A mysterious man known only as 'Mr. X' has been handing out free tickets for luxury cruises to people, one of which is you. However, upon your arrival, you have been forced to play a brutal game of life and death to satisfy the sick desires of this Mr. X. Every contestant on this cruise ship of death has been assigned to kill somebody, while there is also somebody out to kill them. You must find a weapon on board and kill your target. Only few will survive... will you be one of them?

The promise of The Ship lies in the fact that this is all online multiplayer. While there is a single-player 'arcade mode,' which provides training against AI before you jump online, you will spend most of your time online, hunting out people across the globe. And it succeeds pretty well.

The Ship is engineered to keep you on the move at all times, and follow the rules. You see, Mr. X frowns upon such behavior like randomly killing people, or killing people in public, so you'll have to avoid ship security and witnesses, and secretly murder your target, or "quarry" as it's called in the game. (On a side note, you will also be booted and banned from servers for just randomly killing people if the game mode does not call for it. Combined with fines and virtual time in the brig, online griefers are not as prolific in The Ship as one would initially assume.) Mr. X will occasionally give you hints as to where your quarry was last seen, but it's up to you to find out what they look like and where they have wandered to since they were last seen. If you start killing in front of witnesses, or brandish weaponry in front of security gaurds, you can be fined and tossed in the brig. On the flip-side, however, Mr. X likes you to be creative with how you dispose of your quarry. You see, Mr. X gets bored if the same weapons get used over and over again, so he offers cash rewards for certain weapons that are not used often. A list of these weapons is accessable at all times during the game, but beware, as the more a weapon is used, the less the reward will be.

In order to just keep people from camping on the ship, however, you are faced with real-world problems of having to eat, sleep, shower, socialize, and take a dump. This keeps you moving about the ship to fulfill your needs, all while being paranoid out of your mind because somebody is out there, waiting for the perfect opportunity to kill you. And if you don't take care of these needs, it will affect the game. Example: If you do not eat, you die, or if you do not sleep, you can no longer sprint. It really adds to the tension that the game builds.

The game mode you'll probably encounter most online is Hunt, where each round begins with somebody assigned a new quarry, and the person with the most money at the end of the game is the winner. However, there are a few other modes as well, to keep you occupied on the game's 6 maps. There is elimination, where if you kill your quarry, you don't wait until the next round to get a new one, but rather get a new one immediately, and if you die, that's it. Last one standing wins. Then there is Deathmatch, where players can kill anyone, but still avoid security and have to satisfy their needs, and Dual, which is basically a 1v1 deathmatch.