“Captain! Open the door…”
“Kick it in!”
“…lest we break it down… and take more than those shells.”
“You bastards may take… exactly what I give you!”
With that opening gunshot, I knew I had stumbled upon something truly great.
How is it that after over 30 years of adventure games, Return of the Obra Dinn nailed the formula and continues to this day to be the definitive detective mystery game? It’s actually deceptively simple; while its predecessors were often games built around mysteries, Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery built around a game.
You see, most detective-mystery games attempt to adhere to reality, or at least some form of fictionalized reality. Investigators stumble upon the crime scene, sweep the crime scene to collect evidence, analyze the evidence in a lab, interrogate witnesses, and then arrest suspects. In other words, it’s your usual CSI drama-like that does its best to recontextualize real life crime fighting techniques into video game mechanics, and this can lead to a slew of difficulties and frustrations on the player’s end, such as being railroaded from case to case, brute forcing solutions from an already provided answer bank, and transforming complicated logical reasoning and deduction into what is more or less a streamlined experience that consists of answering several simple multiple choice questions.
Return of the Obra Dinn doesn’t do any of that.
The year is 1807, and the Obra Dinn has just mysteriously drifted back into port after being declared lost at sea five years ago. You are an insurance agent, woken up on an otherwise uneventful morning to piece together everything that’s happened to the 60 lost souls of the Obra Dinn and determine the damages to charge whoever is held responsible for this whole mess. You’ve been sent a mostly empty volume titled Return of the Obra Dinn: A Catalogue of Adventure and Tragedy as well as a mysterious pocket watch named the “Memento Mortem.” There’s no one left on the ghost ship to arrest or interrogate, and the crime scene is years old by now; it’s just you, armed with a magical timepiece, left to your own devices to fill out as much of this tragic and inky tale as you so desire.
Obra Dinn keeps the questions simple: who is whom, and how did they die? Because the questions are the same for all fates, the game doesn’t lead you down any obvious lines of reasoning. Furthermore, there are tons of potential answers for each of the two main questions: you have every name from the ship’s manifest to insert as a potential identity, and a slew of verbs that could be inserted for a death, ranging from the classics “Clubbed” and “Shot” to the more out there “Poisoned” and “Eaten.” That’s right, you can write in cannibalism as a cause of death on the Obra Dinn.
As the insurance adjuster, you use the Memento Mortem to travel back to the exact time of crisis; it is aptly named “Remember Death” for a reason. You’ll often get a few seconds of audio leading right up to the moment of death, and then you’re immediately transported to the exact frozen moment in time, like a still diorama of doom, where you can examine the minute details in-person. As mentioned before, the book gives you little guidance regarding exact fates and identities, and it’s up to you to draw the connections. Lucas Pope pulls out every trick in the book: accents, nationalities, clothing, occupations, tools, items of personage, who they’re often around, even the continuity of the narrative itself. It’s pure deductive reasoning with little to no hand-holding; you’ll often have to find specific clues from one scene and tie it back to characters in a completely different scene, and not only spotting the minute details, but linking them together, is crucial to determining the fate of all 60 souls.
Let me take this time to just say it; Obra Dinn slays in presentation. The sound design is immaculate; the voice acting perfectly captures the tone and emotions across the entire cast, much less capturing their nationalities and speech patterns, and often thrown into the mix are a cornucopia of sound effects from squeaking, slashing, the sloshing of waves and the whistling of wind, and various cries of pain, anguish, and despair. The soundtrack (also composed by Lucas Pope) accentuates these moments too. I’ll never forget the clanging bells from Soldiers of the Sea signifying an approaching calamity, or the ominous wind instrumental melody from A Bitter Cold hinting at a lurking danger, and especially the abrupt baritone horns of The Doom alerting the player that shit just got real. Finally, who could forget the iconic 1-bit art style of the game, a “dither-punk” stylistic choice that inspired many classic Macintosh-esque graphics for games to come? Not only does it serve the practical purpose of letting Pope illuminate exactly what details he wants to highlight (mainly, the expressive faces of the passengers and crew of the Obra Dinn, as well as their colorful belongings set in scenes of harrowing jeopardy) while giving him room to leave out other extraneous details, including an almost lack of text outside of the book, it plays extremely well to the lean of a gothic and macabre tale of a ship lost at sea.
An understated but nevertheless crucial strength of this game to aid the brilliant presentation is that Lucas Pope understands how to use volume swells. To elaborate upon this, think about how much of popular music has learned to emphasize loud-soft dynamics in songwriting; the softer the build-up, the louder the climax becomes. A good example of this in classic video games is in Shadow of the Colossus, where Wander’s trek to each colossi is accompanied by practical silence with the exception of environmental noises and Agro’s hooves, leading to an anticipation track when Wander first stumbles upon the Colossi and then exploding into an epic battle track as he scales upon the Colossi’s body.
Obra Dinn has another fantastic translation of this idea; in the “present-day” overworld upon the ghost ship, all you hear is the call of the sea and the creaking of the ship’s planks. As soon as you find a body, the stopwatch pops open, plays a quick string melody as you spiral into the memory, and the few seconds of audio as a build-up to the time of death play out until the grisly, painted scene of death suddenly appears with the abrupt accompaniment of horns, strings, and bells. These scenes never outstay their welcome either; for the first time you stumble upon each new diorama, the player spends 60 seconds in the memory taking in all the new details, until the game fades out, pulls you into the book to form the outline, and then either opens a door in the distance so you can continue your search or leads you to the next body contained within a death diorama to find the next tragic happening. Certainly, it’s a pleasant and welcome surprise from so many games that just play the same droning background music over and over while players are performing the “same” task of investigating or working all the logic out.
Going back to the mechanics of Return of the Obra Dinn, there’s a degree of player control that I think is simply not present in other detective games. I’ve already mentioned that the game doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to figuring out fates and identities, but this increased player control is also due to the structure of the game itself. After solving a few of the opening fates, and opening new doors thanks to open doors within the memories themselves, you’re more or less free to explore around the Obra Dinn as you please and tackle whatever memories you want in whichever order you desire. In fact, the game’s reliance upon this often disconnected narrative via traveling back and forth through different memories is critical to working out the timing of the game’s events and forming the connections necessary to deduce whom is present at what time, ultimately leading to their respective demises. It’s also a nice-built in feature that you don’t even need to solve every fate to end the game; you can step off the Obra Dinn and head back home at any time if you ever get fed up. That said, the insurance report at the end of the game does vary depending on how you marked fates along your investigation, which means there is an incentive to actually try and perform your damn duty.
To add on to the above, Obra Dinn has several nods to player perspective and player agency that elevate this far above any other detective game I’ve ever played. Lucas Pope has mentioned previously in interviews about this degree of ambiguity that exists in detective work; multiple people can look at the same scene, but come away with different conclusions based off of the different clues that they notice and the different ways that their brain works out the logic and reasoning. Pope wanted to implement this into the game mechanics as well, and included some degree of leeway when it comes to putting down certain fates. Because many passengers and crew die off screen in the game (and in fact their bodies are often lost between the scenes of death and cannot be recreated for one reason or another), and because figuring out every exact fate of 60 souls is quite challenging, players often have to rely on educated guesses and process of elimination to figure out how everything exactly went down. Thus, Pope decided to allow multiple “acceptable” answers for certain circumstances because honestly, who’s he to say that this player’s interpretation is more correct than the other?
Even more viscerally shocking to me is that the game is innately aware of who you are and what role you play, and has multiple nods to this throughout the game. I can’t go into too much detail since that would quickly enter spoiler territory, but needless to say, your actions do have consequences upon the final findings and ending of the frame tale (both in the form of the insurance report and what’s revealed to you thereafter), and the game is extremely self-aware of how omnipresent death plays a role in your investigation and how without it, your perception of events would be much different. I also at this time want to point out that Lucas Pope puts a lot of emphasis in toolkits, particularly calling back to his time spent at Naughty Dog developing GUI tools. Pope then proceeds to both play this emphasis straight and subvert this at times; sure, the book is great at marking down the exact location of bodies, but what happens when the bodies can’t be recovered? It’s extremely helpful to zoom in on people within the frozen memories and then press Tab to immediately lock in on their location within the sketch, but what do you do when the person is so far away in the background of the memory that zooming in doesn’t lock onto that identity? By doing this, Pope utilizes the presence of the built-in tools to their maximum capacity, through both forcing reliance upon the tools and reliance upon other means of discovery when the tools are subverted.
Lastly, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what makes Obra Dinn a goldmine for so many memorable moments. I’ve already discussed the presentation and the strong presence of player control/perspective/agency that only a video game could really accomplish, but there’s two additional reasons I want to walk through at this time. Firstly, Obra Dinn’s anachronistic narrative sets it up for success in a few ways. Of course, there’s the degree of player control that this allows, thanks to letting players walk through most memories however they wish. We’ve also discussed the presence of continuity serving as a usable clue itself; that is, if a character is dead in a prior scene, then chronologically, that identity should not be present later on, and so on so forth. However, we haven’t talked about the power that disjointed story-telling has narratively, in that twists and sudden shifts in plot development feel much more natural and built-in.
