Wow, what a fascinating game! An insurance simulator that doesn't make you want to tear your own limbs off!

In all seriousness, though, Obra Dinn is incredibly engaging. Lucas Pope's last big game was Papers Please, and this feels like such a huge leap ahead from that in every possible way. The 1-bit graphical style mimicking the look of old Macintosh displays is definitely inspired, but it takes some tweaking and adjustment to really get used to. But once you do, you're drawn in.

What makes Obra Dinn so fascinating, though, is its non-linear, irregular detective work. At the start, you are given explanations on all of the individual mechanics, how they work together, and how you're going to go about solving the game's central mystery, and that's it. With little-to-no overt handholding, you're given free reign to determine the fate of every member of Obra Dinn's crew.

This is, of course, overwhelming initially, but piece by piece, you start connecting the dots and using context clues from the flashbacks you witness to draw your conclusions for each individual crew member. It's all incredibly intuitive and rewarding to figure out.

That being said, as you dive deeper into the mystery, it seems that much more of it relies on guesswork and going over scenes several times over to spot incredibly minute details to determine identities than is initially pitched. It does start to feel tedious, but then, I suppose that's the price of real detective work.

The overarching narrative behind the mystery of the Obra Dinn was also not as satisfying as solving it. It takes some intriguing turns, sure, but I definitely found putting all of it together much more rewarding than seeing the whole thing in its entirety.

Regardless, Obra Dinn lives up to its promise of compelling mystery and intrigue with deep, engaging mechanics and a fantastic visual style and score.

8.5/10

I absolutely love the music, the monochromatic visuals, and the spooky ghost ship setup! It's so up my alley

As the game started I was intrigued by the mystery being set up and the vivid incredible dioramas of dozens of characters that each told their own small story of death and chaos

But as I played more and more I came to realize that for all its aesthetic acumen, there aren't any characters in this game. Sure you can learn a little bit about most of the 60 passengers of the Obra Dinn, but none of them have a strong character arc or more than one dimension to them

Who cares about solving a murder mystery, let alone 60 murder mysteries, when you hardly know anything about the killer, the victim, or the motive?

The violence gets comical after a point. There are so many deadly accidents that seem to happen so often that it's like watching the Final Destination movies on fast forward. Then you add in how all these people are so ready to murder each other at the slightest grievance and the number of deadly sea monsters that keep showing up and eventually all the death begins to feel rote

It's an amazing premise and beautifully told, but ultimately there's nothing to tell. After I finished the game, I checked online for a secret ending or a story I must have missed, but there was nothing. Just a cliche story filled with blood bags who pop at the slightest stumble or poke.

WOW! the hype was true! the way the game introduces mechanics and makes the scenes slowly more complicated is definitely something that should be emulated as much as the mystery and intrigue it gets so much praise for. i need some time to think about the story, but wow what a great game. my only criticism is that by the end i was pretty tired so i really wished that there was a faster way of jumping through scenes because it just got tedious, and i had a headache, so i did look up hints and brute forced a few. perhaps this could be fixed if i were someone who didnt play all the games i can in a single sitting, but if it were just a teeny bit quicker this game would be the perfect single sitting game and im a little sad it's not. that being said, guessing at the end was not fun, but the rush from guessing in the middle and having it work was truly delightful and i felt like a god. so, dont ever try not to brute force anything.

One of the best games that I never want to play again!

At the height of maritime trade in the Atlantic, an English craft dubbed the "Obra Dinn" sets out for the Cape of Good Hope with sixty people aboard. However, it never makes landfall at its destination, and it is assumed lost to the depths after a year without contact. Some four years later, the ship miraculously returns off the shore of its home port... With not a single member of its crew to be seen. You play the role of an insurance investigator working on behalf of the East India Company, who has been tasked with recording what might have happened to the unfortunate vessel. A less-than-enviable charge for just about anybody. Blessedly, a mysterious individual by the name of Henry Evans has given you a significant boon: A magicked timepiece called the Memento Mortem, which grants you the ability to witness visions of a person's final moments. In exchange, Evans has asked only that you remain steadfast in your investigation and not rest until you have unveiled the full truth of the Obra Dinn's grim fate.

