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.