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.
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…
yeah, there’s a lot of potential here.
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.