Return of the Obra Dinn managed to do something not many games can pull off these days, which is make me refuse to budge from my seat until I had seen it to its conclusion. Granted it ended up being pretty much the perfect length for it, at least in my case - it's a runtime that I'm sure varies wildly depending on one's powers of observation and deduction. However, I think that is exactly where the bulk of Return's strength lies. It introduces the concept and the concern, slaps a journal and a cool pocketwatch into your hands and says "don't step off this boat until you've puzzled it out". The singular tool at your disposal would be any homicide detective's dream come true, but where such a powerful artifact would lead to a breezy day of work at Scotland Yard, here you are responsible for discerning the fate of sixty individuals. A daunting mystery, to be sure, but one that does compel: Just how does a crowd of that size disappear, and moreover, how does their ship make it home without them? Thus you will go to your task with that burning question in your chest, and will scour every inch and ponder every angle as you unravel this nautical whodunit. The lack of hand-holding and thoughtful design results in a riddle of logic that is deeply satisfying to solve, and you can rest assured knowing that each eureka moment you arrive at is well-earned.

Concerns? Well, the way each new scene is introduced did start to grate after a bit, permitting you to wander around your newly discovered "momento mortis" for a limited amount of time before kicking you back out to present day. Oftentimes this felt like an arbitrary imposition, as I would usually want to jump back in right away to continue taking notes. The soundtrack, while by no means bad and perfect for the setting, felt just a bit too same-y across the board with no real stand-outs. The retro computing-inspired visuals, which I'm sure will hold plenty of appeal for some, wore out their welcome for me by the end - if for no other reason than its monochrome palette not being a great choice for a game centered around careful observation of your surroundings. I admittedly cheated a smidge at one point just because I was completely lost on what to do next, only to realize the clue I needed was pretty much staring me in the face. If only I could see it! And while I know it's all in the name of establishing a sense of progression, the fact that the book will periodically confirm your findings for you feels a bit... Cowardly? A part of me wishes the game would force you to fill everything out and submit it with no way of knowing you were correct until the end, but that's probably just the masochist in me speaking. When I think about it, I doubt I would have been willing to go back through the full game just to correct one or two mistakes. This is the kind of experience that only hits with full force the first time around. To its credit, though, this mystery does have a bit of open-endedness in how you can resolve it, so that may be a bit of a draw for those seeking to dive back in.

I think if there's anything that truly hurts the experience in the long run, it's that the narrative at the center of it all, for all of the fantastical elements surrounding it, ultimately feels rather mundane. This didn't need to be a problem, mind; I would argue that the more grounded elements of the story are what lends it the gravity and intrigue that it does have. The failure, then, is making the more out-there aspects seem a bit shoehorned and unimaginative by comparison. I won't pick it apart here in case you intend to play it, and hopefully your opinion of the tale of the Obra Dinn will be brighter than mine. I simply felt that the conclusion arrived at was a little lackluster given the setup.

All in all, Return of the Obra Dinn is an excellent adventure in deduction that trims away a lot of the fluff typically associated with other games of its ilk. It knows the story it wants to tell and drops you right into the center of it, leaving it up to you to fill in the blanks. While I don't know that the ending will satisfy everyone, I think this is definitely one situation where the journey is more important than the destination. Hopefully I'll be able to give Lucas Pope's other claim to fame a proper shake in due time.

One of the best racial profiling simulators on the market.

Alright, so, in this game you play as an insurance investigator figuring out what the Hell happened on a ship full of crazy ass white boys. Your task is to identify the crew members and log their fates, by using a magic pocket watch on corpses that shows you their moment of death. You hear audio from the scene, and then can freely move around a still diorama of the events. Within those memories, you can continue this process to keep working your way backwards and uncover more of the mystery.

The game is one giant Professor Layton puzzle, where you deduce characters' identities by learning about their relationships to each other. Or, like me, you can say "this guy looks Russian" and put down a Russian name and see if it works. To be fair, the game only validates entries in sets of threes, specifically to eliminate total guesswork, but it also tells you that you'll have to guess for some of them. So I dunno.

The main problems I had, and the only points where I had to cheat and look for the answers, were with the game being strangely specific with the cause of death that it expected. The last time one guy is seen, he's dangling on the rigging, so I put "fell from rigging". That's a specific CoD available in the journal. INCORRECT!!! The game wants "fell overboard" and in fact there was nobody who even used the "fell from rigging" option! C'mon, man!

Alright, this game was literally made by one person. So I can cut it a little slack, because otherwise this would be a 2.5 star review, but I got a lot of issues with Obra Dinn, and now you're gonna hear about it!

- First, and this is the biggest one: navigating to specific memories is really annoying. You have a book that already shows you every one, including transcripts and an image from them, but you can't just go into them from there. You have to trudge your ass around the ship, find the specific body that leads to it, and then go in. And then exit again through a ghost-door. This alone makes the game far more tedious than it should have been, because there are a ton of clues that you can only find by exploring the memories thoroughly.

