While there have been tons of great interactive stories brought to the mobile platform over the years, I feel like developer Inkle are the ones who really raised the bar for everyone else. Their Sorcery! series brought Steve Jackson’s original gamebook series to life in ways we never could have imagined back in the ’80s, and it felt like the perfect marriage of video games and literature and mobile device technology. Then there’s 80 Days which took Jules Verne’s classic Around the World in Eighty Days and created an infinitely playable sprawling adventure out of it. Today Inkle saw fit to drop a brand new interactive story onto all of us with no warning whatsoever, and as you can expect from them it’s a unique twist on a well-trodden formula. The game is called Overboard! and it’s a classic murder mystery where your husband is thrown overboard out at sea and it’s up to you to get to the bottom of who did it. Except you already know who did it, because YOU did it.

Yes, the goal in Overboard! is to find a way to get away with the murder you committed by any means necessary. As the game’s description put it, “Blackmail a spy. Fall in love. Murder a rival. Cheat at cards. Drug a witness. Lie, befriend, betray, console, sneak, seduce, steal, borrow, pray, eavesdrop, kill…" This isn’t simply a story with multiple branching paths, but more like an actual living game world where you’re free to do and say what you want and other characters will remember the things you say and do and will also act independently on their own. Similar to 80 Days a single play through Overboard! shouldn’t take more than an hour but it is meant to be played through multiple times and in multiple different ways in order to uncover every little secret and ending. Basically strap in for another heaping helping of Inkle goodness. You can grab Overboard! on the iOS App Store now for $5.99 and talk about it in the discussion thread in our forums here.