Down Among the Dead Men Review (Xbox): Hard to Judge Beyond the Cover

I’ve played all kinds of video games in my life. Some have been story games with little to no gameplay, like visual novels, but I don’t think I’ve ever played software that had the sole intention of being a book and nothing else. How do you recommend a video game, that at the end of the day, is just a book and nothing else? 

That’s the case with Down Among the Dead Men, which is literally software that allows you to play through the 1993 gamebook of the same name by Dave Morris. There is nothing more and nothing less to this title. At the end of the day, is it really an accomplishment to make software that automatically flips through pages?

I’m but a Basic Landlubber

In Down Among the Dead Men, you read through a story of someone who escapes the clutches of Captain Skarvench and must fight to survive, make it back to civilization, build up a crew, and get a ship for an upcoming war. Every page has you hopping to different sections of the book as you make choices. There is an extra wrinkle here, though, where you choose to play a certain kind of character and keep track of your health, doubloons, and items throughout the journey. Neat for a physical book, not for software trying to masquerade as a video game.

The title will keep track of your inventory, and every now and then you will get an illustration that shows what you are encountering, but most of the time, you are just shifting through text, listening to an AI voice horribly mispronouncing pirate slang as it reads everything on the page to you. Not only do we have software that has the highest ambition of turning a page, but it’s gone the absolute cheapest route possible, incapable of having a human do the bare-minimum of pronouncing words on paper.

Final Verdict

I can’t find a reason to recommend Down Among the Dead Men to absolutely anyone unless you are looking for achievement/trophy slop to add to your gamerscore. If you happen to be a big fan of Dave Morris, you likely already have this book in your physical collection. Even if you are looking for a story to follow, that is something I struggled with hard here because of the AI voice reading along, plus it’s not like a “journey” that lasts five minutes before starting over is really enough to grab hold of your attention. If you’re highly curious, support your local library and find the real book.

Down Among the Dead Men was reviewed on Xbox Series X with a code provided by Infinite Zone. It is also available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.

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