- Second, every time you enter a memory, you have to wait around until it lets you move on and do anything. It's like a minute or two, and in larger scenes, it'll probably happen before you're done exploring, but there are plenty of scenes where it's just One Guy Shot Another Guy and there isn't much to see so you have to stand around waiting until it'll fill in the journal page and let you select a cause of death. Related:

- Third, the game does not let you enter a cause of death until the game determines you've seen it happen. The game is very stupid about this, because there are multiple cases where you see the death happen, but you can't actually log it until a later scene. This infuriated me. I saw the damn guy get crushed by barrels, let me enter it, you hack fraud!!!

Anyway, all of these aspects made me stop playing it when it originally came out. Now that I went back to finish it... I don't feel much differently about it. I was, however, amused by the True Ending, which provides no revelation of any sort unless you're a complete dumbass who somehow reached that point without putting together the basic plot.

6/10

Played this in it's entirety over the course of two nights (which, can I just say, what an excellent length for a game like this!) with a friend who I now realise may be the world number one Lucas Pope fan internationally. He spent the entire game geeking out, trying (and occasionally failing) to restrain himself from spoiling crucial parts that he was excited about. It was a ridiculous but somehow fitting environment for a mystery game. The game itself is a thunderous accumulation of aesthetic force, in which Pope wrangles every single possible element of dramatic tension out of a relatively flimsy plot, utilising nothing but stationary (and colourless) 3D environments, silent film-style title cards, and a seemingly impossibly skilled array of voice actors to do so. The music is the real secret (by which I mean not even vaguely secret) weapon, combined with perfect editing rhythms to position the player within their very own DVD boxset detective drama. I called the plot here flimsy because it is. But the most frustrating element of the game (and the biggest problem, including the inevitably repetitive nature of the gameplay / obvious total lack of replay value) is probably that this only reveals itself to be the case right at the end. Because information is revealed in such an invigorating and disjointed manner throughout, the actual story of events as you discover them is really compelling. But the conclusion can't help but leave a little to be desired. Nevertheless, this is probably the single best detective game ever made, and the only one I've ever played in which 'detecting' is rendered the deeply complex logic puzzle it should be, as opposed to a dialogue tree with obviously wrong answers.

Genre: Puzzle, narrative mystery, unlike anything else | Released: October 2018 | Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch | Developer: Lucas Pope | Publisher: 3909 LLC | Language: English | Length: 8-12 hours | Difficulty: Moderate to Hard | Do I Need To Play Anything First: Nope | Accessibility Options: None | Monetization: Singe Purchase | Microtransaction: None | Gambling Elements: None | Content Warning: Violence, Death, Gore, disturbing imagery and themes | Parenting Guide: I’d say 16 and up | How Did You Play It: On my Xbox | Did you need a guide: Do not use a guide, you are running the entire purpose of the game. However, I did not clarification on some of the labels as to whether something was considered a beast or not. | Mods: None

Is It Good: Fantastic. It is essentially perfect, I have no notes.

Back of the Box: The only insurance investigator game you’ll ever like.

This is brilliant. Play it.

You play as an insurance investigator trying to discover what happened to the crew of the Obra Dinn, a 19th century ship that had been thought lost for years. You have one magical ability: with a mysterious pocket watch you can move back into time to observe the moment of death for anyone who was on board. Your job it to identify and record every crew members fate.

This is not an easy game, but with determination and observation you can figure out the fate of every crew member. Some may find this frustrating, but I really, REALLY liked this. This is an exceptionally well designed game, remarkably restrained, and polished to a mirror shine. I can not imagine how difficult creating a puzzle box like this would be.

10/10

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.

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.

Many games have been inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn, but none have surpassed it so far.

Honestly, I underestimated this game at the beginning, but it is pretty complex, deep, and almost impossible to brute force (which is quite rare in current deduction games). Every time I managed to identify another part of the team, I was really excited until I solved all the mysteries of this ship.

My only complaint is that sometimes it was a bit painful and tedious to review/navigate through the memories, especially when they are embedded a few scenes deeper into each other.

9.0/10

Visually striking, memorable, and at times morbidly hilarious, it is truly unlike anything I have ever experienced. To see a game use its gameplay elements in such clever ways to communicate information (and even reward the especially perceptive) to lead the player on so seamlessly makes me believe that Lucas Pope knew exactly what he was doing the entire time. Every decision this game makes is deliberate and extremely well-executed, making its seemingly bold choice of being a hands-off detective game pay off tenfold. This game could not have worked had it not pulled off its concepts so well, and yet it did. It is easily my favorite game of all-time, and I don't think it will be dethroned any time soon.

What is this game?

