A murder hunt on a 1920s cruise ship
The Ship: Murder Party is a first-person multiplayer murder mystery set aboard a series of 1920s art deco cruise ships. You are one of many people who received a free ticket from the mysterious Mr X, and once on board you find the catch: you are forced into a brutal Hunt, under threat of death for you and your family. Your only way out is to play and win. The package includes a tutorial called The Ship Single Player, which walks you through some of the gameplay mechanics and the storyline, plus The Ship Multiplayer, where you hunt and get hunted by other players.
How the group plays it together
Every player in a match is given a Quarry to kill, and at the same time has to evade their own Hunter. So the whole group is caught in a web where each person is both predator and prey. It plays out in first person with stealthy action rather than straightforward firefighting, and a needs system runs alongside the killing, so you have things to take care of while you stalk or hide. The Steam features list Online PvP, which is where the group plays against each other.
What to know before starting
The in-game server browser no longer works, so you will need to connect through the Steam client: View, then Servers. If The Ship does not show up there, restarting the client usually brings it up. The developers also point to their forums and a State of the Game announcement for more detail on the current state of things, so it is worth reading those before you gather your group. Expect a slower, more considered kind of multiplayer than a typical shooter: tracking your Quarry, staying out of your Hunter's reach, and managing your needs while the art deco decks of the ship work as cover. The tags attached to the game include stealth, mystery, assassins, survival and comedy, which gives a fair sense of the tone — tense hunting with a streak of dark humour running through it.