To further elaborate, let's consider the cold opening of this game, where a few men bang on the captain’s door before one is unceremoniously shot in cold blood. This scene does several important things; firstly, it’s a sharp contrast from the peaceful and quiet beginning as you obtain your magical pocketwatch and stumble upon the rotting and decaying bones of the “first” victim, and in doing so, it immediately grabs your attention. Secondly, it introduces a flurry of new characters and terms in the form of “MacGuffins” that are most certainly relevant and just known to the cast at this point, but to an outsider like you, won’t make any sense at all. Think of it like a reverse Chekhov’s Gun; it’s mentioned in passing often at the chronological end (after all, the timing of deaths within death scenes means you’ll generally be traveling backwards) and its relevance has already been established, so you don’t have to wonder about whether or not it’s important. In fact, it provides a degree of investment to figure out exactly what it means and how it all played out. Finally, these scenes often take place in altered environments (i.e. what the Obra Dinn looked like 5 years ago) and slowly introduce and naturally funnel you towards more and more death as events unfold, with unlocked doors and recently deceased bodies giving you further access to more parts of the ship and more memories. By doing so, there’s an actual sense of progression alongside the sense of satisfaction from filling out the outlined narrative.
Speaking of progression and satisfaction, that brings us to the last additional reason, namely via investment. The game’s lack of hand-holding and overall difficulty are a huge reason why, as well as the focus on personal growth versus systems growth; the systems and mechanics present at the beginning of the game are the exact same as those at the end of the game, and the only thing that has evolved is the player’s knowledge of the fates and workings of the ship. Heavily aiding to both the player’s growth and the difficulty of the game is the “rule of three” mechanic used to validate fates. It strikes a certain balance; Pope wanted a mechanic that would put the player at ease for successfully figuring something out (i.e. not letting the aforementioned ambiguity rule over the whole process) but at the same time, not be so simple as to allow for the game to railroad players into certain choices or obvious brute-forcing. As such, the player must correctly fill out three sets of identities and fates before the book makes these choices permanent and congratulates the player upon their work. The “Eureka!” moments garnered from this system from correctly deducing the story are just as important to me as the “Holy shit!” moments that I experienced from the story unfolding itself. Is it a perfect system? Of course not; you could argue that the mechanic can be abused if you’re very sure about two particular fates and not so sure about the third to allow for more guesswork, and that the mechanic is “contrived” like much of this game. Nevertheless, I appreciate that this margin of error exists as a concession to the player and a good in-between for rewarding players with self-satisfaction while providing an adequate challenge despite providing more than adequate tools to meet the challenge.
A few closing thoughts: for years, many players and developers have pointed out that there’s a glaring dissociation between game mechanics and narrative. That is, we tend to view game mechanics and narratives as separate, and in fact in many cases, mutually exclusive. That’s why in many longer games, you’ll often have chunks of extended gameplay in the form of combat or puzzles, and then chunks of extended storytelling, often in the form of cutscenes, dialogue, text boxes, etc. This works just fine for longer run-times in the span of 20 - 100+ hours, but it would absolutely ruin the pacing of shorter games to switch players back and forth between exclusive gameplay and exclusive storytelling, and smaller indie studios often don’t have the budget or resources to maximize these aspects separately.
I’ve been searching for many examples of games where gameplay and storytelling are married effectively, and there’s a few that come to my mind such as Journey, Ghost Trick, Shadow of the Colossus, Outer Wilds, and so on so forth. Needless to say, I’m both embarrassed and happy to report that one of the greatest examples has been right under my nose the entire time. There’s no separation between Return of the Obra Dinn’s gameplay and narrative, and at no point is there exclusive storytelling or exclusive gameplay. Simply put, interaction with the narrative is the gameplay.
All of the previous points come back into play. The personal growth is learning more about the story. The logic and deductive reasoning into figuring out identities and fates are the core gameplay mechanics. The focus on eerie and often grotesque visuals and expressive sound effects and voice acting are integral to piecing together the Obra Dinn’s story. The very presence of death throughout the narrative is the only thing allowing you to even solve these fates in the first place, because without the Memento Mortem as a game mechanic allowing you to travel back to the exact time of death, you’d just be some insurance adjuster who walked onto an empty ship, saw a locked door and flies swarming around a pile of bones, and walk straight back to the rowboat to fabricate at best, a creepypasta of how 60 people were mysteriously lost at sea. Gameplay and story are inexorably intertwined, and one aspect would cease to exist or be severely crippled without the other half.
Time to address the elephant in the room: for a story-heavy game, is the story exceptional? I wouldn’t necessarily say so, as if I were to compare this to exceptional works of fiction in other mediums (say, a book like Moby Dick), I’d say that Obra Dinn’s details aren’t quite as elaborate nor as fanciful.
But Return of the Obra Dinn isn’t trying to be a book, or a movie, or even a museum installation. It’s trying to be a video game, and it embraces the strengths of the interactive medium so well that I honestly couldn’t care if the story isn’t as ambitious or beautifully scripted and its prose doesn’t match with even contemporary acclaimed writers. Frankly speaking, Return of the Obra Dinn doesn't just elevate the bar for detective games, it blows the bar off the rail and becomes something much more. I’ve been playing through a few other detective games recently, and none of them even came close to holding a candle to the grandmaster itself. That, and a lot of free time (and maybe a bit of nostalgia and passion) led me to reference a few analysis and interview videos and type this all up in an afternoon or so. It'll all make sense soon, but just know this: the narrative might not necessarily be exceptional, but I’d damn well say that this narrative is exceptionally told.
My one video gaming regret is that I will never be able to experience this again for the first time. As a result, I have resorted to recommending this to virtually everyone I know with no reservations and buying my friends copies of Return of the Obra Dinn so I can be there when they too, experience the frustrations and satisfactions of the medium in its rawest form for the first time. I really don’t know what else to say; I’ll vouch for this game in every waking moment of my life, and at this point, I'm convinced that I’ll probably buy anything Lucas Pope makes day one with no exceptions. If you want a game that will challenge your perception of what video games can be and accomplish, I don’t think you can do much better than this.
Sources referenced:
Return of the Obra Dinn Thinks Differently About Narrative
How Return of the Obra Dinn Works
How Return of the Obra Dinn Makes You An Honest Detective
Rumination Analysis on Return of the Obra Dinn
Lucas Pope on 3 years of Return of the Obra Dinn, and what's next
Noclip Podcast #07 - Lucas Pope
Return of the Obra Dinn Steam Page
“Kick it in!”
“…lest we break it down… and take more than those shells.”
“You bastards may take… exactly what I give you!”
With that opening gunshot, I knew I had stumbled upon something truly great.
How is it that after over 30 years of adventure games, Return of the Obra Dinn nailed the formula and continues to this day to be the definitive detective mystery game? It’s actually deceptively simple; while its predecessors were often games built around mysteries, Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery built around a game.
You see, most detective-mystery games attempt to adhere to reality, or at least some form of fictionalized reality. Investigators stumble upon the crime scene, sweep the crime scene to collect evidence, analyze the evidence in a lab, interrogate witnesses, and then arrest suspects. In other words, it’s your usual CSI drama-like that does its best to recontextualize real life crime fighting techniques into video game mechanics, and this can lead to a slew of difficulties and frustrations on the player’s end, such as being railroaded from case to case, brute forcing solutions from an already provided answer bank, and transforming complicated logical reasoning and deduction into what is more or less a streamlined experience that consists of answering several simple multiple choice questions.
Return of the Obra Dinn doesn’t do any of that.
The year is 1807, and the Obra Dinn has just mysteriously drifted back into port after being declared lost at sea five years ago. You are an insurance agent, woken up on an otherwise uneventful morning to piece together everything that’s happened to the 60 lost souls of the Obra Dinn and determine the damages to charge whoever is held responsible for this whole mess. You’ve been sent a mostly empty volume titled Return of the Obra Dinn: A Catalogue of Adventure and Tragedy as well as a mysterious pocket watch named the “Memento Mortem.” There’s no one left on the ghost ship to arrest or interrogate, and the crime scene is years old by now; it’s just you, armed with a magical timepiece, left to your own devices to fill out as much of this tragic and inky tale as you so desire.
Obra Dinn keeps the questions simple: who is whom, and how did they die? Because the questions are the same for all fates, the game doesn’t lead you down any obvious lines of reasoning. Furthermore, there are tons of potential answers for each of the two main questions: you have every name from the ship’s manifest to insert as a potential identity, and a slew of verbs that could be inserted for a death, ranging from the classics “Clubbed” and “Shot” to the more out there “Poisoned” and “Eaten.” That’s right, you can write in cannibalism as a cause of death on the Obra Dinn.
As the insurance adjuster, you use the Memento Mortem to travel back to the exact time of crisis; it is aptly named “Remember Death” for a reason. You’ll often get a few seconds of audio leading right up to the moment of death, and then you’re immediately transported to the exact frozen moment in time, like a still diorama of doom, where you can examine the minute details in-person. As mentioned before, the book gives you little guidance regarding exact fates and identities, and it’s up to you to draw the connections. Lucas Pope pulls out every trick in the book: accents, nationalities, clothing, occupations, tools, items of personage, who they’re often around, even the continuity of the narrative itself. It’s pure deductive reasoning with little to no hand-holding; you’ll often have to find specific clues from one scene and tie it back to characters in a completely different scene, and not only spotting the minute details, but linking them together, is crucial to determining the fate of all 60 souls.
Let me take this time to just say it; Obra Dinn slays in presentation. The sound design is immaculate; the voice acting perfectly captures the tone and emotions across the entire cast, much less capturing their nationalities and speech patterns, and often thrown into the mix are a cornucopia of sound effects from squeaking, slashing, the sloshing of waves and the whistling of wind, and various cries of pain, anguish, and despair. The soundtrack (also composed by Lucas Pope) accentuates these moments too. I’ll never forget the clanging bells from Soldiers of the Sea signifying an approaching calamity, or the ominous wind instrumental melody from A Bitter Cold hinting at a lurking danger, and especially the abrupt baritone horns of The Doom alerting the player that shit just got real. Finally, who could forget the iconic 1-bit art style of the game, a “dither-punk” stylistic choice that inspired many classic Macintosh-esque graphics for games to come? Not only does it serve the practical purpose of letting Pope illuminate exactly what details he wants to highlight (mainly, the expressive faces of the passengers and crew of the Obra Dinn, as well as their colorful belongings set in scenes of harrowing jeopardy) while giving him room to leave out other extraneous details, including an almost lack of text outside of the book, it plays extremely well to the lean of a gothic and macabre tale of a ship lost at sea.
