The potential for environmental(?) storytelling with this is amazing. Crew that have been hoarding fruit bringing it to you during restricted rations then the rest of the crew finds out and they just stop showing up, or being bribed to redirect better food from the captain's table, or trying to manage the rationing requirements given to you by an increasingly insane captain while at the same time having to keep the crew happy or they'll turn on you.
Parrots stuffed with crackers, long saltpork, barrels of infinte biscuits, huge oysters, eldtritch fish, trying to keep the nightmares from stealing your ingredients while still serving dinner on time, your knives all go missing so you have to improvise all your recipies without them...
I would also love it if they used real recipes for things, like the ones from Lobscouse & Spotted Dog, which is a tremendously well-researched and well-written book that has the recipes from the Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin series. This includes a recipe for boiled shit and millers (rats) in onion sauce.
As food supply dwindles you're forced to cook with more and more spoiled ingredients. Leading to sickness and hallucinations on top of the strange supernatural influence. Sleep won't come any more. Whatever is on the ship makes it impossible to rest. Vision is blurry and hearing is off. Which voices are real, which are the ghosts, which are purely your own?
The wind has stopped and the ship hasn't moved is a week as the waves rock. People who you thought had jumped overboard are back making requests for dishes from their childhood. Spices you don't remember stocking and couldn't possibly be on board turn up in unexpected places. This looks like saffron. Does saffron taste like that all the time or is this something else entirely?
Add in increasingly brutal reactions to bad meals from getting yelled at near the beginning to getting knocked to the floor and some ingredients stolen then eventually a guy takes a couple of your fingers off with a clever and walks away laughing as he pops them in his mouth
In the book Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, the main character Sadie is a video game designer who created his game in which you play a worker creating factory parts. If you ignore what's going on around you and just focus on winning the game by making the parts better and faster, eventually the game ends and it becomes clear that you were creating equipment for Nazis during the Holocaust and, thus, you lose the game.
Movies love to have twist endings in which something would have been obvious if you were paying better attention. I think more video games need to do this as well.
I heard of an art / board game like this as well, loading trains with as much cargo as possible. Once you get to the end of the game you discover what the cargo was.
Dredge was so much fun, just wish it was a bit longer or had more replayability. Also there's achievements you just straight up can't get yet so even though I've gotten 100% of the achievements that are possible, steam doesn't show it's 100%
Being able to look out the porthole, sometimes seeing a kraken. Crew in the mess start getting possessed, eyes turn red, etc. BGM turns from jovial shanties to mixed with eldritch whispering.
I love it, it really makes for great immersive experience even for people who aren't used to RPG settings. The Deep ones are always on the move, so there is the omnipresent sense of impending doom, and that gets everyone nervous and looking kinda sus.
But it takes a while to finish one run, with first-timers it can take over 3 hours.
I still recommend it and push it on other people :)