Praise the Titanic?

What the ongoing struggle between RMS Titanic and the Atlantic Ocean lacks in kineticism and pyrotechnics, it more than makes up for in atmosphere and pathos. While Early Access ROV sim, vROVpilot: TITANIC only managed to distract me for around an hour, it was a haunting and influential hour.

Utilising recent scans of the bow section (the stern and debris field will be added later) Magellan’s £15 creation seems to be going down pretty well with Titanicophiles, despite the missing areas and fairly low resolution model and textures.

As Romeo and Juliet, the two ROVs used in the 2022 scanning operation, didn’t venture inside the White Star Line celebrity, users don’t get to explore interiors with them. If you do manage to squeeze one of the star-crossed lovers through an intriguing hull hole then you won’t get far and may discover distracting untextured internal surfaces in your cramped surroundings.

Not being a Titanic obsessive, I’d have appreciated an embedded encyclopedia, and more than one mission. The launch build tasks you with finding and scanning five Titanic appendages. Thanks to helpful radar blips, this is no great challenge even at the highest difficulty setting (higher difficulty = more fragile ROVs, lower light levels, and shorter battery life).

Keen to descry decaying state rooms and debris-scattered corridors, I went looking for a less restrictive Titanic ROV sim and ended up playing a delightfully dotty Nineties classic instead.

Packed with entertaining characters and, thus far, pleasantly free of maddening puzzles, Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time (1996) is, I now realise, my kind of point-and-click adventure.

Developer Cyberflix educated in the subtlest way imaginable. Because the game’s elaborate ensemble mystery (think Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, mixed with a soupcon of The 39 Steps) takes place on a surprisingly faithful recreation of the famed iceberg brusher, the player gets to know the liner almost by accident.

Navigating the vessel’s numerous nooks and crannies, and approaching staff and passengers, is done using a movement system not dissimilar to the one employed in Google Street View. Can’t face trudging back down that lengthy corridor to question that paranoid heiress or search the Turkish Baths? No problem – the multi-deck floorplans can be used for teleportation.

Even if regular breakthroughs, interesting interactive environments, and an intriguing multi-strand plot, hadn’t kept me keen as mustard during hours one and two, I’d have pressed on in order to experience more of the game’s wonderfully bonkers not-quite-FMV character conversations. Once you’ve met unforgettable chaps and chapesses like Alfred Zeitel and Penny Pringle, abandoning Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time prematurely is unthinkable.

If you are tempted to give TAOOT a try, installing this unofficial patch before starting is a good idea as the GOG and Steam versions of the game come with glitches.