An understated but nevertheless crucial strength of this game to aid the brilliant presentation is that Lucas Pope understands how to use volume swells. To elaborate upon this, think about how much of popular music has learned to emphasize loud-soft dynamics in songwriting; the softer the build-up, the louder the climax becomes. A good example of this in classic video games is in Shadow of the Colossus, where Wander’s trek to each colossi is accompanied by practical silence with the exception of environmental noises and Agro’s hooves, leading to an anticipation track when Wander first stumbles upon the Colossi and then exploding into an epic battle track as he scales upon the Colossi’s body.
Obra Dinn has another fantastic translation of this idea; in the “present-day” overworld upon the ghost ship, all you hear is the call of the sea and the creaking of the ship’s planks. As soon as you find a body, the stopwatch pops open, plays a quick string melody as you spiral into the memory, and the few seconds of audio as a build-up to the time of death play out until the grisly, painted scene of death suddenly appears with the abrupt accompaniment of horns, strings, and bells. These scenes never outstay their welcome either; for the first time you stumble upon each new diorama, the player spends 60 seconds in the memory taking in all the new details, until the game fades out, pulls you into the book to form the outline, and then either opens a door in the distance so you can continue your search or leads you to the next body contained within a death diorama to find the next tragic happening. Certainly, it’s a pleasant and welcome surprise from so many games that just play the same droning background music over and over while players are performing the “same” task of investigating or working all the logic out.
Going back to the mechanics of Return of the Obra Dinn, there’s a degree of player control that I think is simply not present in other detective games. I’ve already mentioned that the game doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to figuring out fates and identities, but this increased player control is also due to the structure of the game itself. After solving a few of the opening fates, and opening new doors thanks to open doors within the memories themselves, you’re more or less free to explore around the Obra Dinn as you please and tackle whatever memories you want in whichever order you desire. In fact, the game’s reliance upon this often disconnected narrative via traveling back and forth through different memories is critical to working out the timing of the game’s events and forming the connections necessary to deduce whom is present at what time, ultimately leading to their respective demises. It’s also a nice-built in feature that you don’t even need to solve every fate to end the game; you can step off the Obra Dinn and head back home at any time if you ever get fed up. That said, the insurance report at the end of the game does vary depending on how you marked fates along your investigation, which means there is an incentive to actually try and perform your damn duty.
To add on to the above, Obra Dinn has several nods to player perspective and player agency that elevate this far above any other detective game I’ve ever played. Lucas Pope has mentioned previously in interviews about this degree of ambiguity that exists in detective work; multiple people can look at the same scene, but come away with different conclusions based off of the different clues that they notice and the different ways that their brain works out the logic and reasoning. Pope wanted to implement this into the game mechanics as well, and included some degree of leeway when it comes to putting down certain fates. Because many passengers and crew die off screen in the game (and in fact their bodies are often lost between the scenes of death and cannot be recreated for one reason or another), and because figuring out every exact fate of 60 souls is quite challenging, players often have to rely on educated guesses and process of elimination to figure out how everything exactly went down. Thus, Pope decided to allow multiple “acceptable” answers for certain circumstances because honestly, who’s he to say that this player’s interpretation is more correct than the other?
Even more viscerally shocking to me is that the game is innately aware of who you are and what role you play, and has multiple nods to this throughout the game. I can’t go into too much detail since that would quickly enter spoiler territory, but needless to say, your actions do have consequences upon the final findings and ending of the frame tale (both in the form of the insurance report and what’s revealed to you thereafter), and the game is extremely self-aware of how omnipresent death plays a role in your investigation and how without it, your perception of events would be much different. I also at this time want to point out that Lucas Pope puts a lot of emphasis in toolkits, particularly calling back to his time spent at Naughty Dog developing GUI tools. Pope then proceeds to both play this emphasis straight and subvert this at times; sure, the book is great at marking down the exact location of bodies, but what happens when the bodies can’t be recovered? It’s extremely helpful to zoom in on people within the frozen memories and then press Tab to immediately lock in on their location within the sketch, but what do you do when the person is so far away in the background of the memory that zooming in doesn’t lock onto that identity? By doing this, Pope utilizes the presence of the built-in tools to their maximum capacity, through both forcing reliance upon the tools and reliance upon other means of discovery when the tools are subverted.
Lastly, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what makes Obra Dinn a goldmine for so many memorable moments. I’ve already discussed the presentation and the strong presence of player control/perspective/agency that only a video game could really accomplish, but there’s two additional reasons I want to walk through at this time. Firstly, Obra Dinn’s anachronistic narrative sets it up for success in a few ways. Of course, there’s the degree of player control that this allows, thanks to letting players walk through most memories however they wish. We’ve also discussed the presence of continuity serving as a usable clue itself; that is, if a character is dead in a prior scene, then chronologically, that identity should not be present later on, and so on so forth. However, we haven’t talked about the power that disjointed story-telling has narratively, in that twists and sudden shifts in plot development feel much more natural and built-in.
To further elaborate, let's consider the cold opening of this game, where a few men bang on the captain’s door before one is unceremoniously shot in cold blood. This scene does several important things; firstly, it’s a sharp contrast from the peaceful and quiet beginning as you obtain your magical pocketwatch and stumble upon the rotting and decaying bones of the “first” victim, and in doing so, it immediately grabs your attention. Secondly, it introduces a flurry of new characters and terms in the form of “MacGuffins” that are most certainly relevant and just known to the cast at this point, but to an outsider like you, won’t make any sense at all. Think of it like a reverse Chekhov’s Gun; it’s mentioned in passing often at the chronological end (after all, the timing of deaths within death scenes means you’ll generally be traveling backwards) and its relevance has already been established, so you don’t have to wonder about whether or not it’s important. In fact, it provides a degree of investment to figure out exactly what it means and how it all played out. Finally, these scenes often take place in altered environments (i.e. what the Obra Dinn looked like 5 years ago) and slowly introduce and naturally funnel you towards more and more death as events unfold, with unlocked doors and recently deceased bodies giving you further access to more parts of the ship and more memories. By doing so, there’s an actual sense of progression alongside the sense of satisfaction from filling out the outlined narrative.
Speaking of progression and satisfaction, that brings us to the last additional reason, namely via investment. The game’s lack of hand-holding and overall difficulty are a huge reason why, as well as the focus on personal growth versus systems growth; the systems and mechanics present at the beginning of the game are the exact same as those at the end of the game, and the only thing that has evolved is the player’s knowledge of the fates and workings of the ship. Heavily aiding to both the player’s growth and the difficulty of the game is the “rule of three” mechanic used to validate fates. It strikes a certain balance; Pope wanted a mechanic that would put the player at ease for successfully figuring something out (i.e. not letting the aforementioned ambiguity rule over the whole process) but at the same time, not be so simple as to allow for the game to railroad players into certain choices or obvious brute-forcing. As such, the player must correctly fill out three sets of identities and fates before the book makes these choices permanent and congratulates the player upon their work. The “Eureka!” moments garnered from this system from correctly deducing the story are just as important to me as the “Holy shit!” moments that I experienced from the story unfolding itself. Is it a perfect system? Of course not; you could argue that the mechanic can be abused if you’re very sure about two particular fates and not so sure about the third to allow for more guesswork, and that the mechanic is “contrived” like much of this game. Nevertheless, I appreciate that this margin of error exists as a concession to the player and a good in-between for rewarding players with self-satisfaction while providing an adequate challenge despite providing more than adequate tools to meet the challenge.
A few closing thoughts: for years, many players and developers have pointed out that there’s a glaring dissociation between game mechanics and narrative. That is, we tend to view game mechanics and narratives as separate, and in fact in many cases, mutually exclusive. That’s why in many longer games, you’ll often have chunks of extended gameplay in the form of combat or puzzles, and then chunks of extended storytelling, often in the form of cutscenes, dialogue, text boxes, etc. This works just fine for longer run-times in the span of 20 - 100+ hours, but it would absolutely ruin the pacing of shorter games to switch players back and forth between exclusive gameplay and exclusive storytelling, and smaller indie studios often don’t have the budget or resources to maximize these aspects separately.
I’ve been searching for many examples of games where gameplay and storytelling are married effectively, and there’s a few that come to my mind such as Journey, Ghost Trick, Shadow of the Colossus, Outer Wilds, and so on so forth. Needless to say, I’m both embarrassed and happy to report that one of the greatest examples has been right under my nose the entire time. There’s no separation between Return of the Obra Dinn’s gameplay and narrative, and at no point is there exclusive storytelling or exclusive gameplay. Simply put, interaction with the narrative is the gameplay.
All of the previous points come back into play. The personal growth is learning more about the story. The logic and deductive reasoning into figuring out identities and fates are the core gameplay mechanics. The focus on eerie and often grotesque visuals and expressive sound effects and voice acting are integral to piecing together the Obra Dinn’s story. The very presence of death throughout the narrative is the only thing allowing you to even solve these fates in the first place, because without the Memento Mortem as a game mechanic allowing you to travel back to the exact time of death, you’d just be some insurance adjuster who walked onto an empty ship, saw a locked door and flies swarming around a pile of bones, and walk straight back to the rowboat to fabricate at best, a creepypasta of how 60 people were mysteriously lost at sea. Gameplay and story are inexorably intertwined, and one aspect would cease to exist or be severely crippled without the other half.
