Fun adventure game in a pirate world with nice atmosphere, linear gameplay and not that interesting shooting.

When a guy wakes up after drinking a lot the night before, he heads to the bathroom to get rid of all the fluids. But when he looks towards the bathtub, he notices a skeleton inside. He dismisses it as a booze-induced hallucination and prepares for work. He dashes down the stairs, opens the front door, and plunges into a pirate world populated by living skeletons.

The gameplay resembles a first-person adventure. You move around and explore the location you are on. You start on an island, but later you move to other locations. Although the game's UI will be familiar to fans of horror indie games, with a throbbing heart representing health and a diary displaying your current objective, it has been tailored to the game. This UI nearly always comes with an annoying lighter and flashlight that require batteries or fuel to work. There is a flashlight here, but you don’t have to worry about batteries.

Aside from walking forward, you make progress via finding and utilizing objects. Items are used automatically when you click on the spot. The only rule is that you have it in your inventory. None of it is marked with visual cues, so you must approach anything and see if it displays a hand icon when you hover the cursor above it.

This is usually not an issue because most items are located in chests, and there are notes throughout that can send you in the right direction or disclose more about this weird world. While it is difficult to get lost due to the confined location and linear progress, the great diary prevents wandering in the dark by telling you exactly what needs to be done and updating frequently. One thing to remember is to read notes and interact with everything you can because this triggers events and spawns new items that might not have been there before.

Low-poly images provide great visuals. They may not seem particularly unique because so many games use the same style, but everything looks great and blends well together. The game has a few scary moments, such as sewers and dark souls that come after you like a wave.

As you solve challenges, the day will turn into evening, and skeletons will appear. They will not do anything, yet they appear to move while you are not watching. However, everything changes as night falls. Then they come alive and hunt you. Fortunately, you are also given a pistol to take them out. A skeleton can be dropped with two bullets, and there’s another enemy that requires three.

Ammo is limited and discovered in small boxes, but because enemy confrontations are almost like puzzles, if you waste too many bullets, you will have to restart from the previous checkpoint. Another annoying part is when you have low health. This makes your vision blurry until you eat a few cucumbers, which act as healing items. But if you don’t have any, it’s easier to reload a previous save because finding something with blurry vision is not fun.

The game does a good job by automatically saving in many slots, allowing you to return to any checkpoint. However, there was one bothersome bug that appeared in the second level. If you die or restart in this stage, the triggers become messed up, rendering the stage unsolvable. This can be fixed by loading a checkpoint before entering the new stage and not dying.

Despite episode 1 tag, there’s quite a lot of content here for around 3-4 hours. However, the game leaves all questions unanswered because it simply ends with “to be continued” message.

Evil Water Ep1 :: a puzzle adventure with hints of darkness :: an blend of easy, casual puzzles and bright graphics with a foreboding atmosphere and jump scares. Good for light horror fans. 6/10