Overall, this is an incredible game with an extremely interesting way of going about solving the mystery of the Obra Dinn. As you happen upon different threads and start pulling, you start to realize that even though you're following an overarching plot of the major events on the ship, you're quickly pulled into individual plotlines as you try to identify each character and what ultimately happens to them. You find yourself becoming invested in each scene, slowly starting to go from a very superficial view of just the victim to paying more attention to details the game has been hiding in plain sight from the beginning. It quickly becomes very satisfying to see the book filled out with everything you figured out, regardless of how you reached the outcome because of the plethora of ways to reach one solution. For the full time I was playing, I became fully immersed in the world and found it easy to start pulling at strings and following them without realizing how much time had passed. It's a pretty perfectly structured game that lets you unravel the mystery at your own pace and is presented in such a way that even the ultimately straightforward story is extremely interesting.

There's an overwhelming amount of things to do in this game with simultaneously being not enough things to do. For as fun as the game can be at times, I often found myself without a sense of a goal or feeling any meaningful progression despite the immense amount of options for things I could do and gradually led to a lack of motivation to keep playing. The biggest offender was that finding better ships and multi-tools is effectively a random event, and it does not feel particularly rewarding to just happen upon them.

This game definitely makes some improvements on the first one, especially being backed by a more interactive story with plenty of characters each with their own motivations and views on the world. While it succeeds in establishing this tremendous world and leaves you with much to consider throughout the playthrough, it unfortunately begins lacking in the puzzles. There are plenty of mechanics that get used to a varying degree outside their own areas, but none of them feel fully explored. This leaves the endgame puzzles feeling extremely lacking and not super satisfying outside of the initial introduction of the mechanics, and I found this especially egregious and disappointing in West 3. While the mechanics are more interesting than the first game, they are not nearly as fully explored or built upon, which is disappointing for a game that presents itself as a puzzle game. However, they were still fun to explore and utilize the new tools to find solutions, and the story was incredibly interesting to follow along to while thinking about applicability to the real world.