Time to address the elephant in the room: for a story-heavy game, is the story exceptional? I wouldn’t necessarily say so, as if I were to compare this to exceptional works of fiction in other mediums (say, a book like Moby Dick), I’d say that Obra Dinn’s details aren’t quite as elaborate nor as fanciful.
But Return of the Obra Dinn isn’t trying to be a book, or a movie, or even a museum installation. It’s trying to be a video game, and it embraces the strengths of the interactive medium so well that I honestly couldn’t care if the story isn’t as ambitious or beautifully scripted and its prose doesn’t match with even contemporary acclaimed writers. Frankly speaking, Return of the Obra Dinn doesn't just elevate the bar for detective games, it blows the bar off the rail and becomes something much more. I’ve been playing through a few other detective games recently, and none of them even came close to holding a candle to the grandmaster itself. That, and a lot of free time (and maybe a bit of nostalgia and passion) led me to reference a few analysis and interview videos and type this all up in an afternoon or so. It'll all make sense soon, but just know this: the narrative might not necessarily be exceptional, but I’d damn well say that this narrative is exceptionally told.
My one video gaming regret is that I will never be able to experience this again for the first time. As a result, I have resorted to recommending this to virtually everyone I know with no reservations and buying my friends copies of Return of the Obra Dinn so I can be there when they too, experience the frustrations and satisfactions of the medium in its rawest form for the first time. I really don’t know what else to say; I’ll vouch for this game in every waking moment of my life, and at this point, I'm convinced that I’ll probably buy anything Lucas Pope makes day one with no exceptions. If you want a game that will challenge your perception of what video games can be and accomplish, I don’t think you can do much better than this.
Sources referenced:
Return of the Obra Dinn Thinks Differently About Narrative
How Return of the Obra Dinn Works
How Return of the Obra Dinn Makes You An Honest Detective
Rumination Analysis on Return of the Obra Dinn
Lucas Pope on 3 years of Return of the Obra Dinn, and what's next
Noclip Podcast #07 - Lucas Pope
Return of the Obra Dinn Steam Page
" Heard the bosun ain't doin so well after Morocco "
X " Aye, what does he have? "
" 'Perantly is something called Ligma "
" среди нас самозванец | sredi nas samozvanets "
X " Who's that Stevay Jobs?"
" ME BALLS "
gun shot
X " Aye, what does he have? "
" 'Perantly is something called Ligma "
" среди нас самозванец | sredi nas samozvanets "
X " Who's that Stevay Jobs?"
" ME BALLS "
gun shot
Yeah, sorry. Putting this firmly into the "not for me" pile. I'm not saying this is a bad game at all, but even a couple of hours in I can already feel my head starting to hurt. It feels similar to Case of the Golden Idol but with even less hand-holding, and I know that if I push myself to try and complete it I'm just going to end up getting frustrated and upset. I already feel really fucking stupid at the best of times.
Great game I'm sure, just not for me. Sorry!
Great game I'm sure, just not for me. Sorry!
Veredito: Um excelente jogo de detetive.
Trocadilhos à parte, Obra Dinn não tem muito mistério. É um jogo de detetive muito bem feito, em que você tem que pensar para solucionar os mistérios e que te faz se sentir inteligente quando consegue.
São 60 pessoas pra descobrir quem são e que destino aquela alma teve (se morreu, como morreu, quem matou, etc) usando uma mecânica inteligente de flashback, sendo que a grande maioria dessas 60 é opcional. Minha maior reclamação é que, pra quem resolver platinar, precisa de um pouco de tentativa-e-erro pras últimas pessoas. Se você gosta de jogos como Ace Attorney ou de livros como Sherlock Holmes, cai dentro e seja feliz.
Trocadilhos à parte, Obra Dinn não tem muito mistério. É um jogo de detetive muito bem feito, em que você tem que pensar para solucionar os mistérios e que te faz se sentir inteligente quando consegue.
São 60 pessoas pra descobrir quem são e que destino aquela alma teve (se morreu, como morreu, quem matou, etc) usando uma mecânica inteligente de flashback, sendo que a grande maioria dessas 60 é opcional. Minha maior reclamação é que, pra quem resolver platinar, precisa de um pouco de tentativa-e-erro pras últimas pessoas. Se você gosta de jogos como Ace Attorney ou de livros como Sherlock Holmes, cai dentro e seja feliz.
AHOY!
Ao contrário dos infelizes tripulantes do navio, eu adorei cada segundo dentro do Obra Dinn.
Tudo isso em meio ao caos, suicídios, mortes, monstros marinhos, doenças que assolaram o local, preconceito, pessoas ficando insanas e etc.
A curiosidade é imensa em tentar descobrir as motivações de cada uma dessas pessoas que estavam nesse navio.
Tudo isso graças ao Lucas Pope que é um gênio, e assim como já fez em "Papers, Please", criou outro game que marca uma experiência única e inesquecível.
Ao contrário dos infelizes tripulantes do navio, eu adorei cada segundo dentro do Obra Dinn.
Tudo isso em meio ao caos, suicídios, mortes, monstros marinhos, doenças que assolaram o local, preconceito, pessoas ficando insanas e etc.
A curiosidade é imensa em tentar descobrir as motivações de cada uma dessas pessoas que estavam nesse navio.
Tudo isso graças ao Lucas Pope que é um gênio, e assim como já fez em "Papers, Please", criou outro game que marca uma experiência única e inesquecível.
Existem jogos tão bons que, embora me deixem com uma tremenda vontade de escrever uma análise sobre eles, simplesmente não consigo pensar em nenhum detalhe que não seja óbvio demais. E esse é exatamente o caso desse jogo.
Sabe aqueles filmes que começam pelo final e você não entende a história até vê-la por completo? Return of the Obra Dinn é assim do início ao fim. Nele, você busca pelo desenrolar da história através dos destinos de cada personagem, a fim de descobrir o que aconteceu para que o navio Obra Dinn nunca chegasse ao seu destino.
Sabe aqueles filmes que começam pelo final e você não entende a história até vê-la por completo? Return of the Obra Dinn é assim do início ao fim. Nele, você busca pelo desenrolar da história através dos destinos de cada personagem, a fim de descobrir o que aconteceu para que o navio Obra Dinn nunca chegasse ao seu destino.
i binged the shit out of this game in one sitting and it took me something like 7 or 8 hours and it was a fucking blast its so addictive i could not turn off the game i was like "just one more triplet... just one more" and ended up finishing the game entirely this is so fucking weird my god
from a gameplay standpoint this is possibly the most esoteric and out there gameplay loop ive ever seen in my entire life the way in which you "play" this game is unreal honestly and though doing the whole explore the boat > discover a corpse > watch flashback animation > explore flashback > write down clues > another animation > (sometimes: unlock a new dead body in the same chapter) > rinse and repeat might have resulted into a repetitive mess and an entire slog to go through the game is structured in a way that you never lose interest in what youre doing you have to observe EVERYTHING and come to the conclusion yourself theres no one hand holding you no one doing the explanation for you its you a weird book and a weird boat and a weird story and thats it and it feels so rewarding tbh
basically the gameplay loop revolves aroung pinpointing correctly in the big crew illustration the name and the cause of death of said person . now that would be very easy if it werent for the fucking 60 crew members names and A LOT of death situations you can put in the solution like A LOT OH MY GOD when i saw that i was almost gonna drop this because it was like sensory overload like i didnt even know people could die in so many ways electrocuted ? burned alive ? tore apart by a sea monster ? the world of possibilities is neverending and all go back to death umh anyway . but lets just say that if youre very alert you can at least put most of the deaths right (some deaths i could not for the life of me figure out how these people died i swear what the fuck i dont know if its the artstyle but i could not understand what was happening they couldve all gone to a burlesque show and the performer danced and cracked her neck falling and i wouldnt know a thing) and then they ask you whats the name of the person who killed them and youre like (☉_☉) because who the fuck knows this man i dont know this man at all as for revealing the characters names theres a lot of clues they give you like nationalities uniforms jobs position on the map vicinity to some other members sometimes they even say names in the audio log of the death flashback or speak in a certain language like thats a lot of stuff to use for your enchanted necronomicon ??? umh chronology
now thing is the game uses a system that i dont know how its called but lets say its called the triplet death system so that means that logs in the book are convalidated every 3 right logs you put so basically if the blindfolded goddess of luck began to root for you somehow you can take a lucky guess on your third and the game will stop to tell you that youre a conniving and sly fucking bastard and convalidate 3 profiles . FUN
i felt this was not a game for me in the beginning because im kind of dumb puzzle games are not for me and make me feel even more stupid than i already am so this game was a surprise for how enjoyable it all is its just incredible i didnt know i could enjoy puz- puzz- sorry i cant say that word without feeling nauseous
story feels like a marginal thing because clearly the main focus is being a phantom detective with a magic clock to watch brutal murders or deaths unfold before your eyes and trying to see which sailors were having a gay affair unbeknownst to the other 58 straight people (probably none but i felt the homoerotic tension between someone in here and im not taking that back) but apart from that its just a slow and steady massacre of every fucking crew member on this joy trip and gets into some really weird monster horror stuff which i shouldve kind of expected like a sailor tale without a giant fucking kraken halving the company or weird titted mermaids trying to drown everyone on board would be weird and also... grotesque spider umh things and chinese sorcery honestly this a strange game dont look at me im trying to rationalise here
i felt like the art style was gonna make my diopters fall vertiginously but for some reason i grew accustomed to it very quickly ? unbelieavable also they do really cool stuff with particles effects and like shading or something im not that sure what i played thats the thing and also you can change the monitor to like idk macintosh or commodore and the screen will change color thats like so cool honestly how do you even think of that Acclaimed Papers Please Creator umh checks name pucas lope
anyway its great you should play it if you like tragedies like i do because life is a neverending spectacle of bad stuff and death omg sorry where did that came from lmaoooo i meant to say if you like puzzle games because youre a psycho and nobody should trust you ever
from a gameplay standpoint this is possibly the most esoteric and out there gameplay loop ive ever seen in my entire life the way in which you "play" this game is unreal honestly and though doing the whole explore the boat > discover a corpse > watch flashback animation > explore flashback > write down clues > another animation > (sometimes: unlock a new dead body in the same chapter) > rinse and repeat might have resulted into a repetitive mess and an entire slog to go through the game is structured in a way that you never lose interest in what youre doing you have to observe EVERYTHING and come to the conclusion yourself theres no one hand holding you no one doing the explanation for you its you a weird book and a weird boat and a weird story and thats it and it feels so rewarding tbh
