Return of the Obra Dinn is a very interesting game, the second major game by auteur developer Lucas Pope of Papers Please fame both falling into a genre that I can only really describe as "Puzzle write-em-ups"
You start off as an investigator with a randomly chosen gender climbing on-board to a ship that has docked with all it's passengers either absent or dead, and with the power of a watch that lets you see a moment frozen in time of the events of their death, and you need to solve not only how they died, but who they are and what happened to everyone in general, even the ones you can't find a body for.
The idea is you start with the simple people to identify and going through every memory, and then going through and narrowing down and picking through every placement, nationality, rank, social grouping, hammock number, etc. until you've figured out what happened to every single person
...There's only one major issue though, this means after you've gone through every memory this is really boring, as not only is 60 crew members a lot to worry about, at no point can you just fast travel to memories, you have to walk around and enter each one, and the book menu is slow and annoying to use meaning quickly checking faces, memories and the different chapters is a HUGE pain in the ass.
Going through memories can be a bit annoying too, because you have to wait for the game to tell you that you're done looking and can leave, or it'll tell you to leave as you're checking out a more detailed scene, but it forces you to be railroaded into the next 4 scenes anyways, making figuring out how to get back to that last scene annoying, I have no idea why fast travel and not being forced to stay in/leave a memory being absent was not caught in playtesting to be a major issue.
However, the game is really unique and is a very unique thoughtfully put together puzzle, I'm trying carefully not to compliment the game for it's mystery, as there is none. Once you see the first beast on like the fourth memory (cool reveal though) the game has completely blown it's load on what the mystery is, it's incredibly predictable, Cursed treasure, Evil monsters... and that's about it, unless the unbelievable stupidity of the entire crew is supposed to be a part of that mystery as well.
I played another game with a similar premise to this on Itch.Io called "Once Upon a Crime in the Wild West" a few years ago, and although its execution in terms of function, voice acting and general what-have-yous was not nearly as good, the concept they had going was much more interesting, you're playing out the scenes (with an option to do so on the fly!) and connecting a train on to figure out who murdered who until you've solved the whole case, I feel like Lucas Pope got a bit carried away with the almost bureaucratic elements and it turned the game into a bit of a chore.
The only real criticism about the shallow story that I really have is that the crew are ridiculously stupid, they're accident prone as all hell, have a tendency to fall on their heads or die instantly to the slightest bop to said head, have nasty tunnel-vision, terrible hearing, and worst of all....
[SPOILER for what happened in the final chapter, The End]
All 4 of those guys got killed for no reason, the 3 trying to mutiny did it for absolutely no reason, for some reason assuming the Captain still had the shells, which he obviously did not and had thrown out, and even admits to this, only for them all to attack him anyways, dropping dead one after another without hesitating for a second, with all of the attacks from the sea-monsters already having come to pass for quite some time now, and with the actual chronology of everything, it's something that most of the VERY DWINDLING population of the crew should know about, also the Captain just coldly instakills one of the members of the crew he was implied to be decently close with.
I guess the excuse is that one of the crew members that bargained with the mermaids was killed frankly fucking ridiculously, who just gets spiked when clearly trying to bargain, making sure he dies so he can't let everyone know that everything is chill now, but wow, all this bending over backwards for setting up a shitty set of 4 deaths that serves no value other than being the tutorial, which probably could have been done just as well by moving around the whole scuffle around the first mutiny.
Still, great game and it's worth playing even past the many flaws, give it a try if you like experimental stuff.
You start off as an investigator with a randomly chosen gender climbing on-board to a ship that has docked with all it's passengers either absent or dead, and with the power of a watch that lets you see a moment frozen in time of the events of their death, and you need to solve not only how they died, but who they are and what happened to everyone in general, even the ones you can't find a body for.
The idea is you start with the simple people to identify and going through every memory, and then going through and narrowing down and picking through every placement, nationality, rank, social grouping, hammock number, etc. until you've figured out what happened to every single person
...There's only one major issue though, this means after you've gone through every memory this is really boring, as not only is 60 crew members a lot to worry about, at no point can you just fast travel to memories, you have to walk around and enter each one, and the book menu is slow and annoying to use meaning quickly checking faces, memories and the different chapters is a HUGE pain in the ass.
Going through memories can be a bit annoying too, because you have to wait for the game to tell you that you're done looking and can leave, or it'll tell you to leave as you're checking out a more detailed scene, but it forces you to be railroaded into the next 4 scenes anyways, making figuring out how to get back to that last scene annoying, I have no idea why fast travel and not being forced to stay in/leave a memory being absent was not caught in playtesting to be a major issue.
However, the game is really unique and is a very unique thoughtfully put together puzzle, I'm trying carefully not to compliment the game for it's mystery, as there is none. Once you see the first beast on like the fourth memory (cool reveal though) the game has completely blown it's load on what the mystery is, it's incredibly predictable, Cursed treasure, Evil monsters... and that's about it, unless the unbelievable stupidity of the entire crew is supposed to be a part of that mystery as well.
I played another game with a similar premise to this on Itch.Io called "Once Upon a Crime in the Wild West" a few years ago, and although its execution in terms of function, voice acting and general what-have-yous was not nearly as good, the concept they had going was much more interesting, you're playing out the scenes (with an option to do so on the fly!) and connecting a train on to figure out who murdered who until you've solved the whole case, I feel like Lucas Pope got a bit carried away with the almost bureaucratic elements and it turned the game into a bit of a chore.
The only real criticism about the shallow story that I really have is that the crew are ridiculously stupid, they're accident prone as all hell, have a tendency to fall on their heads or die instantly to the slightest bop to said head, have nasty tunnel-vision, terrible hearing, and worst of all....
[SPOILER for what happened in the final chapter, The End]
All 4 of those guys got killed for no reason, the 3 trying to mutiny did it for absolutely no reason, for some reason assuming the Captain still had the shells, which he obviously did not and had thrown out, and even admits to this, only for them all to attack him anyways, dropping dead one after another without hesitating for a second, with all of the attacks from the sea-monsters already having come to pass for quite some time now, and with the actual chronology of everything, it's something that most of the VERY DWINDLING population of the crew should know about, also the Captain just coldly instakills one of the members of the crew he was implied to be decently close with.
I guess the excuse is that one of the crew members that bargained with the mermaids was killed frankly fucking ridiculously, who just gets spiked when clearly trying to bargain, making sure he dies so he can't let everyone know that everything is chill now, but wow, all this bending over backwards for setting up a shitty set of 4 deaths that serves no value other than being the tutorial, which probably could have been done just as well by moving around the whole scuffle around the first mutiny.
Still, great game and it's worth playing even past the many flaws, give it a try if you like experimental stuff.