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
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