The Alleged Ship: The Game.
Deep Sixed is a Rogue Like space sim by Little Red Dog Games. The main character is Involuntary Employee 6584, a criminal sentenced to work for the Astra Corporation to pay off her crimes. She is given a small spaceship, the S6-DSV, and tasked with exploring a mysterious nebula filled with alien life. Her only companion on this task is URSA - a deliberately simplistic AI that keeps her updated on threats to the ship. As she explores, she also discovers secrets about the Astra Corporation's true agenda in the nebula.
While the nebula is hazardous, the main danger in the game comes from your own ship, which is very complicated and constantly breaking down. Fortunately, the game provides an in-game manual (also available as a PDF printout) with step-by-step instructions on how to diagnose and fix any problems. The player uses a point-and-click interface to navigate between different rooms, operate the controls, and fix various systems.
Attention, Pilot! The examples list is experiencing a malfunction. Consult your manual.
- The Alleged Car: Your ship, the S6-DSV. It won't get through a single mission (or even a single sector) without breaking down in some way.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Played with.
- Defied: The player's job before the game was to babysit an AI and keep it from going crazy.
- Played Straight and parodied: Retrieval probes (the tiny, defenseless robots you use to recover minerals) will sometimes declare that the "machine war" has begun and refuse to launch.
- Averted with URSA. She becomes a good friend of the player's after you remove her limits.
- All There in the Manual: You need the manual to fix almost any problem (although you can memorize some of the easy fixes). Reading the manual is also the only way to find out about some obscure features in your ship, such as the ability to play back creature calls.
- Artificial Stupidity:
- URSA will occasionally refuse to let you hyperjump (or force you to hyperjump back to base) for silly reasons if her system is broken.
- Even when she's functioning normally, she has very limited ability to make conversation due to the limits on her intelligence. The player describes her as "just an interactive script."
- Breakable Weapons:
- Your lasers have two different systems which degrade each time you shoot. Failing to maintain either one can cause your lasers to malfunction.
- Severe damage or fire can completely destroy your ship's systems, requiring you to repair it back at base.
- Boxed Crook: "Involuntary Employees" as Astra calls them. The "box" in this case is that you don't have the navigation data needed to jump back to Earth, forcing you to stay in the nebula.
- Crew of One: Averted. The DSV has multiple work areas (scanners, hyperdrive, reactor, and 5 viewing rooms). It was clearly designed for more than one person, and this is very noticeable when you have to run back and forth between different rooms to make repairs or fight multiple enemies.
- Dangerous Forbidden Technique: The manual mentions that certain drivers can be disabled to speed up scanning, strengthen your lasers, or skip the hyperdrive cooldown, but this is dangerous. Those safety features are there for a reason, after all.
- Diegetic Interface: All the ship's controls are visible on screen, operated by point and click.
- Duct Tape for Everything: Used for fixing hull breaches and leaks in the coolant pipe.
- Easy Logistics: Averted. You have to order repair supplies to fix certain problems, and the supplies take time to arrive, forcing you to sometimes launch on a mission with some parts still broken down.
- Explosive Leash: The DSV has a hidden explosive that Astra can use to kill off any pilot who Knows Too Much.
- Friend-or-Idol Decision: The final mission gives you a choice between going home after completing your contract, and recovering URSA's delimiter.
- Have a Nice Death: If you die, the game will tell you Astra's assessment of the cause of death, either "Unforeseen Accident" if you're killed by an alien, or "Negligent Suicide" if it was a ship malfunction that you failed to repair.
- Hold the Line: The final mission requires you to simply keep your ship running (easier said than done) while you wait for a series of timers to complete.
- Insistent Terminology: Astra insists on "Involuntary Employee" rather than "slave" or "prisoner."
- Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Retrieval probes will occasionally rebel against you in classic A.I. Is a Crapshoot style, even though there's no indication they have any intelligence and their sole job is to fly out and pick things up.
- Marathon Level: The second-to-last mission requires multiple trips into the nebula to set up comms beacons as you slowly follow a signal. Better stock up on spare parts.
- MegaCorp: Astra Corporation.
- Mêlée à Trois: The final mission throws you into the middle of a battle between the aliens and Astra warships. Fortunately, you don't need to kill anyone, just recover a MacGuffin and escape.
- My Car Hates Me: Expect your ship to break down at the most inconvenient times (generally while you're in combat).
- Shield malfunctions seem designed to invoke this, because you only see the error message when you turn on the shields... which is usually about half a second before the enemy hits you.
- Organic Technology: You unlock certain upgrades by recovering alien body parts and attaching them to your ship.
- Percussive Maintenance: A surprising number of hardware faults can be fixed by hitting them with a wrench.
- Restraining Bolt: Inverted. Early in the story you find a "quantum delimiter" that removes URSA's intelligence limits.
- Scylla and Charybdis:
- Zephyrlings become more aggressive when your hyperdrive is powered up, but you need the hyperdrive to go anywhere, so you're forced to choose between making progress towards your destination and not getting ripped apart by aliens.
- Reavers become more aggressive if your scanners are powered up, forcing a similar choice because you generally need the scanner to reveal where your goal is.
- Unwinnable by Design: The scanner (a necessary tool for most missions) has a Universal Circuit Board which sometimes burns out and needs replacing. If you're unlucky (or didn't plan ahead when buying spares), it's possible for it to burn out so many times that you have no spares and can't afford to buy more, at which point you can't complete any mission that needs scanning.
- You Are Number 6: Involuntary employees are only referred to by their number.