basically the gameplay loop revolves aroung pinpointing correctly in the big crew illustration the name and the cause of death of said person . now that would be very easy if it werent for the fucking 60 crew members names and A LOT of death situations you can put in the solution like A LOT OH MY GOD when i saw that i was almost gonna drop this because it was like sensory overload like i didnt even know people could die in so many ways electrocuted ? burned alive ? tore apart by a sea monster ? the world of possibilities is neverending and all go back to death umh anyway . but lets just say that if youre very alert you can at least put most of the deaths right (some deaths i could not for the life of me figure out how these people died i swear what the fuck i dont know if its the artstyle but i could not understand what was happening they couldve all gone to a burlesque show and the performer danced and cracked her neck falling and i wouldnt know a thing) and then they ask you whats the name of the person who killed them and youre like (☉_☉) because who the fuck knows this man i dont know this man at all as for revealing the characters names theres a lot of clues they give you like nationalities uniforms jobs position on the map vicinity to some other members sometimes they even say names in the audio log of the death flashback or speak in a certain language like thats a lot of stuff to use for your enchanted necronomicon ??? umh chronology
now thing is the game uses a system that i dont know how its called but lets say its called the triplet death system so that means that logs in the book are convalidated every 3 right logs you put so basically if the blindfolded goddess of luck began to root for you somehow you can take a lucky guess on your third and the game will stop to tell you that youre a conniving and sly fucking bastard and convalidate 3 profiles . FUN
i felt this was not a game for me in the beginning because im kind of dumb puzzle games are not for me and make me feel even more stupid than i already am so this game was a surprise for how enjoyable it all is its just incredible i didnt know i could enjoy puz- puzz- sorry i cant say that word without feeling nauseous
story feels like a marginal thing because clearly the main focus is being a phantom detective with a magic clock to watch brutal murders or deaths unfold before your eyes and trying to see which sailors were having a gay affair unbeknownst to the other 58 straight people (probably none but i felt the homoerotic tension between someone in here and im not taking that back) but apart from that its just a slow and steady massacre of every fucking crew member on this joy trip and gets into some really weird monster horror stuff which i shouldve kind of expected like a sailor tale without a giant fucking kraken halving the company or weird titted mermaids trying to drown everyone on board would be weird and also... grotesque spider umh things and chinese sorcery honestly this a strange game dont look at me im trying to rationalise here
i felt like the art style was gonna make my diopters fall vertiginously but for some reason i grew accustomed to it very quickly ? unbelieavable also they do really cool stuff with particles effects and like shading or something im not that sure what i played thats the thing and also you can change the monitor to like idk macintosh or commodore and the screen will change color thats like so cool honestly how do you even think of that Acclaimed Papers Please Creator umh checks name pucas lope
anyway its great you should play it if you like tragedies like i do because life is a neverending spectacle of bad stuff and death omg sorry where did that came from lmaoooo i meant to say if you like puzzle games because youre a psycho and nobody should trust you ever
One of the best feelings in the world is playing a game that truly deserves the kind of praise it's garnered.
Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the most perfectly detailed and intricately planned games maybe ever made. The nature of it's extremely unique gameplay requires that every detail of the story be near perfectly woven together with every aspect tying into the next. Miraculously, it almost pulls this off without a hitch.
Deducing a majority of the crew and the nature of their untimely deaths comes extremely naturally, through only your own cunning. It completely trusts you to notice patterns in their relationships and activity, and use the frankly beautiful dioramas to piece it together.
Which brings me to the topic of it's unique art style, which uses the limitations of low-poly models and a one-man animation team and embraces it's lo-fi nature and draws the game entirely in two colors. Too close up it can sometimes be a bit grating on the eyes, but watching the sails flap in the wind or being greeted by the gruesome sight of an execution stuck in time can be completely engrossing.
That engrossing feeling not at all hampered by the truly excellent sound design. The voice acting, the horrifying shrieks of men being shredded by monsters, the piercing sound of a gunshot making quick work of a fistfight, or even the waves softly hitting the vessel as you walk across the blood-shed boards of the Obra Dinn. Every bit of it is to marvel at.
It could be said that there is too much guesswork involved nearer to the end of the game, but it's frankly not enough to hamper the experience. It could be said that it's premise reduces replay value drastically, but the first playthrough alone is worth it.
I truly admire this game, and I hope it's gotten the kind of success it deserves.
I hope Lucas Pope is proud of this game, because it's a beautiful tribute. And god damn, those transitions are like porn to me
Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the most perfectly detailed and intricately planned games maybe ever made. The nature of it's extremely unique gameplay requires that every detail of the story be near perfectly woven together with every aspect tying into the next. Miraculously, it almost pulls this off without a hitch.
Deducing a majority of the crew and the nature of their untimely deaths comes extremely naturally, through only your own cunning. It completely trusts you to notice patterns in their relationships and activity, and use the frankly beautiful dioramas to piece it together.
Which brings me to the topic of it's unique art style, which uses the limitations of low-poly models and a one-man animation team and embraces it's lo-fi nature and draws the game entirely in two colors. Too close up it can sometimes be a bit grating on the eyes, but watching the sails flap in the wind or being greeted by the gruesome sight of an execution stuck in time can be completely engrossing.
That engrossing feeling not at all hampered by the truly excellent sound design. The voice acting, the horrifying shrieks of men being shredded by monsters, the piercing sound of a gunshot making quick work of a fistfight, or even the waves softly hitting the vessel as you walk across the blood-shed boards of the Obra Dinn. Every bit of it is to marvel at.
It could be said that there is too much guesswork involved nearer to the end of the game, but it's frankly not enough to hamper the experience. It could be said that it's premise reduces replay value drastically, but the first playthrough alone is worth it.
I truly admire this game, and I hope it's gotten the kind of success it deserves.
I hope Lucas Pope is proud of this game, because it's a beautiful tribute. And god damn, those transitions are like porn to me
Technically the second paperwork simulator that Lucas Pope has made in a row. I would tell him to get some new material, but in reality his two most recent games could hardly be any further apart. While Papers, Please is a miraculous implementation of a terrible concept, Return of the Obra Dinn is more of a... decent implementation of a miraculous concept. It's tempting to say that this game's nearest ancestor is Ghost Trick, what with the premise of time-traveling to the moment of each side character's death and whatnot, but, ironically, it's probably closer to something like the Ace Attorney series. Both are similarly unique in how they reveal plot details in a disorganized, incomplete fashion and then require the player to figure out what's truly going on to progress. Though, compared to our insurance inspector here, Phoenix Wright actually has to put something on the line in order to get his work done. Usually it's trivial- risking a game over that hardly matters or just some snide comments from the judge and the prosecutor-of-the-week- but messing up does mean something. And make no mistake, guesswork is very much the dominant strategy onboard the Obra Dinn. It's more effective to be half-certain about a dozen fates than absolutely certain on one or two. It's an age old problem for the genre: failstates are completely irrelevant when information is the only goal, but I still wish the game tried any kind of punishment for putting forth incorrect answers, especially since that's absolutely something our main character would have to deal with himself. Or, at the very least, done away with automatic fate validation, which is arguably part of a bigger problem. On top of magically telling you when any three of your guesses are correct, your journal matches faces to pictures, reflexively records which crew members were present in each memory, and determines which lines were spoken by the victim before his or her death. Obviously, this was all done to promote convenience, but it comes at the expense of making you feel less like a detective. Most of the time, it seemed like my journal was playing the part of Holmes and I was just its Watson. My ideal version of this game would have you doing everything an inspector should be doing- mainly, using physical space to trace through the behavior of each personnel member and then forming hypotheses about where they were at any particular moment in time, which I never found myself trying outside of a few exceptions. Instead, what felt like ninety percent of my deductions came from two sources: the portrait of the crew and the dialog before each death. It's probably not a catch-all solution, but I think I would have preferred if there were fewer corpses but each memory allowed you to explore the entire ship. The game's best moments come from noticing something that wasn't the focal point of a flashback, and this would serve to amplify that, alongside both allowing more room for creative theories about what happened in between memories and adding to the build-up for the reveal of the story's supernatural elements. Though, if solving fates isn't entirely fulfilling, it's sure as hell satisfying. For all of my complaining, I can't pretend that I didn't stand up and take a five-minute victory lap after every set of three that I got correct. If Papers, Please's "cutscenes" weren't proof enough, Pope is a master of subtle aesthetic flourishes, and something about the abrupt relinquishment of control after selecting the right name, followed by the cut to black and the congratulatory text before the fates are permanently added to the journal just feels so good. Despite how harsh this review may seem, it's touches like this that make the game enjoyable overall. At its worst, it's still an undeniably well-researched, well-crafted and aggressively entertaining diorama simulator. Definitely an experience that I could recommend to just about anyone, but it too frequently feels closer to something like Gone Home than the nautical detective game that I was sold on.
