Blending traditional first and third person gameplay with a Sims-style day-to-day needs system - including food, sleep and social interaction - The Ship offers exploration, investigation, survival, stealth, intrigue and murder across beautifully crafted decking and highly-polished interactive environments.

Launched in 2006, the original game (“The Ship: Murder Party”) introduced players to The Ship set aboard a series of 1920’s cruise ships.  Lured onto the doomed vessels by the mysterious Mr X, the player is offered a very simple choice – hunt or be hunted!  Assigned a quarry who they must hunt down and kill, the player must also avoid their own hunter while maintain their personal needs such as hunger, thirst and hygiene.

The quirky blend of unique gameplay and dark humour has seen the game grow in popularity over the years and more recently become a hit with Youtubers who love to share their many, many, many untimely deaths with their subscribers.

Based on feedback from the community, we’ve delayed the launch of the game by 1 week (22nd Feb, 2pm GMT). There were a number of concerns from the community about the impact of a LAN-only launch may have on initial Steam reviews and on balance, we felt that it was appropriate to address those concerns. 

Today, we'll release relay server functionality to closed testing players. This service is isn't entirely functional right now as there are bandwidth limitations (with Unity Cloud Services) meaning that games are capped at 4 players (otherwise they would just time out quickly). We're discussing this with Unity just now and hope to have this cap increased soon. However, it will mean that our test group can play online matches without the need for 3rd party services and we're also hoping to get some good feedback on this.

Work on dedicated servers is also continuing and as originally planned, we would expect these to become available within a few weeks.

Thanks to everyone for their comments and also for voicing your concerns. Launching a game like this is a delicate process and we were also concerned about the impact of negative reviews will have on the future of the game. We did feel that on balance there were more benefits to launching today than later, but given the feedback from the community, we've moved to a more suitable solution.

For what it's worth, we believe that one of the most important aspects of launching a game like this is the community that builds around it. That's why we invited Ship fans to closed testing and gave all of our former Kickstarter backers keys for the new game. We believe this is the best starting point for building a new Ship community and, well, we wouldn't be doing very well at the first step if we didn't listen to you! :)

We're sure the next few weeks are going to be pretty hectic for us and indeed, some people may not be happy with the product we're offering right now. But, we believe that a combination of Ship fans and Early Access fans are a strong foundation to build a community on and we're confident if you stick with us for the duration (even if you don't buy the game right away), you'll be happy about the progress that is made.

- the Blazing Griffin team

Key points about the delay;

• LAN gameplay is functional.
• Relay servers, using the Unity Could Service are functional although limited by bandwidth meaning games would be capped at 4 players.
• We are working with Unity to resolve these issues as quickly as we can.
• We’re rolling out access to relay servers to our test group today.
• Work on Dedicated Server support is ongoing and likely to be available for public testing over the next few weeks.