Maritime crime game
Dead Water is a maritime crime game where you run cargo past a surveillance state. You load a boat with contraband, thread it through waters watched from orbit, and turn the profit into money that will not get you arrested. Everything below is the game as development stands today. Some of it is built, most of it is not, and the parts that survive playtesting are the parts that ship.
Smuggling is the middle of the loop, not the whole of it. Getting the cargo moving, getting it seen by no one, and getting paid in money you can actually spend are three separate problems, and each one is somewhere you can get caught.
Run
Open water is fast and exposed. The shoreline is slow and covered. Pick one. There is no star meter and no wanted level that ticks down while you wait in a cove. What follows you is an evidence picture assembled by a task force: transponder history, satellite passes, thermal and night vision returns, radar contacts, track history, and a witness in a port who remembers your face. Different evidence clears in different ways, and some of it never clears at all.
Launder
Cargo becomes cash. Cash becomes clean money. Each conversion is a place to get caught and a place to lose a cut, which makes this a laundering game as much as a smuggling game. Every port has one number that matters: who will buy from you here, at what cut, and what dealing with them costs you later. You cannot outrun a pattern in your own accounts.
Grow
Six hull types, six arguments about risk, from a go-fast that outruns anything and explains nothing to a fishing trawler that is slow, scannable and completely believable, with hidden holds. Bigger hulls need more hands doing separate jobs at the same moment, so crew size is the difficulty dial rather than a stat you buy. You can run all of it solo, in first person, or with a crew, and everyone else is out there on the same water at the same time.
Watched from orbit
The interesting choices are not about guns. They are about how visible you are willing to be: transponder on and legible but legitimate, or dark and invisible to tracking and deeply suspicious to anything that does see you. Or you wear somebody else's name, because a trawler that is really tied up three ports away is a very good thing to be.
The setting is a fictional archipelago on today's shipping lanes. Every place, brand and crew in it is invented. Read the FAQ for the awkward questions, and the boat roster and heat system for the rest of the design.
Dead Water is made by NoQuarterLabs LLC and self-published: a maritime crime game built in Unity 6 for PC, first person, built for an adult audience, with no release date announced. There is a design, an economy on paper, and a prototype whose first job is proving that driving a boat fast is fun.
The devlog is where the honest version lives, including the parts that do not work, and the roadmap shows what has to be true before anything ships. There is no storefront to wishlist, so the list below is how you hear about a demo. If you came looking for a boat smuggling video game, that page covers the same game from that angle.
No storefront, no wishlist button
One email when the free demo is playable. One more when the game is out. That is the whole plan, and you can leave any time.
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Dead Water
Dead Water is a crime game about smuggling. It is built for an adult audience and deals with drugs, violence and organised crime, all of it fictional. Please confirm you are 18 or older.
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