Do yourself a favor and play this masterpiece! A unique game both for style and game design, a real hidden gem of the modern gaming times
God this is such a unique and remarkable experience. Walking around on the ship, getting to know each part, as well as constantly getting new information about the vast amount of characters is one of the best gaming experiences I've had in awhile. The ending chapter is a bit of a letdown considering how good every other chapter is, but it didn't detract from the experience too much. A short, but amazing game nonetheless.
Cool, unique detective point n click mystery game, there's nothing really quite like it, so it gets points for that. On the other hand, the weird, kinda ugly art style (I know what its paying homage to but still, pretty ugly). Also, difficulty is quite high, I definitely wouldn't have finished it without checking online guides.
Remember all the gaming media hipsters who always keep telling you that this game truly pushes the medium forward, and that game is one true example of games as an art form?
This is the game where these pretentious remarks are actually true for once.
This is the game where these pretentious remarks are actually true for once.
I had always been offput by the art-style but man I am so glad I played it. It is so so so fun to go through this game and experience the story how it is told through the deaths of the members of the Obra Dinn in vibrant and exciting scenes that you walk through and uncover. The puzzle element of finding out the name of the crew and how they died is always interesting and thank god for the system that correct you when you get 3 right at a time cause I would of lost mind if I didn't have that. I played this with a friend who had already played it so she helped me out when I needed it but never gave me the answer straight away so I would say a non-spoiler guide can be a help in this game to truly enjoy it while having a interesting, sometimes challenging, and amazing puzzle to uncover in the return of the Obra Dinn.
This is how I'd like more investigation games to be, instead of the ace attorney / daganronpa / zero time kinda stuff with ridiculous twists and characters spelling out stuff for you. This game feels like you are the one putting the pieces together, not just clicking on some piece of evidence and letting the main character spell out a contrived plot for the murder, which will then be followed by more unexpected and unbelievable shenanigans that you will also masterfully see through as the most logical thing to deduce, like a Columbo episode.
Also unlike the aforementioned titles, there's not that many other games that have this same kind of feel and approach, which is unfortunate but also makes it stand out more.
Also unlike the aforementioned titles, there's not that many other games that have this same kind of feel and approach, which is unfortunate but also makes it stand out more.
The game can be incredibly overwhelming in the beginning, but soon the pieces starts to fall in their places. The way each death scene is depicted is gorgeous, and much more elevated with this absolute BANGERS of soundtrack.
The only downsides I noticed is the unskippable cutscenes (mainly in the short ones) and the inability to run (since you need to go to each body if you want to review some scenes).
I think the difficulty of the game is perfect, although I got stuck in the last few deaths and had to check "a list" online to complete them (since I didn't see any other way to solve them).
TL;DR: hard but fun :D
The only downsides I noticed is the unskippable cutscenes (mainly in the short ones) and the inability to run (since you need to go to each body if you want to review some scenes).
I think the difficulty of the game is perfect, although I got stuck in the last few deaths and had to check "a list" online to complete them (since I didn't see any other way to solve them).
TL;DR: hard but fun :D
I played this game for an hour or two and was very much smitten by its artstyle, and its painterly death-moments, and its unconventional game mechanics, and its general sense of mystery; but I started to feel weirdly ambivalent every time I geared up to play it. Soon, I found myself avoiding it entirely.
And I suddenly, just now, realized why. The game feels like homework. It gives me the same low-level anxiety as doing research for a history project at school. I honestly don't even know if that makes it bad! I just know that it's not for me, right now, at this moment in my life.
I have to stress: It's 100% worth playing the first hour or two just to soak in the vibes, and see the kinds of cool, unique stuff the game is asking you to do, even if, like me, you don't want to do it :D
And I suddenly, just now, realized why. The game feels like homework. It gives me the same low-level anxiety as doing research for a history project at school. I honestly don't even know if that makes it bad! I just know that it's not for me, right now, at this moment in my life.
I have to stress: It's 100% worth playing the first hour or two just to soak in the vibes, and see the kinds of cool, unique stuff the game is asking you to do, even if, like me, you don't want to do it :D
My grandma likes collecting shells from the beach to put in her garden so I shot her.
Doing an Whodunit? videogame is I would'nt even think possible. Yet here Obra Dinn is. It is a wondeful game that gave me feelings very few games did. Every game system is sober. This sobriety gives space for the true star of the game : the human brain. Thinking, comparing, looking, moving, hearing are all the tools you'll use to determine who, how, by whom. This is much more stimulating than how it sounds on paper.
The end is sober and suprinsingly satisfying.
The game is gorgeous.
The sound design is wonderful.
This game is a masterpiece.
The end is sober and suprinsingly satisfying.
The game is gorgeous.
The sound design is wonderful.
This game is a masterpiece.
I think it's interesting how this game basically lets you figure out everything on your own. Usually in detective games it gives you a bunch of possible answers and you kind of have to solve it the way they want you to. In Obra Dinn, you can pretty much go anywhere you want and solve each death in any order. The only downside to this approach is that there are a few crew members who seemingly don't stand out at all and only appear in a few scenes. I pretty much had to guess who was who in that case, since there didn't seem to be any concrete way to discern what their names were. Finding out the identity of every other crew member fortunately isn't all that hard as long as you pay attention to the scenes, especially the early ones where you can see some of them doing their jobs. It helps that the artstyle allows for super detailed faces, so all of the characters are pretty easy to recognize even if you don't know their name.
It's kind of like sudoku, except instead of numbers it's people, and instead of columns and boxes, it's finding their cause of death. Actually that's not a very good analogy now that I think about it. Anyway, there's not much replay value for obvious reasons but the game is still pretty fun.
It's kind of like sudoku, except instead of numbers it's people, and instead of columns and boxes, it's finding their cause of death. Actually that's not a very good analogy now that I think about it. Anyway, there's not much replay value for obvious reasons but the game is still pretty fun.
Loved this brilliant game. The throwback Mac 1-bit art style is unique and gives the world a sort of lived-in 1800s illustration feel. I was wary that a game built so heavily on deduction might become wearying and dull, but the overwhelming variety of sources for information to be gleaned from and the fine-tuned curve of challenge and the occasional info gap to allow for educated guesses left me feeling accomplished, even if the accomplishment was really owed the designer of the interactive mystery itself. I ended up playing most of this in one relentless, obsessive 6 hour marathon late into the night, I can think of no greater praise than to say even now that I’m done, I can ID nearly everyone of the cast of 60 characters and their specific fate. What a great game!
Inacreditavelmente criativo e bem executado, uma experiência única.
Posso até dizer que tive um sentimento semelhante a Outer Wilds enquanto jogava. Imperdível para quem curte investigação.
Posso até dizer que tive um sentimento semelhante a Outer Wilds enquanto jogava. Imperdível para quem curte investigação.
HOLY SHIT
Like Lucas Pope's earlier Papers Please, the real game here is in your head, making connections and deducing identities. The inhabitable still-life dioramas are aesthetically stimulating and unlike anything else in modern games. We need more mind teasers like this. Unfortunately, Obra Dinn is clever without insight. Its chief mechanic (a stopwatch that plays back the death of nearby remains) has zero bearing on its narrative universe – with an oxymoronic treatment that renders it both an oddity and a banality – and its lone philosophical contribution is to brow-beat you with silent-film snuff killings. Voyeurism masquerading as existentialism.
I yearn to be eternal sunshined.
This one's very memorable and special to me, but utterly for reasons outside of its storytelling and narrative design. As a writer, I tend to approach games in that way- Bear with me, I'll talk about things other than words in a bit.
Lucas Pope, I feel, does well with creating emerging stories through branching paths, heavily influenced by player action. In "Papers, Please", for example, it was extremely compelling to have little stories for all these people passing by your checkpoint, unfolding either on-screen or in your mind. After all, your decision of "APPROVING" or "DENYING" their visas was an incredibly meaningful one in the lives of these bit-characters! However,
even back then, dialogue-writing and scene-construction were not exactly Pope's forté, and there wasn't much meat to the characters' bones (partially because there were so many). That wasn't a huge problem when the micro-narratives the game created were so dependable.
"Return of the Obra Dinn" definitely does not play to the strengths as a storyteller that "Papers, Please" made apparent; it's a fairly linear game where player agency in the story is starkly reduced (considering that the game's story takes place in a past you interface with from the present through magical flashbacks). Obra Dinn is also divided into individual areas that, while variable in the exact sequence of the scenes within them, end up following each other in the same order every time.
By the way: Obra Dinn has an enormous cast, all of them named and uniquely designed - while continuing to underwrite each of them, worse even than the few consistent and familiar faces from "Papers, Please". It feels like you barely get to know anyone; the windows you see them through are so brief and so limiting. You have no agency in these people's lives because they're either already dead or otherwise gone. The game feels extremely dead because of that, to its detriment. In a game with a stronger horror-component, that feeling would've been compelling; here, it's kind of dull.
Then, there are some of Lucas Pope's historical and political beliefs that subtly seep into the writing and character designs; never becoming ghoulish, but never being particularly tasteful in its depictions of people from distinct cultures, nor of complex political circumstances drenched in blood (such as the East India Company); it attempts to ride a strange line of fantastic pulp and historical precision, where each side diminishes the other. (As an aside, I still struggle to forgive Pope for his toothless and dull examination of the "circle of revolution" in "The Republian Times". It's a jam game, I know, but c'mon.)
TL;DR:
Why does the game still stick with me. then?
The deduction mechanic in 3D-space was genuinely beautifully executed. On your first playthrough, there is so much to see and discover in these static scenes from the past; Obra Dinn absolutely is a game for people with a love for detail, and - guilty as charged, that'd be me! It's also very good at capturing a feeling; an era of computer games that's long-past, one that never played like Obra Dinn, but definitely felt like it.
Overall, I'd say it's a worthwhile thing to go into entirely unspoiled. It'll give your brain some good exercise for an evening or three, and despite its flaws (all that shit up there + the 1-bit style being maybe not ideal for a detective game), it really is a game you remember.
Lucas Pope, I feel, does well with creating emerging stories through branching paths, heavily influenced by player action. In "Papers, Please", for example, it was extremely compelling to have little stories for all these people passing by your checkpoint, unfolding either on-screen or in your mind. After all, your decision of "APPROVING" or "DENYING" their visas was an incredibly meaningful one in the lives of these bit-characters! However,
even back then, dialogue-writing and scene-construction were not exactly Pope's forté, and there wasn't much meat to the characters' bones (partially because there were so many). That wasn't a huge problem when the micro-narratives the game created were so dependable.
"Return of the Obra Dinn" definitely does not play to the strengths as a storyteller that "Papers, Please" made apparent; it's a fairly linear game where player agency in the story is starkly reduced (considering that the game's story takes place in a past you interface with from the present through magical flashbacks). Obra Dinn is also divided into individual areas that, while variable in the exact sequence of the scenes within them, end up following each other in the same order every time.
By the way: Obra Dinn has an enormous cast, all of them named and uniquely designed - while continuing to underwrite each of them, worse even than the few consistent and familiar faces from "Papers, Please". It feels like you barely get to know anyone; the windows you see them through are so brief and so limiting. You have no agency in these people's lives because they're either already dead or otherwise gone. The game feels extremely dead because of that, to its detriment. In a game with a stronger horror-component, that feeling would've been compelling; here, it's kind of dull.
Then, there are some of Lucas Pope's historical and political beliefs that subtly seep into the writing and character designs; never becoming ghoulish, but never being particularly tasteful in its depictions of people from distinct cultures, nor of complex political circumstances drenched in blood (such as the East India Company); it attempts to ride a strange line of fantastic pulp and historical precision, where each side diminishes the other. (As an aside, I still struggle to forgive Pope for his toothless and dull examination of the "circle of revolution" in "The Republian Times". It's a jam game, I know, but c'mon.)
TL;DR:
Why does the game still stick with me. then?
The deduction mechanic in 3D-space was genuinely beautifully executed. On your first playthrough, there is so much to see and discover in these static scenes from the past; Obra Dinn absolutely is a game for people with a love for detail, and - guilty as charged, that'd be me! It's also very good at capturing a feeling; an era of computer games that's long-past, one that never played like Obra Dinn, but definitely felt like it.
Overall, I'd say it's a worthwhile thing to go into entirely unspoiled. It'll give your brain some good exercise for an evening or three, and despite its flaws (all that shit up there + the 1-bit style being maybe not ideal for a detective game), it really is a game you remember.
Full Review + Trophy Review and Tips Below (Easy Platinum)
Return of the Obra Dinn is a creative story based puzzle game with a unique art stlye. It is essentially "Memento" in its inspiration as you work backwards through the story to determine what happened to the ship and its crew. As you learn about characters with moment in time glimpses of their story, you start to piece together their place in the larger narrative.
The end of the game has you identifying the 60 or so crew members, their current status (dead or alive) and the actions they took that impacted the crew or ship.
Saying anything more would be to spoil this experience and is one that I recommend you go in to blind and ready for an unique and memorable experience.
Trophies
Difficulty: 2/10
Time: 4 Hours
Trophy Guide: Highly Recommended
Trophy List Score: 6/10
The trophies of this game are tied to your ability to flawlessly identify the outcome of every crew member. This is not a simple task and could require either great note taking or multiple playthroughs. For the platinum it is best to just play the game once for yourself and then do a second run following a guide with the correct outcomes for each character.
Happy Trophy Hunting!
Return of the Obra Dinn is a creative story based puzzle game with a unique art stlye. It is essentially "Memento" in its inspiration as you work backwards through the story to determine what happened to the ship and its crew. As you learn about characters with moment in time glimpses of their story, you start to piece together their place in the larger narrative.
The end of the game has you identifying the 60 or so crew members, their current status (dead or alive) and the actions they took that impacted the crew or ship.
Saying anything more would be to spoil this experience and is one that I recommend you go in to blind and ready for an unique and memorable experience.
Trophies
Difficulty: 2/10
Time: 4 Hours
Trophy Guide: Highly Recommended
Trophy List Score: 6/10
The trophies of this game are tied to your ability to flawlessly identify the outcome of every crew member. This is not a simple task and could require either great note taking or multiple playthroughs. For the platinum it is best to just play the game once for yourself and then do a second run following a guide with the correct outcomes for each character.
Happy Trophy Hunting!
interesting and addicting at first, with the puzzles genuinely making you think while still all being logically solvable, but gets repetitive and sort of frustrating from the pacing/padding between finding new corpses. the starting narrative is compelling, but once you fill out the broad strokes after the first two hours it's easy to see the full picture, and you're left with 8 hours of mindlessly combing over minutiae details, which is my main beef with the game.
on its own it's pretty cool when you realize oh this guy has this pair of shoes so i can trace it back to his bunk number!! but then you have to make the long trek back to cross check, and to make matters worse there's a lot of padding during this process, like only being able to exit cutscenes through doors or the stupid light that unveils new corpses that i hate with all my soul, because is there really a reason i need to follow it around in circles instead of just walking in a straight line to where the corpse is supposed to be? padding like this is rampant throughout the game, like having to wait way too long for new chapter details to unveil itself, and at times it felt more like a walking simulator than a detective game to me. i understand that the developer wanted more realism as opposed to it feeling too 'gamey', but when added with the fact that this game gives me motion sickness like no other, I feel that my enjoyment of the game would've been much higher if i was able to jump between discovered cutscenes easily to cross reference things.
at it stood, even though i really enjoyed the process of deducing identities (real world logic actually applies in every scenario, which is something i've only really seen obra dinn be able to pull off so well), the hassle of all those mindless in-betweens ended up soiling a lot of it for me, which is a shame.
on its own it's pretty cool when you realize oh this guy has this pair of shoes so i can trace it back to his bunk number!! but then you have to make the long trek back to cross check, and to make matters worse there's a lot of padding during this process, like only being able to exit cutscenes through doors or the stupid light that unveils new corpses that i hate with all my soul, because is there really a reason i need to follow it around in circles instead of just walking in a straight line to where the corpse is supposed to be? padding like this is rampant throughout the game, like having to wait way too long for new chapter details to unveil itself, and at times it felt more like a walking simulator than a detective game to me. i understand that the developer wanted more realism as opposed to it feeling too 'gamey', but when added with the fact that this game gives me motion sickness like no other, I feel that my enjoyment of the game would've been much higher if i was able to jump between discovered cutscenes easily to cross reference things.
at it stood, even though i really enjoyed the process of deducing identities (real world logic actually applies in every scenario, which is something i've only really seen obra dinn be able to pull off so well), the hassle of all those mindless in-betweens ended up soiling a lot of it for me, which is a shame.
probably the most satisfying game ive played all year, great ost too
9.5/10
i only needed a guide for 3 of the fates, everything else was natural if you had a keen eye and ear.
9.5/10
i only needed a guide for 3 of the fates, everything else was natural if you had a keen eye and ear.
Sensational. A genuine masterpiece. A detective game with no detail out of place where you must truly work for every solve. If you think you've got a good brain for solving mysteries, Obra Dinn is a must-play test of that skill.
Took me a while to get round to this but once I started I had trouble putting it down. Nothing quite beats the thrill of working out who's who and how they died and your deductions being correct - especially if you've spent a lot of the time you're meant to be sleeping thinking about it.
Easily one of the best detective/mystery games I've played and with an excellent presentation to boot.
Easily one of the best detective/mystery games I've played and with an excellent presentation to boot.
I'm a sucker for media that goes all-in on style, and the fullness of Obra Dinn's artistic vision is overwhelmingly impressive.
I waited years to play this because I tend to give up on puzzle games when I inevitably hit a roadblock and get frustrated for feeling too dumb. But Obra Dinn is so brilliantly designed that it empowers you to feel smart. Lucas Pope strikes a really rewarding balance in difficulty. Nothing discourages me more in an adventure/puzzle game than the "how the fuck was I supposed to figure that?" solution. Obra Dinn never made me feel that way. Yes, a couple scenes and solutions are tricky or a little ambiguous, but the mystery is so well plotted that you're never going to be stuck for long. And when you are stuck, it's just so novel and cool to look at that it's hard to be mad.
It's easy (and correct) to point to the graphic style as beautiful and refreshing, but the physical composition and framing of the scenes deserves attention, too. Spaces on the ship are filled organically and feel real. Time-travel scenes are cleverly framed to guide you toward clues, whether tangible items or simply highlighting a relationship or interaction. And again, Pope strikes an amazing balance - there's no confusing visual cruft, and the communication of clues perfectly ramps up in cleverness to let you keep feeling clever, too.
Above all, it's clear that this game is full of intent. A setting and concept we rarely see in games; a uniquely-minimalistic visual style; tightly refined mechanics that empower the player: all choices that must have been made with great consideration and care in order to express a very specific vision. I love engaging with art made with that kind of intent. It's what makes game design a craft, and it's what makes Return of the Obra Dinn a holistically incredible experience.
I waited years to play this because I tend to give up on puzzle games when I inevitably hit a roadblock and get frustrated for feeling too dumb. But Obra Dinn is so brilliantly designed that it empowers you to feel smart. Lucas Pope strikes a really rewarding balance in difficulty. Nothing discourages me more in an adventure/puzzle game than the "how the fuck was I supposed to figure that?" solution. Obra Dinn never made me feel that way. Yes, a couple scenes and solutions are tricky or a little ambiguous, but the mystery is so well plotted that you're never going to be stuck for long. And when you are stuck, it's just so novel and cool to look at that it's hard to be mad.
It's easy (and correct) to point to the graphic style as beautiful and refreshing, but the physical composition and framing of the scenes deserves attention, too. Spaces on the ship are filled organically and feel real. Time-travel scenes are cleverly framed to guide you toward clues, whether tangible items or simply highlighting a relationship or interaction. And again, Pope strikes an amazing balance - there's no confusing visual cruft, and the communication of clues perfectly ramps up in cleverness to let you keep feeling clever, too.
