Release Date: 18/10/2018
Played On: Win
Available On: Mac / Win
Time Played: 6h 25m
Progress: Completed
Developer: 3909 LLC
Publisher: 3909 LLC
Finding a truly original game is often like finding an original movie. These days they're mostly remakes and reboots of stories and actions that have already been proven to work. Turns out we're a simple kind of animal and seeing the same thing we always expect to see is a good way to sell products. Although, sometimes we need to leave those expectations at the door if we're to experience something truly special.
I won't mince words, I loved Return Of The Obra Dinn. There's simply no two ways about it, except I won't claim that it's without any flaws, as there are some notable shortcomings that I'll discuss later. However, let it be known that is truly a special little game that needs to find a place in everyone's gaming library.
The initial premise sounds a little lame, as we're an insurance inspector who has been tasked with assessing the events that took place aboard the Obra Dinn. This is a ship who returned mysteriously after a perilous voyage where nobody was left alive. In fact, it seems that the ship has returned with nothing but corpses and a hidden story to be told. As the one tasked with assessing the situation, it's up to us to discover what happened to the ship, its crew, and its passengers.
Fortunately, we're not just some chump in a suit from your local insurance agency. In fact, we have with us a stop-watch that allows us to travel through time and witness snapshots of events that relate to an individual's death. It's with this ability that we are then able to explore the Obra Dinn and peek into the incredibly interesting circumstances behind every corpse we find.
I say incredibly interesting, because the story is front and centre of this somewhat linear mystery. Mechanically speaking, we are able to walk around areas of the ship to look for signs of death. These could be corpses, skeletons, even a blood stain, or some other remanence left by a dead body. As more death is discovered, more of the ship becomes accessible, until we've hopefully found and accounted for every soul on board.
More on the mystery in a second, but the real moment to moment gameplay consists of little more than moving around and looking at things. Each scene presents a static moment, usually with some kind of action happening in front of you. For example, the first corpse we discover is a skeleton outside the Captain's quarters. By clicking our stop-watch on the skeleton, we're taken back to the moment that the skeleton's owner was killed.
Minor spoilers of course, but this is literally within the first five minutes of the game and acts as a tutorial, so it's a good way to explain what's going on!
So we're taken to the moment of the individual's death, which reveals a scene with various bits of information. First and foremost is that we can see someone standing in the doorway to the Captain's quarters, shooting the bloke we just found on the deck. Apparently the shooter is responsible for killing this man, so it's safe to say that he died from a gunshot.
Throughout our investigation we have a notebook that we're attempting to fill out. It contains a list of every crew member and passenger on the Obra Dinn. We also have a couple of sketches that depict everyone on board, but in the beginning we have no way to connect the names to the faces. As we explore the ship and find the scenes of each person's death, we're given clues that will help us figure out what happened to each and every one of them.
Thus, we have a scene in front of us where a man is shooting another man with a gun. Back to the mechanics and we can open our notebook and record that an unknown man killed by a gunshot fired by an unknown man. Might not seem like a lot at first, but there are other clues in the scene as well.
When each scene loads we're given an audio snippet that has the final few moments of sound that lead up to each victim's death. In this first scene we get a pretty good idea that the Captain is involved, as well as the first mate and some other dudes as well. Although, we still don't have enough information to settle all the details of what took place.
This is when the game starts acting like a bit of a pixel hunt, as you'll eventually find yourself inspecting every single angle and aspect of each and every scene. There are many little details that will help the investigation, such as trying to match the people in the scene, to those on the sketch in our notebook. What's more, we can check out their uniforms and even where they are situated on the ship to determine their jobs and rank.
I honestly had to look up a bit of maritime terminology to get a better idea of each crew member's role was. Thankfully though, it helped out a lot to know the difference between a Midshipman and a Topman.
The point is that everything in each scene has a place and will be essential when piecing together the puzzle of what happened. As you can imagine, the early scenes are fairly straight forward with only a few characters and very few deductions to be made. Later in the game there are scenes with dozens of people on deck, all shouting and in the middle of some desperate action that can take some serious mental gymnastics to keep track of every detail.
Herein lies the challenge and appeal of Return Of The Obra Dinn, as it quickly unfolds to be one of the most compelling mystery games I've played in a long time. The complexity ends up being such that you have to make educated guesses, or write down notes on an IRL pad of paper so that you can keep track of everything. Some scenes throw so much information at you at once that I wonder if there's any way to keep track without note taking, but I suspect that's kind of the point.
It reminds me a lot of playing Myst for the first time and writing down every little clue I uncovered, because I knew it might help me solve a puzzle somewhere far down the path. Return Of The Obra Dinn has the same treadmill of discovery and revelation that keeps the gameplay so interesting.
Although, it would be all the worse if this was a game without an interesting story to keep you on the hook. Much like uncovering what's really going on in Myst, the events of the Obra Dinn are fascinating to see unfold in sometimes shocking ways. What makes it all the more intriguing is that you're discovering events in reverse order, as you're moving from death to death in order to find more clues in new scenes. Not only are you tasked with finding and recording pertinent information, but discovering who has died in each scene is a fine way to keep the narrative flowing.
It's a classic story-telling technique of confusing you completely in the beginning, only to reveal answers along the way. Hopefully by the end of the game there's enough information to answer everything succinctly, but we don't want things to be too obvious do we?
