RPG and action game, with 16-bit music and graphics. In You Must Build A Boat, you play as an adventurer on a boat. You sleep, train and upgrade your items in various rooms, that are progressively built, on the boat. There are two monsters which you interact with as a gateway to many dungeons of varying difficulty, wherein you kill monsters, bust open crates, collect items and gain experience.
Instead of hitting monsters with spells from a click, the player is presented with a Bejeweled-like puzzle board, with several tiles to perform several functions. Therefore, matching 3 swords is a very different action than matching 3 keys. When you're not running full sprint through the dungeons, hacking through skeletons and zombie soldiers, you're back on the boat, using your collected items, gold and experience to gear and train up for the next run.
You ultimate goal in You Must Build A Boat is to build the boat you need to get to your ultimate destination.
You Must Build a Boat is a followup to 10,000,000, which was released in August 2012.
You Must Build A Boat includes examples of:
- Evolving Title Screen: The title screen changes to the background color of whatever level you're on.
- Excuse Plot: You're trapped on a boat and need to build a better boat to get somewhere.
- Fireballs: One of the spells that can be gotten from a crate.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Tomatoes obtained from crates makes the screen jump a small interval to the right. Since the game ends when you slide off the left side of the screen, this effectively makes it the closest thing to a healing item as a game like this can get.
- Kill It with Ice: A Freeze spell can be gotten from crates.
- Retraux: The sound and graphics are around the 16-bit mark at best.
- Shock and Awe: A Shock spell can be gotten from crates.
- Status Effects: There are two, both of which have a random chance of being applied to any magic attack:
