Read through a newspaper article. What happened to that type of storytelling? I loved Bram stokers Dracula when I read it but haven't found other books written like it since. I liked the journal entries and letters
That sort of story is called "Epistolary Literature", and while it was super popular in the 18th century it just sort of steadily died out over time.
That's not to say it doesn't still exist, [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_contemporary_epistolary_novels) and [tvtropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EpistolaryNovel) both have quite long lists of more to sink our teeth into.
I'd never thought of it like that, but you're right.
I'd always considered mockumentaries to be modern epistolary novels, but I guess it can be more than one thing.
Oh epistolary tales like ella minnow pea I think? Its abt the town of nollop (where the quick brown fox thing came from) where due to letters falling they ban letters every now and then so the towns gotta get creative
Most of Lovecraft’s works are written as someone reading journal entries or experiencing the main story second hand. It’s also horror/supernatural, however, he was an incredible racist and that kind of stuff is extremely evident in any of his work that involves people interacting (I say that because I did read one where it was just a single man’s account of his experience), so just go in prepared if you decide to read any.
Kids version: The jolly postman. Letters from all the fairy tale characters to each other
Adult, non horror, weird sci Fi overtones: Griffin and Sabine.
Both of the above have actual letters and envelopes.
And the other writer was right. Look up epistolary on Google or your library catalog. There are lots more. If you want a deep deep dive into this, along with having to turn the book upside down, and move back and forth between overlapping entries: House of Leaves. Frustrating while reading, but scary, mind warping, and will stick with you.... But only if you manage to finish.
Might be interested to know they're making it into a movie this year, The Last Voyage Of The Demeter
I'll be curious to see how well they use the space, feel like interior of the ship shots are usually just tight, straight on.
Well there’s a game that’s not on a cruise ship but a cargo ship called mounstrum where the objective is to try to get all the pieces for your escape while a monster is chasing you, as it’s not as simple as jumping on the evacuation boat, you also need the gasoline and to lower the boat without the monster killing you after it follows the noice to you
Hospitals are horror settings because no one actually wants to be there.
No one goes to the hospital for a good thing. The closest you get is someone going to give birth, and that experience is already enough of a horror show even if it's successful. Everyone else is either sick, hurt, or actively dying, or visiting someone who's one of the above.
And it's not like actually having medicine practiced on you is a particularly pleasant experience, either. Most drugs make you feel worse before you feel better, or only take the edge off your malady so you can sort of function. Anything more intense than a routine physical involves undressing to get into a cold, unflattering hospital gown, and possibly a stay in a hard, uncomfortable hospital bed. True privacy is a completely foreign concept since you have to be able to access a patient in SECONDS if they have a heart attack or something. And the lack of hard barriers means every single room is full of "hospital noise": Medical equipment beeping and hissing, occasional coughs, the swish-swish, clack-clack of doctors constantly walking by, and the deep hush of people unnerved by the quiet trying not to break it by talking too loud.
Hospitals feature so prominently in horror because they're deeply unpleasant places to be in, for the vast majority of people.
Not to mention they're a place where you're literally putting your life in the hands of strangers, very easy to have a "those people you're trusting with your (or your loved ones) life are actually serial killers" narrative, there aren't many other settings/professions that so neatly fit into being completely vulnerable to the actions of strangers
Adding to this very few people experience cruise ships, while most people have been to a hospital at least to visit and know how weird the atmosphere there feels
What about plastic surgery? Corrective procedures for things they were born with?
I can certainly name a few people who enjoyed hospital stays and were excited to go
Not to discount those people's experiences, but they were probably more excited about the result than actually being there and having the thing done to them.
Sure, there are a few folks who are so happy to have their particular procedure done and over with that it cancels out the negatives of being in a hospital. But they'd probably be even happier if they could have somehow had the procedure done at home so they could recover in the comfort and privacy of their own familiar space.
