Cruise for a Corpse

Year 1991, me sitting at a monochrome monitor and Delphine Software serving up a murder on a ship. No warning. No tutorial. Just the sea, the deck, and a corpse.

Cruise for a Corpse is a third-person adventure set in 1927 aboard a luxury yacht cruising Mediterranean waters. You play as an inspector invited for a pleasant voyage — and right from the start, that invitation turns into a murder investigation of the ship's owner. Plot straight out of Agatha Christie, complete with a whole gallery of suspects with plenty to hide.

Delphine knew how to do things their own way back then. Instead of a traditional text parser, you get a rotating list of context verbs and movement across the deck through smooth animation — the same engine they used in Operation Stealth and Future Wars. The game runs in real time, or more precisely: the world advances in discrete time steps depending on what you do. Every action pushes the clock forward a bit and characters react to what you've discovered. Miss the right place at the right time, and you'll miss a crucial scene. That was a real innovation in 1991.

Today, this very system is also the biggest stumbling block. Without a manual or pen and paper, you'll likely get stuck, because the logic of some steps requires either solid intuition or willingness to read gaming magazines from back then. The verb list controls look elegant, but in practice sometimes frustrate when you have the right thing, the right place, but the wrong verb. And the graphics — yes, decent for 1991, but today more of a historical document than eye candy.

Still, I remember Cruise for a Corpse fondly. The atmosphere of a confined space, a limited cast of characters, gradually emerging motives, and one tightly bounded scene like a chessboard — that still works today. The game will take you an afternoon if you know what you're doing. If not, it could keep you busy all weekend. In the browser today, mainly those who love Sierra and LucasArts adventures will play it, but want to see how the French school did it. A little different. A little harder. And without mercy.