In fact, that's one of the standout features that I loved while playing Return Of The Obra Dinn. This is not a game that wants to beat you over the head with the answers. Many times, these kind of games feel like you're simply passing through a museum and reading diaries to fill in the blanks, but really there's no way to fail your objective. The cool thing about exploring the Obra Dinn, is that you can easily miss just about every piece of information available.
Actually, if I recall correctly, the game only holds your hand when it comes to discovering the next corpse to investigate. To unlock and witness new scenes in the story, you need to find the death in each scene. Finding the body will allow you to open the scene associated with that death, within which you find the next one, and so on. Therefore it's understandable that the game purposefully highlights corpses and deaths within each scenario, as it would be impossible to progress without these discoveries.
The cool thing is that everything else can be missed, and even a few deaths can be overlooked if you're too eager to move on to the next. Some are hidden away, or happening elsewhere on the ship, so it pays to hunt around and take a look at every nook and cranny on board.
Thankfully though, we're able to revisit scenes as we progress and move forwards and backwards through the timeline we have unlocked. I can't stress enough how many details are implanted in every scene, so it's often wise to bounce between moments in time to see where a particular individual went, or who they talked to. Often there will be a tiny clue hidden somewhere in the past that identifies a dead body further in the future. You really need to pay attention and think about each and every scenario you're presented with if you want to get the full picture. Even then I had to make some educated guesses every now and then in order to connect the dots.
The game never felt like an unfair challenge, even when it seemed impossible to piece together all the fragments of the story. You're essentially looking for three pieces of information that can be recorded for everyone on board the Obra Dinn. We want to know their name, how they died, and who was responsible for their death. Thanks to the notebook, we're able to record our thoughts and keep track of the information we have available to us, until it's confirmed to be true.
Progression through Return Of The Obra Dinn is marked by successfully identifying sets of people and the circumstances of their death. It also acts as a kind of check-up system to see if you're on the right track, as you'll automatically be notified when you have a certain number of folk identified and recorded correctly. Although, I had some individuals added right at the beginning of the game, but I didn't find out all of their information until the final stages, so the solutions aren't necessarily presented in a linear fashion.
One of the more apparent difficulties in uncovering the truth behind the Obra Dinn, is that the entire experience is delivered in a strikingly high-contrast colour palette. The aesthetic is that of an old Mac computer, where everything is made from two colours, leaving only patterns to indicate shape and form. You can't miss how striking this graphical choice is, even in the screenshots you can see on this page.
The upshot is that the graphics actually add to the overall experience of the Obra Dinn, and the palette fulfils its role perfectly. In fact, the amount of detail is just as important as the parts that lack definition, as it simultaneously makes everything clear to understand, but occasionally confusing to identify. It's fortunate that this style is coupled with a smooth three-dimensional experience, so often the key to identifying something in the environment can be as simple as shifting perspective to view everything from a different angle.
I found that after a while I wasn't really noticing the limitations of the two-tone patterns anymore and I was appreciating the simplicity of the palette and its flat textures. In some of the more congested scenes with a lot of action going on, the graphics can be truly breathtaking, and as you can see in the screenshots, they make for some beautiful imagery.
Consider this unique and creative use of graphics, combined with the unique and creative investigation mechanics and gameplay. What you end up with is a game that far surpasses the sum of its parts, as the culmination brings about a visceral and fascinating mystery to discover and dissect. I've played plenty of mystery games before this one, but I've never played one that sucked me in quite as much as Return Of The Obra Dinn.
I mentioned at the top that this wasn't without its faults, so let's go over those quickly before finishing up. Let me stress though, that this is definitely a must-play for anyone who finds the concept remotely interesting, even if there are hurdles to overcome.
One of the main complaints I have about Return Of The Obra Dinn is also one of its best features, which is the difficulty. I mean it when I say that I love how you actually have to take notes and investigate everything to piece solutions together, but sometimes it feels a little ridiculous. Especially in the final chapters, there are some characters who you literally have no information on and have to make a blind guess as to their fate.
It wouldn't be much of a problem, except the rest of the cast have at least a small indication of what happened to them, so you're able to make educated guesses almost all the time. It's the random stabs in the dark that I found frustrating, to the point that I had a look online to see if it was just me being dumb, or if I really hadn't missed anything essential. Turns out that there are simply a couple of characters who require complete guesswork to solve, which is a little bit of a letdown.
The other disappointment is again tied to one of the major selling points of the game: the graphics. Playing through Return Of The Obra Dinn would have been a different experience entirely if the graphics were any different, so I honestly don't mind them at all. However, the down side to a high-contrast palette of only two colours, is that sometimes it's impossible to add enough detail. In fact there were a couple of locations and scenarios that were virtually unrecognisable thanks to the poor quality of the game's graphics. Perhaps it was intentional, but I found it a little frustrating here and there, whether it was meant to be that way or not.
The thing is though, that these kind of stumbling blocks aren't actually a big deal when you think about how intricate and challenging the rest of the game can be. Figuring out the fates of everyone on board the Obra Dinn was incredibly challenging at times, but it only made the victory feel even better. Besides, I managed to find it compelling enough to go back and discover what happened to each and every person in the story, which isn't required to technically 'beat' the game.
Hopefully you've gathered by now that I'm a bit of fan of Return Of The Obra Dinn, which is little surprise considering Lucas Pope also made the phenomenal Papers, Please (among other notable games). Pope is fast becoming one of my favourite developers to follow, as he manages to bring a fresh twist on gameplay systems and design.
There might be nothing more difficult than coming up with a truly creative and original iteration in a medium, but Return Of The Obra Dinn delivers in abundance.