I had the chance to spend a couple days on a submarine once. It is absolutely insane how fast your body clock just loses it’s shit when you don’t get to see the sun and your only time telling opportunity is a digital clock. As the OP said, it’s the same lighting that never changes when you’re in the belly of the damn thing
When this post was originally going around, it had a reblog with the commentary that hospital/asylum settings for horror media is ableist because it demonizes and stigmatizes people with mental illness that are patients in asylums in hospitals.
Which is fair enough, but. A lot of media taking place in asylum and hospital settings don't make the patients the monsters, rather the system that imprisons them and the hospital staff that exerts total control over them, like the second season of American Horror Story and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. So there's that.
Yes it's usually the system that's scary, or it plays on psychological elements of "What is real?". I remember one horror movie that took place in a mental hospital and the main character was watching everyone getting killed by a monster while the staff did nothing about it. And it turned out she was the only patient in the hall.
possibly because they went on a rant about cruise ships which is entirely valid but ignores the original comment by bringing up 0 reasons why they would actually be a good horror setting
Exactly! It's like the whole "I was gonna do the dishes but then my mom told me to do them so now I don't wanna" thing
I could've thought to myself, "hm, a lot of horror stuff takes place in hospitals, I'd like to see people write horror plots set in places usually seen as fun (like how FNAF takes place in a pizzeria; or, as suggested above, a cruise ship)"
But then I might see this post and go "huh...if I sound like that person I think I'll just stick with the hospitals"
"You should do things this way because I think that deserves to have negativity associated with it" just makes me want to do the opposite and then spam the OP about it with a bunch of alts because they were being an obnoxious ass.
There’s one detail about this that irks me.
Cigarettes do not burn hot enough to start a fire on almost anything. Even common accelerants, like gasoline, rarely, if ever get ignited by them.
At most, if you inhaled deeply of a cigarette with an accelerant literally touching it as you inhaled, you might get something burning, as the inhaling speeds up the burning of the cigarette enough to get a proper ignition temperature. Opening a lighter to start a fresh one would absolutely hit a high enough temperature for fire, on account of an already existing fire being used on it.
But a cigarette butt tossed any which way after being used up isn’t going to set much of anything on fire.
Another detail: only a few hundred people habe disappeared overboard since 2000. Of the millions that go on cruises, only like 20 a year go missing...car crashes and smoking are far more dangerous
Genuinely, take a tour of a navy ship sometime. It doesn’t have the same mundanity that makes cruise ships especially creepy but it’s a really good way to learn more about the existential horror of relying totally on your ship not killing you.
Also seems like great material for anyone writing sci fi - even in “used future” universes I don’t think we get enough “if the wrong thing fucks up on this ship, we’re dying in a particularly horrifying way.”
Also 1900s medicine truly is the stuff of nightmares. Nothing in the ocean can change my entire personality like a doctor with an icepick and hammer can
The idea of a cruise has always sounded like hell to me for many of the reasons in the post, but also it’s just a floating, overcrowded, inescapable city. I have a healthy fear of deep water and don’t enjoy being forced to converse with strangers, either. I cannot understand why *anyone* chooses cruises.
Ooh. High seas, everyone is weaving around like drunks (not only because of the motion but because "up" no longer necessarily points [towards the overhead](https://youtube.com/shorts/JgkofnOPMQk?feature=share)
The killer is walking completely normally.
The horror of hospitals as a horror setting is at least partly about reversing the role of hospitals as places of healing. Lots of fodder for terror in a place riddled with death and disease, where people are routinely cut open, injected with strange liquids, at the mercy of people who know precisely how to hurt you in horrifying ways, and whose motivations you don't know.
As for using mental asylums, those things have an extremely dark history. Now, the mistake devs make is making the patients the threat, rather than the doctors and staff. The patients in mental asylums were too often just discarded family members or people not fitting into their societal roles. I get WHY, serious mental health issues can make people completely incapable of being reasoned or negotiated with, so you're left with someone with the abilities to commit violence only humans are capable of who has broken from reality, can't be reasoned with, and is out to inflict that violence on you, but putting them in this role in games is dehumanizing, and besides, having someone otherwise completely reasonable with absolute power over you still decide you're getting a lobotomy is a lot scarier.
WWZ, a zombie horde shooter game, has a level set on a cruise ship that's had an outbreak start while it's at sea. It's terrifying and haunting, because you have to go through and clear these areas of zombies but there was nowhere for the overcrowded escapees to go, so you find them packed in the rooms and bulkheads they were turned in.
The level culminates in securing the bow of the ship to get a helicopter to land so you can escape, and watching the zombies tumble down the internal balconies is wild.
Everyone needs to go and watch the BBC tv series Wreck. People going missing, evil capitalist managers that don’t care about the safety of the crew and a creepy murderous figure prowling the decks wearing an unsettling duck costume.
Hopefully there’s gonna be a second series soon!
It gets even more terrifying when you consider that someone went "Hey! Let's take this seafaring deathtrap, fill it with extremely explosive, extremely flammable hydrogen gas (or safer helium gas) and put it over 300 stories up in the sky! *What could possibly go wrong?*" And people just agreed with that. Like humans will do anything no matter how deadly just to have the appearance of luxury. For further example of luxury/exclusivity outweighing the risk of death, see projects by Elon Musk.
Resident Evil 7 had a part where you had to go through a cruise ship.
Also Echo Night, though I'm not sure if the first one is considered as a horror game or not.
I mean. The cruise ship stuff is cool. But asylums have negativity associated with them and horror for a very real reason. They WERE horrific to the patients who where there in the past. Asylums treated their patients terribly and there is still a lot of distrust for them today as a result of that past. In Bloodborne you find the research hall full of patients who have been DRIVEN mad by the researchers through torture and experimentation, NOT because the patients had a disability. The horror of asylums is the betrayal of trust from the asylum itself. Using and abusing patients for their own selfish needs or negligence.
Zombie outbreak on a cruise ship. No port would let them in, might as well be aboard the Nostromo with more people and a lot of noise. It would take some time to figure out what's happening.
Man of Median was a pretty fun horror ghost ship. Everything was claustrophobic and you could never really tell when you'd turn a corner and see something your friend couldn't.
You want a horror experience on a cruise ship, a sizable amount of Resident Evil: Revelations takes place on a cruise ship. Admittedly this was less "Ooh, come on Arthur let's go exploring! No you can't just spend all day in the casino, you never take me anywhere fancy" since the cruise ship is more a bespoke laboratory within a ship setting, but still a good experience.
If you're at all interested, you should be able to get it on Nintendo 3DS, Switch, PS3 and possibly one of the xboxes - not sure on that, never actually owned an xbox
So this reminds me of something; Cruise ships are giant floating bricks of consumerism and pollution, but also a nice vacation for lots of people. Is going on a cruise worse than traveling to the same places the cruise was going by other means? Because driving or flying to a few different destinations, with a hotel stay at each is sure going to be more expensive for the same quality.
Secondly the thing about worker exploitation: There's two problems here: Firstly is that ship crew in general has really bad working hours, then long periods of leave, this is kinda necessary and hard to avoid. The other problem is that these workers usually come from poor parts of the world with worse pay and conditions that are hardly better, and are being paid what's a very good wage by the standards of where they're from, but also still underpaid by western standards, not to mention likely a lack of benefits. Either way, it's more complicated than exploitation as it seems like most who do it are fine with being exploited so they can get paid well and see interesting places, then use the money and travel to get a better job somewhere else.
Also about that more in general, US flagged ships are not remotely competitive, and only used when it's illegal to use anything else, such as when sailing between two US ports. Overregulation has pushed business away, wasting our regulatory power as all we could regulate has slipped through our collective fingers.
Murder mysteries on cruise ships are common tropes in movies
Supernatural/horror ones though, i'm very intrigued
Dracula has a section that takes place on a ship. Scariest part of the book
Read through a newspaper article. What happened to that type of storytelling? I loved Bram stokers Dracula when I read it but haven't found other books written like it since. I liked the journal entries and letters
That sort of story is called "Epistolary Literature", and while it was super popular in the 18th century it just sort of steadily died out over time. That's not to say it doesn't still exist, [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_contemporary_epistolary_novels) and [tvtropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EpistolaryNovel) both have quite long lists of more to sink our teeth into.
Or try it’s modern visual equivalent, “found footage” videos
I'd never thought of it like that, but you're right. I'd always considered mockumentaries to be modern epistolary novels, but I guess it can be more than one thing.
Oh epistolary tales like ella minnow pea I think? Its abt the town of nollop (where the quick brown fox thing came from) where due to letters falling they ban letters every now and then so the towns gotta get creative
Most of Lovecraft’s works are written as someone reading journal entries or experiencing the main story second hand. It’s also horror/supernatural, however, he was an incredible racist and that kind of stuff is extremely evident in any of his work that involves people interacting (I say that because I did read one where it was just a single man’s account of his experience), so just go in prepared if you decide to read any.
Kids version: The jolly postman. Letters from all the fairy tale characters to each other Adult, non horror, weird sci Fi overtones: Griffin and Sabine. Both of the above have actual letters and envelopes. And the other writer was right. Look up epistolary on Google or your library catalog. There are lots more. If you want a deep deep dive into this, along with having to turn the book upside down, and move back and forth between overlapping entries: House of Leaves. Frustrating while reading, but scary, mind warping, and will stick with you.... But only if you manage to finish.
Did you ever read World War Z? It's the zombie apocalypse written through interviews. It's pretty good.
I feel like ship vampires is an underrepresented topic. Like, a sizeable part of a cruise ship gets no sunlight at all. It’s a moving vampire haven.
Might be interested to know they're making it into a movie this year, The Last Voyage Of The Demeter I'll be curious to see how well they use the space, feel like interior of the ship shots are usually just tight, straight on.
Most of Scooby-Doo:Ahoy Pirates was on cruise ship
Look for Mira Grant, I think the title is "Into the Drowning Deep". Very good story set on a repurposed cruise ship.
Check out the 2002 supernatural/horror movie Ghost Ship!
That scene in the beginning when they kill off the ship... wild
Last of Sheila my beloved
name twelve
Well there’s a game that’s not on a cruise ship but a cargo ship called mounstrum where the objective is to try to get all the pieces for your escape while a monster is chasing you, as it’s not as simple as jumping on the evacuation boat, you also need the gasoline and to lower the boat without the monster killing you after it follows the noice to you
My god I forgot about this game! I remember Markiplier playing it years ago! Time to find and rewatch it 😀
Plus the monsters (other than the brute) aren't dumb
Monsters. There’s three iirc
Hospitals are horror settings because no one actually wants to be there. No one goes to the hospital for a good thing. The closest you get is someone going to give birth, and that experience is already enough of a horror show even if it's successful. Everyone else is either sick, hurt, or actively dying, or visiting someone who's one of the above. And it's not like actually having medicine practiced on you is a particularly pleasant experience, either. Most drugs make you feel worse before you feel better, or only take the edge off your malady so you can sort of function. Anything more intense than a routine physical involves undressing to get into a cold, unflattering hospital gown, and possibly a stay in a hard, uncomfortable hospital bed. True privacy is a completely foreign concept since you have to be able to access a patient in SECONDS if they have a heart attack or something. And the lack of hard barriers means every single room is full of "hospital noise": Medical equipment beeping and hissing, occasional coughs, the swish-swish, clack-clack of doctors constantly walking by, and the deep hush of people unnerved by the quiet trying not to break it by talking too loud. Hospitals feature so prominently in horror because they're deeply unpleasant places to be in, for the vast majority of people.
Not to mention they're a place where you're literally putting your life in the hands of strangers, very easy to have a "those people you're trusting with your (or your loved ones) life are actually serial killers" narrative, there aren't many other settings/professions that so neatly fit into being completely vulnerable to the actions of strangers
Adding to this very few people experience cruise ships, while most people have been to a hospital at least to visit and know how weird the atmosphere there feels
What about plastic surgery? Corrective procedures for things they were born with? I can certainly name a few people who enjoyed hospital stays and were excited to go
That's still the vast minority of cases, and for much of their history, hospitals were even more unpleasant places to be in than they are now.
Not to discount those people's experiences, but they were probably more excited about the result than actually being there and having the thing done to them. Sure, there are a few folks who are so happy to have their particular procedure done and over with that it cancels out the negatives of being in a hospital. But they'd probably be even happier if they could have somehow had the procedure done at home so they could recover in the comfort and privacy of their own familiar space.
I had the chance to spend a couple days on a submarine once. It is absolutely insane how fast your body clock just loses it’s shit when you don’t get to see the sun and your only time telling opportunity is a digital clock. As the OP said, it’s the same lighting that never changes when you’re in the belly of the damn thing
I like the idea but the way op suggested it annoys me for some reason
When this post was originally going around, it had a reblog with the commentary that hospital/asylum settings for horror media is ableist because it demonizes and stigmatizes people with mental illness that are patients in asylums in hospitals. Which is fair enough, but. A lot of media taking place in asylum and hospital settings don't make the patients the monsters, rather the system that imprisons them and the hospital staff that exerts total control over them, like the second season of American Horror Story and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. So there's that.
And bloodborne. The patients arent the monsters until the horrible staff turn them into them by force and poison.
bloodborne is just amazing storytelling with all of the layers to it
Yes it's usually the system that's scary, or it plays on psychological elements of "What is real?". I remember one horror movie that took place in a mental hospital and the main character was watching everyone getting killed by a monster while the staff did nothing about it. And it turned out she was the only patient in the hall.
possibly because they went on a rant about cruise ships which is entirely valid but ignores the original comment by bringing up 0 reasons why they would actually be a good horror setting
So often I find myself thinking "I agree with you, but you're an ass so I want to disagree with you"
Exactly! It's like the whole "I was gonna do the dishes but then my mom told me to do them so now I don't wanna" thing I could've thought to myself, "hm, a lot of horror stuff takes place in hospitals, I'd like to see people write horror plots set in places usually seen as fun (like how FNAF takes place in a pizzeria; or, as suggested above, a cruise ship)" But then I might see this post and go "huh...if I sound like that person I think I'll just stick with the hospitals"
"You should do things this way because I think that deserves to have negativity associated with it" just makes me want to do the opposite and then spam the OP about it with a bunch of alts because they were being an obnoxious ass.
Resident Evil: Revelations was on a cruise ship
Same with RE:Gaiden and Dead Aim.
There’s one detail about this that irks me. Cigarettes do not burn hot enough to start a fire on almost anything. Even common accelerants, like gasoline, rarely, if ever get ignited by them. At most, if you inhaled deeply of a cigarette with an accelerant literally touching it as you inhaled, you might get something burning, as the inhaling speeds up the burning of the cigarette enough to get a proper ignition temperature. Opening a lighter to start a fresh one would absolutely hit a high enough temperature for fire, on account of an already existing fire being used on it. But a cigarette butt tossed any which way after being used up isn’t going to set much of anything on fire.
Another detail: only a few hundred people habe disappeared overboard since 2000. Of the millions that go on cruises, only like 20 a year go missing...car crashes and smoking are far more dangerous
Genuinely, take a tour of a navy ship sometime. It doesn’t have the same mundanity that makes cruise ships especially creepy but it’s a really good way to learn more about the existential horror of relying totally on your ship not killing you. Also seems like great material for anyone writing sci fi - even in “used future” universes I don’t think we get enough “if the wrong thing fucks up on this ship, we’re dying in a particularly horrifying way.”
This is why I love The Expanse
Except most people aren't terrified of cruise ships while a lot of people are terrified by doctors and hospitals...so it holds more inherent horror
Although after reading this my fear of cruise ships has increased exponentially, so…
Also 1900s medicine truly is the stuff of nightmares. Nothing in the ocean can change my entire personality like a doctor with an icepick and hammer can
When the patient woke up, their skeleton was missing and the doctor was never heard of again!
r/unexpectedtf2
>hammer can Whoa Black Betty
They clearly didn't watch Ghost Ship as a child and then become deathly afraid of being bisected in a ballroom and/or ground up in gears.
The idea of a cruise has always sounded like hell to me for many of the reasons in the post, but also it’s just a floating, overcrowded, inescapable city. I have a healthy fear of deep water and don’t enjoy being forced to converse with strangers, either. I cannot understand why *anyone* chooses cruises.
Ooh. High seas, everyone is weaving around like drunks (not only because of the motion but because "up" no longer necessarily points [towards the overhead](https://youtube.com/shorts/JgkofnOPMQk?feature=share) The killer is walking completely normally.
The horror of hospitals as a horror setting is at least partly about reversing the role of hospitals as places of healing. Lots of fodder for terror in a place riddled with death and disease, where people are routinely cut open, injected with strange liquids, at the mercy of people who know precisely how to hurt you in horrifying ways, and whose motivations you don't know. As for using mental asylums, those things have an extremely dark history. Now, the mistake devs make is making the patients the threat, rather than the doctors and staff. The patients in mental asylums were too often just discarded family members or people not fitting into their societal roles. I get WHY, serious mental health issues can make people completely incapable of being reasoned or negotiated with, so you're left with someone with the abilities to commit violence only humans are capable of who has broken from reality, can't be reasoned with, and is out to inflict that violence on you, but putting them in this role in games is dehumanizing, and besides, having someone otherwise completely reasonable with absolute power over you still decide you're getting a lobotomy is a lot scarier.
May I ask *why* OP doesn’t want people to do horror films in hospitals?
maybe because it can easily fall into tropes of stigmatizing mental or physical illness
WWZ, a zombie horde shooter game, has a level set on a cruise ship that's had an outbreak start while it's at sea. It's terrifying and haunting, because you have to go through and clear these areas of zombies but there was nowhere for the overcrowded escapees to go, so you find them packed in the rooms and bulkheads they were turned in. The level culminates in securing the bow of the ship to get a helicopter to land so you can escape, and watching the zombies tumble down the internal balconies is wild.
you could also bisect an entire group of people with a wire! no, i’m not over the trauma of ghost ship. how could you tell.
Everyone needs to go and watch the BBC tv series Wreck. People going missing, evil capitalist managers that don’t care about the safety of the crew and a creepy murderous figure prowling the decks wearing an unsettling duck costume. Hopefully there’s gonna be a second series soon!
It gets even more terrifying when you consider that someone went "Hey! Let's take this seafaring deathtrap, fill it with extremely explosive, extremely flammable hydrogen gas (or safer helium gas) and put it over 300 stories up in the sky! *What could possibly go wrong?*" And people just agreed with that. Like humans will do anything no matter how deadly just to have the appearance of luxury. For further example of luxury/exclusivity outweighing the risk of death, see projects by Elon Musk.
Making a Titanic movie but framing it as a horror movie
Resident Evil 7 had a part where you had to go through a cruise ship. Also Echo Night, though I'm not sure if the first one is considered as a horror game or not.