You start by boarding a ship. Then get called back to the boat that you got there on, because your luggage is too heavy. You grab a log book and a compass from the luggage and enter the ship.
The log book has all the information given to you.
It seems you are an insurance investigator, who has to board the ship and figure out what has happened to the crew. Your report will be basis for any claims or rewards on the crew and their estates.
So... Detective work. Cool.
I get a map of travel, a picture of crew festivitas, a picture of asian passengers and a picture of a firing squad (these are 3 pictures that were drawn during the voyage and serve as visual aid for your work)
Also a complete crew manifest is available.
All the following pages are chapters of the voyage. Empty pages though. What happened? You must figure it out.
On the ship deck not much is present. Very little can be done. Only 1 passenger cabin can be accessed, empty, and 1 body present. Everything else is locked off.
I walk up to the dead body outside the captains quarters and the compass appears to tell me something can be done.
I press the left mouse button.
Woosh... And in to the rabbit hole I began the journey.


Chapter X, The End
Blank screen... People talking. 2 men wants to enter the captains quarters and are willing to do whatever it seems. But a uppety english voice tell them that this is not going to happen. BANG... a shot goes off.
This is done by sound, only aided with the voiced subtitles. Oh I am hooked.
Then a still image appears... I see the dead guy with a bullet pearcing his body, a crew member at his side, and a guy standing in underwear in the captains quarters with a gun pointed directly at the shot guy.
I can move. OHHHH I get to look at this still image in 3D.... I am so into this already!!!!
After 30-odd seconds, the vision fades. You are back on the deck with the remains of the shot man. But now the door to the Captain's quarters is open. I can enter, and I see dead people...

Who are these men? Why is this happening? How on earth am I going to figure this out? 60-ish crew on the manifest and I need to find them and figure out their fates? Will I ever be able to get on with my normal life before finishing this game? Questions that are vital and the primary basis for my existence from now on.

This game is not holding your hand in any way. You are going to have to love adventuring if you want to be happy about playing this game.
Absolutely only basics are given to you from the get go. Information on solving puzzles are given, but only what is absolutely needed and only when you may need the information. Until then all you do is deduce.

So basically you get a compass that can tell you the last scene of a dead persons life, accompanied by 10-30 seconds of audio prior to that snapshot of death.
The first scene you get is always the last scene of a chapter, and then the game unlocks another dead body that gives you the scene before that scene, until the entire chapter has been unlocked.

During the adventuring of the scenes you must observe and listen. You will be getting subtle and not so subtle hints. You must then use whatever knowledge you get to give each crew member a name/rank and a cause of death and if applicable the culprit.
You must use everything, from how people look to how they speak or what they say, to deduce what has happened.

After finishing this game I am awestruck by how good this game is. I am also finding it difficult to point out issues with it.
Well I could pound on the steep learning curve and no hint system if you get "lost". But then again, this is exactly why I loved this game. It was not too easy. I had to pay attention to every detail in every scene. Some scenes would give you information that has nothing to do with a person that died, but just subtle information on who a person was

I must admit that I failed my first playthrough. I got stuck. I put it down for a very long time, and just recently picked it up again. This time I sure was going to pull myself together. This second run I learned how to use the log books cross reference system, which I believe helped me tremendously.
I do believe that all the mechanics in this game are important and needed. How many games can you say that about them? I do not believe to have played that game.

If stripped down to basics, the game is very simple. But it is put so well together with a very catchy story that you just do not care.

The audio in this game is sublime. Some hints are audio only. So it is important that the audio is good. Reasearch into langauges, hiring of voice actors that can speak those languages and with correct accents IMO. I am from Denmark myself so even the dane and swede was spot on.

The graphics you could easily be critical off as it is VERY simple. 1-bit colours in an 8-bit resolution, or something approximating that. Many might give this game horrible grahics score, but not me. This was exactly the graphics that were needed for the gameplay. Some hints were VERY hard to see, and therefore made the deducing harder. Was that a knife he is stabbing that dude with or does he have another tool? If the graphics had been in full blown Unreal Engine with all the bells and whistles then I believe that many hints would have been easier. Also the charm of 19th century ship would have been gone. It seemed fitting for the times that we are in to have poor tools available for deducing.

The music score is also an awesome part of the game. It really pumps you up. Strings and brass, with pumping sounds that entice you to look around and take in whatever scene you are in. Sometimes I felt the still images of scenes to be alive because of the audio.

If you like adventures and puzzles, and you do not mind to think for yourself without a game serving the solution on a silver platter, then this game should be a must have.

This game made by 1 man? Really? Graphics design, programming, mechanics, storyboard AND music composer? Look, I could compose something too, but I will be the first to admit that it would not be at the same level as other things I can do. But Lucas Pope does all the parts so well. Is there anything he can't do?
I will surely look out for more from Lucas Pope...