Obra Dinn is a stylized investigative game that has the look of some really old PC game from the bygone days of the Macintosh. It does provide a decent canvas for the player to put their best detective work forward but I think it failed in providing a compelling narrative.
The story in Obra Dinn is very simplistic, told with small snippets of a voice over and then a frozen scene in time in a certain part of the ship. You play some unnamed detective Insurance adjuster who’s job is to board this derelict ship and with the use of a journal find out the names of every passenger and how they died. These frozen scenes let you walk around and investigate who is who and how they died. Your main tool is the journal which has the passenger manifest with every name and job title of everyone on board as well as a sketch of every crew member minus the names.
in each scene you get a story snippet and someone is killed, you try to identify the dead crew member and how they died. How they died is usually easy to figure out, who they are is the trick. Some voice over moments mention a name and through the way they are positioned and who is in the scene you can deduce who that name belongs to. The journal will keep track which memories each character is in but it won’t allow you to quickly enter the memories which leads to my biggest issue with the game, the repetitive nature of the investigation.
All you do is explore the empty ship and locate the remains of some dead person, then use this magic compass to see the memory. That memory will play a scene of some big event in the ship, usually told backwards from the end of the event toward the beginning. Finish looking around and you get to follow this glowing line to the next body that appears and lets you see the subsequent memory. This repeats over and over till that whole chapter is done. To repeat any scene you need to walk around the boat and find that specific dead body again and use the compass. To exit you have to exit through some magic doorway. Say you want to quickly follow one character through multiple chapters, each chapter might be on totally different floors of the ship, and the only guidance you get is an x on a map to the dead body you are supposed to search for. The entire process is tedious, why the journal doesn’t allow a quick travel to each memory is beyond me.
So that’s all you do for the entire game. Match names to faces and walk around an empty ship reviewing memories for clues. I will give the game credit for not handholding the player, it gives just enough information for the player to figure out how to identify the passengers using their own ingenuity. I would find clues like a tattoo on an arm on a guy sleeping in a hammock that has his crew number on it. You can use the crew drawing to see certain members huddled together, as you see memories you notice them hanging out and can piece together that maybe this is the Russian seamen hanging out. You notice the officers with their stewards. Some memories might have a character emerging from a door, look at the map and you can see that’s the door for the carpenter so that’s probably the carpenter. At first when no names are filled and you are exploring the story it is exciting, so many possibilities, when you make a breakthrough it feels great. But as the game goes on and you finish the memories and are left with revisiting them looking for just one small clue it gets annoying.
Usually the best part of the detective game is the uncovering what is a story usually in the form of a mystery. The twists and turns of the story and the accusations and revelations make the stories memorable… there is none of that here. The story in Obra Dinn is like some R rated Children’s book that has almost no depth to it. Yeah you get a story of a cursed item, sea monsters and of course a mutiny cause every boat story needs a mutiny, but it goes nowhere. Relationships are hinted at but it’s all at face value. There is no grand mystery to solve, no amazing twist, nothing. It’s just the story of a ship that had some unfortunate events and you just need to identify the bodies, that’s it.
Return to the Obra Dinn is a decent enough experience, it lasts a good 8 hours or so if you want to identify everyone. It’s a game that does let you explore at will, I loved that level of freedom. The repetitive nature of how to access memories and the bland go nowhere story really holds this back from being a great game.
6.0
The story in Obra Dinn is very simplistic, told with small snippets of a voice over and then a frozen scene in time in a certain part of the ship. You play some unnamed detective Insurance adjuster who’s job is to board this derelict ship and with the use of a journal find out the names of every passenger and how they died. These frozen scenes let you walk around and investigate who is who and how they died. Your main tool is the journal which has the passenger manifest with every name and job title of everyone on board as well as a sketch of every crew member minus the names.
in each scene you get a story snippet and someone is killed, you try to identify the dead crew member and how they died. How they died is usually easy to figure out, who they are is the trick. Some voice over moments mention a name and through the way they are positioned and who is in the scene you can deduce who that name belongs to. The journal will keep track which memories each character is in but it won’t allow you to quickly enter the memories which leads to my biggest issue with the game, the repetitive nature of the investigation.
All you do is explore the empty ship and locate the remains of some dead person, then use this magic compass to see the memory. That memory will play a scene of some big event in the ship, usually told backwards from the end of the event toward the beginning. Finish looking around and you get to follow this glowing line to the next body that appears and lets you see the subsequent memory. This repeats over and over till that whole chapter is done. To repeat any scene you need to walk around the boat and find that specific dead body again and use the compass. To exit you have to exit through some magic doorway. Say you want to quickly follow one character through multiple chapters, each chapter might be on totally different floors of the ship, and the only guidance you get is an x on a map to the dead body you are supposed to search for. The entire process is tedious, why the journal doesn’t allow a quick travel to each memory is beyond me.
So that’s all you do for the entire game. Match names to faces and walk around an empty ship reviewing memories for clues. I will give the game credit for not handholding the player, it gives just enough information for the player to figure out how to identify the passengers using their own ingenuity. I would find clues like a tattoo on an arm on a guy sleeping in a hammock that has his crew number on it. You can use the crew drawing to see certain members huddled together, as you see memories you notice them hanging out and can piece together that maybe this is the Russian seamen hanging out. You notice the officers with their stewards. Some memories might have a character emerging from a door, look at the map and you can see that’s the door for the carpenter so that’s probably the carpenter. At first when no names are filled and you are exploring the story it is exciting, so many possibilities, when you make a breakthrough it feels great. But as the game goes on and you finish the memories and are left with revisiting them looking for just one small clue it gets annoying.
Usually the best part of the detective game is the uncovering what is a story usually in the form of a mystery. The twists and turns of the story and the accusations and revelations make the stories memorable… there is none of that here. The story in Obra Dinn is like some R rated Children’s book that has almost no depth to it. Yeah you get a story of a cursed item, sea monsters and of course a mutiny cause every boat story needs a mutiny, but it goes nowhere. Relationships are hinted at but it’s all at face value. There is no grand mystery to solve, no amazing twist, nothing. It’s just the story of a ship that had some unfortunate events and you just need to identify the bodies, that’s it.
Return to the Obra Dinn is a decent enough experience, it lasts a good 8 hours or so if you want to identify everyone. It’s a game that does let you explore at will, I loved that level of freedom. The repetitive nature of how to access memories and the bland go nowhere story really holds this back from being a great game.
6.0