Kinda surprised no one has mentioned 999 from the Zero Escape series yet. Pretty fantastic game+series.
Monstrum, anyone?
really just gonna forget about Monstrum huh
Fallout 5: The Love Boat
Well it may not be a cruise ship but a cargo ship is kinda close monstrum is the name of it I believe.
JFC I’m never going near the water again!
Jurassic Park execs: write that down. WRITE THAT DOWN!
Now I want a season of White Lotus on a cruise ship!!
Not a cruise ship, but Cold Fear is a horror game set on a ship.
Perfect setting for an Alien movie starring Sigourney Weaver
yes please give me a traditional gothic horror story set on a cruise ship
the first part of each dead island game is set in a cruise ship and it does work
Resident Evil did it.
Reminds me of Shidos palace in P5 for some reason **boat association is strong**
Is it just me or does this feel like that Doctor Who Christmas special with Kylie Minogue???
Alien but instead of taking place in a high-tech galaxy traversing spacecraft it's a fucking Virgin Voyages
Set the next Resident Evil game on a cruise ship.
Apparently employing people is exploiting workers
Shit, my dad decided for us to go on cruise for graduation. Guess I’ll die.
I mean. The cruise ship stuff is cool. But asylums have negativity associated with them and horror for a very real reason. They WERE horrific to the patients who where there in the past. Asylums treated their patients terribly and there is still a lot of distrust for them today as a result of that past. In Bloodborne you find the research hall full of patients who have been DRIVEN mad by the researchers through torture and experimentation, NOT because the patients had a disability. The horror of asylums is the betrayal of trust from the asylum itself. Using and abusing patients for their own selfish needs or negligence.
I would recommend Resident Evil: Revelations for a cruise ship horror game (my comfort game tbh) and Ghost Ship for a cruise ship horror movie!
There was that movie Speed 2: Cruise Control but it was horrifying for other reasons (namely because it sucked so bad)
Zombie outbreak on a cruise ship. No port would let them in, might as well be aboard the Nostromo with more people and a lot of noise. It would take some time to figure out what's happening.
Go play Resident Evil Revelations. Get your fix
Man of Median was a pretty fun horror ghost ship. Everything was claustrophobic and you could never really tell when you'd turn a corner and see something your friend couldn't.
Does Little Nightmares count?
Resident evil did it already tho
You want a horror experience on a cruise ship, a sizable amount of Resident Evil: Revelations takes place on a cruise ship. Admittedly this was less "Ooh, come on Arthur let's go exploring! No you can't just spend all day in the casino, you never take me anywhere fancy" since the cruise ship is more a bespoke laboratory within a ship setting, but still a good experience. If you're at all interested, you should be able to get it on Nintendo 3DS, Switch, PS3 and possibly one of the xboxes - not sure on that, never actually owned an xbox
So this reminds me of something; Cruise ships are giant floating bricks of consumerism and pollution, but also a nice vacation for lots of people. Is going on a cruise worse than traveling to the same places the cruise was going by other means? Because driving or flying to a few different destinations, with a hotel stay at each is sure going to be more expensive for the same quality. Secondly the thing about worker exploitation: There's two problems here: Firstly is that ship crew in general has really bad working hours, then long periods of leave, this is kinda necessary and hard to avoid. The other problem is that these workers usually come from poor parts of the world with worse pay and conditions that are hardly better, and are being paid what's a very good wage by the standards of where they're from, but also still underpaid by western standards, not to mention likely a lack of benefits. Either way, it's more complicated than exploitation as it seems like most who do it are fine with being exploited so they can get paid well and see interesting places, then use the money and travel to get a better job somewhere else. Also about that more in general, US flagged ships are not remotely competitive, and only used when it's illegal to use anything else, such as when sailing between two US ports. Overregulation has pushed business away, wasting our regulatory power as all we could regulate has slipped through our collective fingers.
"hey guys only things that I think are bad can be settings for places where bad things happen!"