games

Never let go of your thirst for revenge

Titanic Re-Christened: Maiden Vengeance puts you in control of a shipwreck with bloodlust

Adam Cecil

21 May 2025 — 3 min read

James Cameron’s 1997 masterpiece Titanic is my favorite movie. You might think this is a bit—that melodramatic, cheesy, overblown disaster that only teenagers with eyes for Leo could love? As various elements of the film have seeped into popular culture, twisted by parody and mockery, the larger picture has been missed. Sit and watch Titanic on the largest screen you find—ideally, in theaters, with a blow-your-eardrums sound system—for the entire three hour plus runtime and you’ll find it hard not to get swept away by the narrative. There’s something for everyone—class warfare, slapstick comedy, state-of-the-art special effects, tasteful nudity, extremely efficient exposition, Billy Zane pulling out a gun and chasing after Kate and Leonardo in slow-motion, and, of course, a tragic star-crossed-lovers romance.

But even a Titanic lover such as myself will admit that it lacks one crucial element: the shipwreck coming back to the surface, gaining sentience, and exacting revenge on icebergs with an array of firearms.

Titanic Re-Christened: Maiden Vengeance has a simple enough premise: after a century of laying dormant on the ocean floor, the wreck of the Titanic is accidentally re-christened by a cursed wine bottle, dropped overboard by a passing ship. Now with a human-like sentience and ability to use weapons, the ship rises to the surface to enact revenge on the iceberg that sent it down to the bottom of the ocean.

The game sees you taking control of the Titanic—now featuring a mean cartoon face smoking a cigar and a collection of weaponry with names like Unsinkable Sidearm, Molly’s Greetings, and The Icebreaker—and hunting down small icebergs in search of your four smokestacks, spouting catchphrases like “Guess who’s iceberg proof now” and “I’m here to break the ice, and the ice is fucking you” all the while. Once you recollect your smokestacks, the final boss appears: the Titan Slayer, the iceberg that sank you one hundred years ago. The whole thing only took me about 7 minutes to beat, and that was with me pausing to take notes.

A screenshot from Titanic Re-Christened: Maiden Vengeance, showing what happens when your Titanic character dies from too much damage (in this example, I was out of the water and taking on damage).

Is it stupid and goofy and in mildly bad taste? Yes, remarkably so—it reminds me of the early internet, when people made all sorts of ridiculous games and animations and websites for the sole purpose of expressing some bizarre idea, hopefully entertaining at least one other person along the way. There is something beautifully human about having an idea so fucking stupid and going through the minimal effort of cobbling it together using free tools and 3D models, all for a laugh. It got a well-deserved chuckle out of me.

You can play Titanic Re-Christened: Maiden Vengeance for free in your web browser (or download it for Windows) over on itch.io.