I tried so hard to like this after seeing all the good reviews but there were just a few big things that were deal breakers for me and I got increasingly frustrated with the game as it went on. First off the things I loved about the game:
Style: A mystery game set on an abandoned boat is an awesome premise and the idea of a modern game with "old school computer graphics" is interesting. The music fits well and it's fun when it syncs up with stuff that's happening.
Mechanics: The idea of a power that let's you travel back to a static point in the past and walk around in it is awesome. Probably the best application of time travel in any media imo.
The deal breakers:
Graphics: While I loved the idea of this, unfortunately this game is the first game I've ever played to make me physically sick because of the graphics. It's hard to explain exactly why and I'm probably quite unique in this case since it seems from other reviews that most people didn't have a problem. Also the graphics really made it hard to tell what was going on. For example, there were several sections where it was important for progression for me to know that something was fire but to me it just looked like light or fog or something.
Inconvenient mechanics: You have to wait x seconds to enter a memory. You're only allowed x seconds in a memory the first time you visit (but you also can't leave earlier than that). You can't teleport back to a memory from the journal so you have to memorize where all the bodies are and which memory they correspond to. Every time you get 3 fates correct you have to wait like 2 minutes for it to go through and confirm all the info you just input. Just lots of random junk that had me twiddling my thumbs.
Sleuthing is tedious for basically no reward: So this is once again probably just me but the most interesting thing about the game was finding all the death scene memories. These taught me everything I wanted to know about what happened on the ship. Why in the world should I be motivated to find out all these people's names? I know its because I'm an "insurance agent" but that's just a made up thing for the game to work. I don't gain any interesting lore or insights from finding out any of their names. I don't get any more information on the monsters (which were the only thing that really interested me) besides who they killed and how they were killed. It's just not worth it to me to scour over and over through 3d scenes that give me a headache just to identify someone by their shoes when I don't get anything for it besides the chance to check off a box.
Unless you count the bonus chapter? I got fed up after about 12 fates that I went online to look up a guide just because I wanted to see if I could get something interesting from the bonus chapter and it was extremely underwhelming and even annoying since it forced me to sit through minutes of me just looking at a really basic scene.
I think that about sums up my experience though. I usually don't review games on steam but with this one having so so many positive reviews I felt compelled to share my very different experience on the off chance that someone is able to relate and/or benefit from it. Many of the positive reviews also list some of the cons that made this a bad experience for me but still recommend the game anyways. For me this was an experience I regret ever starting and I regret even more that I tried to power through the flaws to just find more disappointment.
What I would've done differently:
Add the ability to teleport to memories I've already seen
Let me skip all the forced waiting sections (when you get 3 fates, when you visit a memory the first time)
Let me choose when to end a memory the first time
Unlock some kind of lore upon each set of fates I unlock (as opposed to just eliminating these people from future guesses)
Some other graphics mode for accessibility
If these changes were made I think I would have actually enjoyed and loved the game, because the premise and mechanics really are great and I usually enjoy mystery/sleuthing games, but this one just didn't motivate me.
Style: A mystery game set on an abandoned boat is an awesome premise and the idea of a modern game with "old school computer graphics" is interesting. The music fits well and it's fun when it syncs up with stuff that's happening.
Mechanics: The idea of a power that let's you travel back to a static point in the past and walk around in it is awesome. Probably the best application of time travel in any media imo.
The deal breakers:
Graphics: While I loved the idea of this, unfortunately this game is the first game I've ever played to make me physically sick because of the graphics. It's hard to explain exactly why and I'm probably quite unique in this case since it seems from other reviews that most people didn't have a problem. Also the graphics really made it hard to tell what was going on. For example, there were several sections where it was important for progression for me to know that something was fire but to me it just looked like light or fog or something.
Inconvenient mechanics: You have to wait x seconds to enter a memory. You're only allowed x seconds in a memory the first time you visit (but you also can't leave earlier than that). You can't teleport back to a memory from the journal so you have to memorize where all the bodies are and which memory they correspond to. Every time you get 3 fates correct you have to wait like 2 minutes for it to go through and confirm all the info you just input. Just lots of random junk that had me twiddling my thumbs.
Sleuthing is tedious for basically no reward: So this is once again probably just me but the most interesting thing about the game was finding all the death scene memories. These taught me everything I wanted to know about what happened on the ship. Why in the world should I be motivated to find out all these people's names? I know its because I'm an "insurance agent" but that's just a made up thing for the game to work. I don't gain any interesting lore or insights from finding out any of their names. I don't get any more information on the monsters (which were the only thing that really interested me) besides who they killed and how they were killed. It's just not worth it to me to scour over and over through 3d scenes that give me a headache just to identify someone by their shoes when I don't get anything for it besides the chance to check off a box.
Unless you count the bonus chapter? I got fed up after about 12 fates that I went online to look up a guide just because I wanted to see if I could get something interesting from the bonus chapter and it was extremely underwhelming and even annoying since it forced me to sit through minutes of me just looking at a really basic scene.
I think that about sums up my experience though. I usually don't review games on steam but with this one having so so many positive reviews I felt compelled to share my very different experience on the off chance that someone is able to relate and/or benefit from it. Many of the positive reviews also list some of the cons that made this a bad experience for me but still recommend the game anyways. For me this was an experience I regret ever starting and I regret even more that I tried to power through the flaws to just find more disappointment.
What I would've done differently:
Add the ability to teleport to memories I've already seen
Let me skip all the forced waiting sections (when you get 3 fates, when you visit a memory the first time)
Let me choose when to end a memory the first time
Unlock some kind of lore upon each set of fates I unlock (as opposed to just eliminating these people from future guesses)
Some other graphics mode for accessibility
If these changes were made I think I would have actually enjoyed and loved the game, because the premise and mechanics really are great and I usually enjoy mystery/sleuthing games, but this one just didn't motivate me.
I see why people like this but it is more of a logic puzzle than a mystery—it's like a scenario in one of those Usborne Puzzle Adventure books for kids. After the first big ooh-ahh reveal there is nothing especially gripping or surprising on the narrative level, it's just the chore of sorting out tedious minutiae like who fell off the mizzenmast, who got popped with the blunderbuss, who fell starboard into the drink, and I finished more out of obligation than curiosity. Nice aesthetic tho.
A wonderful logic and inference puzzle steeped in a timeless, unique art style and haunting story beats. A really interesting experience if a little cumbersome to review known knowledge.
I only have a couple complaints for what is otherwise, in my mind, a perfect game. It has me aching for more like it, games where I really get to play a detective. I think the magic pocket watch is such a brilliant idea, allowing you to witness the moment of someone's death, because otherwise a game like this can't exist. It's always giving you just enough to keep your mind running. Total cohesion of narrative and gameplay. The way this thing unfolds is just brilliant, filling in the gaps with your imagination while the game consistently destroys your expectations.
My minor complaints are that I think you should be able to access someone's moment of death from the book. It gets a little tedious having to remember where someone's body is so you can re-live that death again to catch another clue. The other is that some of the fates are straight up a guessing game, but I think that's kind of realistic. There are few of these so you don't have to do much guessing. I just wanted to be able to know exactly what happened to someone if I could help it.
Don't want to give anything away, this was just an absolute treat. I loved every second of it and hope I get to have another experience like it again.
My minor complaints are that I think you should be able to access someone's moment of death from the book. It gets a little tedious having to remember where someone's body is so you can re-live that death again to catch another clue. The other is that some of the fates are straight up a guessing game, but I think that's kind of realistic. There are few of these so you don't have to do much guessing. I just wanted to be able to know exactly what happened to someone if I could help it.
Don't want to give anything away, this was just an absolute treat. I loved every second of it and hope I get to have another experience like it again.
I liked Papers Please a whole lot when I finally played it last year for the first time (holy shit does time fly) and I figured that it was only a matter of time until I played this game. I’m glad to declare that it completely lives up to the hype. The sheer level of detail in the storytelling here is nothing less than staggering, Obra Dinn conveying a deeply layered, richly complex, and utterly compelling mystery through a unique narrative structure that only pulled me into this world deeper as it went along. Learning more about this cast of diverse, colorful, and interesting characters is incredibly involving and engaging throughout, combined with the subtle and clever writing which deftly explores a handful of thematic ideas without ever feeling overwhelming or oversimplified. The core mechanics of investigation and puzzle solving are also nailed to perfection here, creating a thoughtful, consistently rewarding, and addictively thrilling gameplay loop. That aforementioned depth (both in regards to its story and its systems) is certainly part and parcel to what makes this game so special (and what elevates it beyond the majority of titles in the detective genre) but even the more surface level sensory elements are fantastic. The presentation and the production values are strong across the board, the art direction is refreshingly original and beautifully atmospheric, the voice acting is fucking outstanding and very believable, and the soundtrack (composed by Lucas Pope himself shockingly enough) is incredibly immersive and it’s always utilized to its maximum effectiveness. This game is an exceptional masterpiece that I would recommend to pretty much every gamer that’s worth their salt without an iota of hesitation. It’s one of the coolest games that i’ve played all year and it begs to be experienced going into it as blind as possible.
