Whatever Lets You Play As the Ship Stuck in the Suez Canal

03/09/2021

Whatever Lets You Play As the Ship Stuck in the Suez Canal

If you watched, like the rest of the world, a massive cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal for nearly a week and thought, `I could’ve done better,” then Whatever on Steam is the game for you.

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That’s because it’s a cargo ship drifting game that actually lets you steer a ship through a canal, not unlike the actual Suez Canal. It was created by someone curious about how hard such a task might actually be.

Spoilers: It’s apparently not easy.

WHATEVER is my attempt to answer that question and fulfill my curiosity,” developer Napas Torteeka writes on the game’s Steam page. “You will cry and finally realize how amazing every cargo ship’s captain is because it is extremely hard to pilot that !$@%!$# 200,000-tonne cargo ship with their extreme inertia through the canal.”

The game’s title is Whatever, which is also the title of the player-controlled cargo ship in the game. It’s a nod to the Ever Given cargo ship that was stuck in the Suez Canal for six days earlier this year.

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Axios spoke to developer Torteeka about the game and how it came to be, and it turns out, it’s the first game Torteeka has developed in 15 years.

“I just wondered: How could that be possible?” Torteeka said to Axios. “What were the captain and the crew doing to get it stuck that way? When I first played my prototype, I knew how amazing every cargo ship captain is.”

Whatever seems like a simple game — drift through waterways while collecting coins and safely deliver the ship’s cargo — but if it’s anything like last year’s Suez Canal ordeal, something simple and mundane might turn into a seemingly insurmountable task.

If drifting through the Suez Canal sounds easy, Whatever also tosses wind gusts, whirlpools, kaiju, UFOs, and more at you. Whatever’s current release date is listed on Steam as “Once the ship is ready” (nice), but Torteeka tells Axios that an early access version is coming in late September.

Whatever is certainly drawing on real-world news on purpose and thanks to it, players will get the chance to drift through its canals soon. The Suez incident didn’t just help inspire games, but delay them too like how the Analogue Pocket Gameboy-like device was delayed as a result of the boat stuck in the Suez Canal.