Above all, it's clear that this game is full of intent. A setting and concept we rarely see in games; a uniquely-minimalistic visual style; tightly refined mechanics that empower the player: all choices that must have been made with great consideration and care in order to express a very specific vision. I love engaging with art made with that kind of intent. It's what makes game design a craft, and it's what makes Return of the Obra Dinn a holistically incredible experience.
This review contains spoilers
Captain Robert Witterel's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
caralho que jogaço porra, que bagulho diferente, que bagulho intrigante
esse jogo conseguiu me acorrentar a tentar entender oque aconteceu com todo mundo dentro desse navio fantasma de uma forma muito absurda,
eu nao sou o maior fã de jogo de mistério/riddle/puzzle, mas esse daqui conseguiu ser diferente e ser muito intrigante
os graficos dessa maravilha são um bagulho extremamente simplista mas muito bem estilizado e lindo pra oque ele quer fazer, que é trazer esse clima de """"""noir"""""" com ao mesmo tempo fazer com que esse barco seja macabro
só o fato de eu olhar no horizonte e ver um mar completamente preto que reflete no mistério de como esse barco fantasma conseguiu reaparecer depois de 2 anos me deixa completamente cabreiro das ideias
adorei o jogo, vou platinar essa coisa ainda, o meu unico problema com ele realmente é ter uma mecanica que incentivar chutar e confirma pra você ao invés de ter mais pistas pra poder tirar conclusões
mas no geral achei maginífico
esse jogo conseguiu me acorrentar a tentar entender oque aconteceu com todo mundo dentro desse navio fantasma de uma forma muito absurda,
eu nao sou o maior fã de jogo de mistério/riddle/puzzle, mas esse daqui conseguiu ser diferente e ser muito intrigante
os graficos dessa maravilha são um bagulho extremamente simplista mas muito bem estilizado e lindo pra oque ele quer fazer, que é trazer esse clima de """"""noir"""""" com ao mesmo tempo fazer com que esse barco seja macabro
só o fato de eu olhar no horizonte e ver um mar completamente preto que reflete no mistério de como esse barco fantasma conseguiu reaparecer depois de 2 anos me deixa completamente cabreiro das ideias
adorei o jogo, vou platinar essa coisa ainda, o meu unico problema com ele realmente é ter uma mecanica que incentivar chutar e confirma pra você ao invés de ter mais pistas pra poder tirar conclusões
mas no geral achei maginífico
Masterpiece. No game has married the gameplay and storytelling of a detective better than this. Each of the 60 crewmates story is so well told, and it's all done entirely through 15-30s vignettes and the rest is up to you to figure out. A Top 10 game of all time.
This is definitely a small masterpiece. It was confusing in some parts, but I enjoyed it so much and I wish there were similar games.
Actually, let this game stay unique. I don't want other games like this. Just erase my memory so I can play it again.
Actually, let this game stay unique. I don't want other games like this. Just erase my memory so I can play it again.
I can't actually play this, it's way too smart for me and I am not smart, however I know it's good
Fantastic mystery game filled to the brim with a-ha moments. As much as I felt utterly clueless most of the time, when you finally piece together something you'll feel like a genius. Highly recommend this, go in with as little information as possible.
Beautiful and truly unique murder mystery game and I gotta tip my hat for that. it is split to multiple smaller stories with an overarching story of what happened to the ship and I found it to be rather engaging and well done.
The puzzles I found to be little of a mixed bag. There are some great ones that make you feel like an detective but there is also lots of busywork. Especially at the beginning where you just go from story to story writing how they died because you really don't have much else to go with unless they shout an name. Eventually you will have enough understanding that you can start piecing it together but it does take a while to get there.
The puzzles I found to be little of a mixed bag. There are some great ones that make you feel like an detective but there is also lots of busywork. Especially at the beginning where you just go from story to story writing how they died because you really don't have much else to go with unless they shout an name. Eventually you will have enough understanding that you can start piecing it together but it does take a while to get there.