Easily one of my Top 5. Detective game at its finest — you'll likely need pen and paper! If you haven't played it, just buy it and go in with no preconceptions. Finished over 3 days; couldn't wait to get back from work to continue uncovering the mystery. Only downside is that it has no replay value — I wish I could wipe my memory to play this again.
there's nothing quite as amazing as playing a game that is like nothing you've ever played before
entire crew of a ship risks it all for some mermaidussy
A genuinely magical game that’s kept me thinking about it and will continue having this grip on me for quite some time. Games that utilise the medium to such an extent that their identity hinges on the interactive element being present are some of the most fun ones to let sit with you, and this is one of my favourite instances of it. Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the greatest mystery games I’ve played and a lot of this is owed to the structure of the game, forgoing crafting a mystery specifically designed to surprise the player with its various twists and instead laying it all out bare and forcing you to pick everything apart to fully grasp the finer details of things. The mystery and story themselves are not the important aspects here, it’s just trying to immerse you into the role of a detective without any handholding beyond the bare essentials, and it does so perfectly.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery/puzzle game that revolves around incomplete information and assumption, often leaving little to no definitive evidence and forcing you to jump all around to place with increasingly tenuous lines of logic as you feel yourself going insane. It was quite funny taking a step back after combing through a few scenes in excruciating detail and just thinking “wow, this is deranged” but that’s just how the game is. The player is likely to find all of the story beats of the game rather early on without knowing the fates of the vast majority of the cast, and then the rest of the game boils down to going between the relevant scenes in the game to try and figure out how to deduce some of them, which would seem like an experience that would feel stagnant very quickly, but is saved due to the sense of progression that will take place despite it all just looking like cleanup at first. The progression gates in this game are entirely dependent on and driven by the player, hinging on multiple big realisations on how they need to approach their investigations. This culminates in a deeply rewarding loop of thinking that you’ve hit the logical endpoint of what you achieve on your own, before realising a new detail that leads you down a new line of logic to discover someone, and then applying this newfound understanding of how to figure something out to other characters. A contributing factor to how this is so successful is due to the plethora of approaches that you’re expected to work out, sometimes really being as simple but uncertain feeling as “this guy hangs around this other guy a lot, they’re probably in the same field”.
The way that your answers are confirmed is a clever way of limiting the ability to brute force a lot of puzzle answers as well, since you’ve only got confirmation on whether you’re correct or not once you have 3 correct answers simultaneously written down. While some amount of guesswork was an expected element of this game’s design, by structuring it like this, players are still forced to confidently deduce 2 other people before they can start taking real shots in the dark with incomplete assumptions, solving a problem I’ve seen time and time again in deduction games where people will often resort to total guesswork the moment they’re met with some confusion and uncertainty. The presentation goes a long way in tying everything together as well, being visually striking while having the effect of being simple enough to make the important details easier to pinpoint while simultaneously obscuring everything just enough to invite uncertainty into every observation. I adore whenever a game can keep me thinking for so long after I’m done with it, and I love it even more when it does so through something as esoteric as it is here. Total masterpiece, something new to add to my list of favourites.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery/puzzle game that revolves around incomplete information and assumption, often leaving little to no definitive evidence and forcing you to jump all around to place with increasingly tenuous lines of logic as you feel yourself going insane. It was quite funny taking a step back after combing through a few scenes in excruciating detail and just thinking “wow, this is deranged” but that’s just how the game is. The player is likely to find all of the story beats of the game rather early on without knowing the fates of the vast majority of the cast, and then the rest of the game boils down to going between the relevant scenes in the game to try and figure out how to deduce some of them, which would seem like an experience that would feel stagnant very quickly, but is saved due to the sense of progression that will take place despite it all just looking like cleanup at first. The progression gates in this game are entirely dependent on and driven by the player, hinging on multiple big realisations on how they need to approach their investigations. This culminates in a deeply rewarding loop of thinking that you’ve hit the logical endpoint of what you achieve on your own, before realising a new detail that leads you down a new line of logic to discover someone, and then applying this newfound understanding of how to figure something out to other characters. A contributing factor to how this is so successful is due to the plethora of approaches that you’re expected to work out, sometimes really being as simple but uncertain feeling as “this guy hangs around this other guy a lot, they’re probably in the same field”.
The way that your answers are confirmed is a clever way of limiting the ability to brute force a lot of puzzle answers as well, since you’ve only got confirmation on whether you’re correct or not once you have 3 correct answers simultaneously written down. While some amount of guesswork was an expected element of this game’s design, by structuring it like this, players are still forced to confidently deduce 2 other people before they can start taking real shots in the dark with incomplete assumptions, solving a problem I’ve seen time and time again in deduction games where people will often resort to total guesswork the moment they’re met with some confusion and uncertainty. The presentation goes a long way in tying everything together as well, being visually striking while having the effect of being simple enough to make the important details easier to pinpoint while simultaneously obscuring everything just enough to invite uncertainty into every observation. I adore whenever a game can keep me thinking for so long after I’m done with it, and I love it even more when it does so through something as esoteric as it is here. Total masterpiece, something new to add to my list of favourites.
I feel like I played this game at an incredibly fortunate time in my life. Struggling to commit to any game for more than a few hours I was burned out on most modern game genres such as shooters, platformers and RPGs. When I first saw this recommended to me on steam during a sale I was intrigued by the art-style and main gameplay mechanic. I didn't have particularly high hopes I just knew it was highly rated and had a unique aesthetic. If you had told me I was going to play through the game in one long 8 hour session whilst losing track of the time I'd have been shocked. This game is good. REALLY good.
Mechanically the game is fairly simple. You walk up to a corpse, use your stopwatch on it and you get several pieces of information. It starts with fully voiced dialogue of the moments leading up to the death. Then once that finishes you get the big picture, the actual moment of death in frozen tableau. One of the most impressive things about this game for me is the way it sets your expectations for what the game will throw at you and then continually makes you re-assess what in the actual fuck is happening.
Once having viewed the scene you are asked to fill in notebook and describe who died and what killed them, and later what happened to the passengers who went missing off screen. Did they die? Did they escape? You don't have the answer spelled out for you and have to make a lot of educated inferences to finish the game. While some games are easy and use puzzles to make you "feel" smart, this game feels both challenging and rewarding. I never got stuck and had to use a guide. Meticulous checking off of names and revisiting scenes with newfound context is the name of the game here. Really great stuff.
This game and Outer Wilds are two games that completely changed how I viewed what games could be. I can easily say I have never played anything quite like it. A must play.
Mechanically the game is fairly simple. You walk up to a corpse, use your stopwatch on it and you get several pieces of information. It starts with fully voiced dialogue of the moments leading up to the death. Then once that finishes you get the big picture, the actual moment of death in frozen tableau. One of the most impressive things about this game for me is the way it sets your expectations for what the game will throw at you and then continually makes you re-assess what in the actual fuck is happening.
Once having viewed the scene you are asked to fill in notebook and describe who died and what killed them, and later what happened to the passengers who went missing off screen. Did they die? Did they escape? You don't have the answer spelled out for you and have to make a lot of educated inferences to finish the game. While some games are easy and use puzzles to make you "feel" smart, this game feels both challenging and rewarding. I never got stuck and had to use a guide. Meticulous checking off of names and revisiting scenes with newfound context is the name of the game here. Really great stuff.
This game and Outer Wilds are two games that completely changed how I viewed what games could be. I can easily say I have never played anything quite like it. A must play.
you can literally click the book in this game
In Return of the Obra Dinn you play as an insurance investigator trying to figure out what happened on the Obra Dinn, a ship that disappeared and came back without its 60 crewmates & passengers. Your only tools are a 'magic' death compass and a book which contains some information about the passengers (name, why they're on the ship, and their origin), a few pictures of everyone and some other useful information.
It is your job to figure out who everyone is and how they died with those tools. When you use the compass near a death body, it sets up a static scene with a few lines of dialogue that show what happened at the time the person died. With those scenes and the information in them plus the book, you get all the information you need to figure out who they are and how they died. But that information can sometimes be hidden in plain sight. It could be someone's accent, or their location on the ship, what they're wearing or who they're talking to. You have to pay a lot of attention to every small detail and it's really not as easy as it sounds but it is fun and creates some of the best EUREKA moments I've ever had in a game.
The first thing that caught my eye is the very unique 1-bit art style that comes straight out of an old computer. This style combined with the amazing soundtrack creates a mysterious atmosphere that fits so well within the game. Obra Dinn tells its story in a very untraditional way, it's like you go back through the story, and I love it for that. We really do need more games like this one.
Return of the Obra Dinn is an amazing murder mystery/puzzle game that I absolutely loved playing.
It is your job to figure out who everyone is and how they died with those tools. When you use the compass near a death body, it sets up a static scene with a few lines of dialogue that show what happened at the time the person died. With those scenes and the information in them plus the book, you get all the information you need to figure out who they are and how they died. But that information can sometimes be hidden in plain sight. It could be someone's accent, or their location on the ship, what they're wearing or who they're talking to. You have to pay a lot of attention to every small detail and it's really not as easy as it sounds but it is fun and creates some of the best EUREKA moments I've ever had in a game.
The first thing that caught my eye is the very unique 1-bit art style that comes straight out of an old computer. This style combined with the amazing soundtrack creates a mysterious atmosphere that fits so well within the game. Obra Dinn tells its story in a very untraditional way, it's like you go back through the story, and I love it for that. We really do need more games like this one.
Return of the Obra Dinn is an amazing murder mystery/puzzle game that I absolutely loved playing.
beat it in one sitting, I felt so smart and was extremely satisfied. also am a sucker for the Macintosh palette
imagine if they used the pocketwatch for brian's death in family guy...they would have caught the guy
who says filing for insurance can't be fun and engaging? wait, where are you going?
Alfred, I just completed a playthrough of RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN and I am left wanting for more. Set up Opera Browser to download Lucas Pope's gameography from FreeGOGgames dot com.
Then, using the special parameters "Most Relevant", pull off a YouTube search and find me a video explaining what happened at the end of Obra Dinn, encrypt it and then download it using youtube-dl-gui.exe and then open it on VLC Media Player so I can better understand what just happened.
After that, pull up the Obra Dinn article on TvTropes dot org and go to the "characters" section so I can better understand The Captain's motivations. Download the page in HTML format, send it to my Google Drive and open the file on Opera. Also, I'm all out of Coca-Cola Zero and Doritos, send an order on the Lyft app and have them send me another week's worth.
Then, using the special parameters "Most Relevant", pull off a YouTube search and find me a video explaining what happened at the end of Obra Dinn, encrypt it and then download it using youtube-dl-gui.exe and then open it on VLC Media Player so I can better understand what just happened.
After that, pull up the Obra Dinn article on TvTropes dot org and go to the "characters" section so I can better understand The Captain's motivations. Download the page in HTML format, send it to my Google Drive and open the file on Opera. Also, I'm all out of Coca-Cola Zero and Doritos, send an order on the Lyft app and have them send me another week's worth.
The craziest game of among us I've ever played
I don't know that any other game in history makes you feel as smart as when you get a confirmation on your suspicions in Return of the Obra Dinn.
Return of the Obra Dinn and Papers Please both have the personality of their creator, Lucas Pope, written all over them. Yet, they are both so distinct and original, you cannot compare the two at all.
Obra Dinn is such a unique and creative way of storytelling, and the setting for it is probably the most interesting one could imagine. It feels incredibly real, mostly because of design: the ship's crew is diverse and 18th century-like, the languages are spoken by native speakers, the ship's design is true to its inspirations, and the interactions and motivations of the characters are exactly how one might envision them when thrown into a tragic story like this. The voice-acting is full of emotion, allowing you to closely follow what's happening on screen, even though you aren't even seeing the characters move.
The string of clues the player must follow is laid out in a scattered pattern, but I never felt lost in the story. Sure, putting names to characters is difficult sometimes, but I always felt like I knew what was happening in every scene. When I completed the story, I immediately watched a video with all scenes chronologically, and it all made perfect sense.
The one thing I would have changed about this title, is to allow the player to control cutscene length; at certain scenes, I felt short on time to view everything that was happening, while at others I felt like I had to wait ages. It would have been great to be able to choose when you want to open the book to insert the scene, instead of being forced to wait a certain amount of time.
But, this waiting time also adds value to the amazing soundtrack that accompanies every scene. It was fitting and well-composed in my opinion, much like the soundtrack of Papers Please. It would have been a disservice to skip the music on my first playthrough in my opinion.
Overall, I think this is an amazing puzzle-adventure! It's easy to understand, and hard to perfect, meaning that anyone will get a good kick out of it. I sincerely hope that Lucas Pope will develop more games in the future, because they are an absolute joy to play through.
Obra Dinn is such a unique and creative way of storytelling, and the setting for it is probably the most interesting one could imagine. It feels incredibly real, mostly because of design: the ship's crew is diverse and 18th century-like, the languages are spoken by native speakers, the ship's design is true to its inspirations, and the interactions and motivations of the characters are exactly how one might envision them when thrown into a tragic story like this. The voice-acting is full of emotion, allowing you to closely follow what's happening on screen, even though you aren't even seeing the characters move.
The string of clues the player must follow is laid out in a scattered pattern, but I never felt lost in the story. Sure, putting names to characters is difficult sometimes, but I always felt like I knew what was happening in every scene. When I completed the story, I immediately watched a video with all scenes chronologically, and it all made perfect sense.
The one thing I would have changed about this title, is to allow the player to control cutscene length; at certain scenes, I felt short on time to view everything that was happening, while at others I felt like I had to wait ages. It would have been great to be able to choose when you want to open the book to insert the scene, instead of being forced to wait a certain amount of time.
But, this waiting time also adds value to the amazing soundtrack that accompanies every scene. It was fitting and well-composed in my opinion, much like the soundtrack of Papers Please. It would have been a disservice to skip the music on my first playthrough in my opinion.
Overall, I think this is an amazing puzzle-adventure! It's easy to understand, and hard to perfect, meaning that anyone will get a good kick out of it. I sincerely hope that Lucas Pope will develop more games in the future, because they are an absolute joy to play through.
By all accounts, pretty much a perfect game. Edward Nichols will pay for his sins.
Obra Dinn é como um novelo de lã emaranhado e cheio de nós que você vai lentamente desembolando. O destino das 60 pessoas que entraram no navio está entrelaçado e descobrir o que aconteceu com Fulano muitas vezes exige saber o que aconteceu com Beltrano, o que também vai te dar dicas sobre Sicrano e assim por diante. É possível passar alguns períodos consideráveis sem desvendar nada até que a resolução de um caso começa um efeito dominó que termina com várias resoluções simultâneas. A sensação de "eu sou um gênio" desses momentos é um dos grandes trunfos do jogo.
Claro, isso vai depender um pouco da abordagem de cada um com o game, e aí reside outro grande trunfo de Obra Dinn, sua não-linearidade. O navio é um ambiente perfeito para se colocar uma trama densa e convoluta e após a introdução você pode investigar cada parte dele na ordem que quiser. Essa não-linearidade não se limita ao espaço. O tempo também se tornou convoluto nessa arca amaldiçoada, com você revisitando os momentos finais de vários indivíduos em desordem cronológica. Ordenar cada uma das pequenas narrativas que você se depara de forma lógica e montar uma história que faz sentido é o grande quebra-cabeça que interliga os destinos de cada um dos tripulantes.
Como não há uma ordem definida para se experienciar os casos e a história do navio, alguns casos parecem carecer de informação crítica quando na verdade ela já foi mostrada umas duas horas antes e você não prestou atenção porque não parecia importante. No início do jogo isso é fácil de contornar devido à própria natureza não-linear da obra. Emperrou num caso? Sem problemas, parte pra outro. Provavelmente quando você voltar aqui vai ter uma visão geral muito melhor do que aconteceu ou terá eliminado outros suspeitos. Entretanto, nem sempre as coisas prosseguem de forma tão graciosa e seria mentira de minha parte se eu não admitisse que encontrei algumas soluções na base da força-bruta — principalmente no capítulo VII.
Dito isso, pelo menos em princípio a força bruta não parece ser estritamente necessária. Um guia bem interessante que me deparei depois que zerei se chama How you're supposed to identify people e elabora quais são as dicas ou passos dedutivos que podem levar à identificação lógica de cada tripulante do navio. Mesmo após ler o guia ainda teve uns momentos que pensei "ah, qualé, quem é que iria descobrir isso?", mas Obra Dinn não seria um adventure sem pelo menos um ou outro puzzle que só é óbvio para o designer.
Por fim, não posso deixar de elogiar a estética visual magnífica. Tenho certeza que deve haver ensaios inteiros sobre como Lucas Pope reimagina e resignifica as imagens em preto e branco cheias de dithering dos antigos Macintosh, então vou poupar a internet de mais um. Em vez disso, gostaria de dar destaque para a atenção que Pope deu para que todo o cenário, roupas, apetrechos que as pessoas usam, ferramentas e etc fossem o mais genuínos possíveis. Um trabalho colossal que tem meu respeito de historiador.
Claro, isso vai depender um pouco da abordagem de cada um com o game, e aí reside outro grande trunfo de Obra Dinn, sua não-linearidade. O navio é um ambiente perfeito para se colocar uma trama densa e convoluta e após a introdução você pode investigar cada parte dele na ordem que quiser. Essa não-linearidade não se limita ao espaço. O tempo também se tornou convoluto nessa arca amaldiçoada, com você revisitando os momentos finais de vários indivíduos em desordem cronológica. Ordenar cada uma das pequenas narrativas que você se depara de forma lógica e montar uma história que faz sentido é o grande quebra-cabeça que interliga os destinos de cada um dos tripulantes.
Como não há uma ordem definida para se experienciar os casos e a história do navio, alguns casos parecem carecer de informação crítica quando na verdade ela já foi mostrada umas duas horas antes e você não prestou atenção porque não parecia importante. No início do jogo isso é fácil de contornar devido à própria natureza não-linear da obra. Emperrou num caso? Sem problemas, parte pra outro. Provavelmente quando você voltar aqui vai ter uma visão geral muito melhor do que aconteceu ou terá eliminado outros suspeitos. Entretanto, nem sempre as coisas prosseguem de forma tão graciosa e seria mentira de minha parte se eu não admitisse que encontrei algumas soluções na base da força-bruta — principalmente no capítulo VII.
Dito isso, pelo menos em princípio a força bruta não parece ser estritamente necessária. Um guia bem interessante que me deparei depois que zerei se chama How you're supposed to identify people e elabora quais são as dicas ou passos dedutivos que podem levar à identificação lógica de cada tripulante do navio. Mesmo após ler o guia ainda teve uns momentos que pensei "ah, qualé, quem é que iria descobrir isso?", mas Obra Dinn não seria um adventure sem pelo menos um ou outro puzzle que só é óbvio para o designer.
Por fim, não posso deixar de elogiar a estética visual magnífica. Tenho certeza que deve haver ensaios inteiros sobre como Lucas Pope reimagina e resignifica as imagens em preto e branco cheias de dithering dos antigos Macintosh, então vou poupar a internet de mais um. Em vez disso, gostaria de dar destaque para a atenção que Pope deu para que todo o cenário, roupas, apetrechos que as pessoas usam, ferramentas e etc fossem o mais genuínos possíveis. Um trabalho colossal que tem meu respeito de historiador.