Return Of The Obra Dinn

I had intense fun for the first 7 hours bouncing from memory to memory, slowly uncovering the story. I was making connections, deductions, feeling pretty smart about it all. There were some leaps in logic, but it was easy to follow; and all the characters I didn't yet manage to identify I'd probably get to later. Then I hit the end of the story and the game throws its hands in the air, daring you to keep going whilst seemingly doing everything in its power to be tedious and boring. From that point on it expects you to: 1. Use it's incredibly clunky and time consuming 'chapter select' method to skip around the story hoping to uncover its usually fairly high-level moon-logic clues, requiring you to walk all the way through she ship looking for the right memory to hop into. And for each wrong one that doesn't yield what you're looking for you are going to have to sit through the loading screen, find the door to get out of the current pointless memory, run through the door with your slow as ♥♥♥♥ walking speed, sit through the loading screen for the 'overworld' and walk to the next corpse to do it all again hoping to find the clue you need there. It takes for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ever and it's so incredibly frustrating. 2. Start pixel-peeping to find differences between the crew, while the art style makes all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ look exactly the same. At one point I was trying to see the difference between 'brown loafers' and 'black deck shoes' in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ monochrome game and it make me want to cut out my eyes and sacrifice my faculties of sight to the vapid blood god that clearly runs this universe given the turn this game has taken, in the vain hope it may yield a fairer universe. 3. Know the full timeline of who is where, without giving you any tools to mark people before you name them. So you have 'unknown soul' in 55 places but the game still expects you to be able to keep track of who is who. The game would be a thousand times less ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying if it had some kind of marker system so I can at least keep track of if that bearded guy I'm seeing now is actually the same bearded guy I saw 20 memories ago secretly dragging a corpse or whatever. 4. Keep spreadsheets of everything without providing you the proper tools in-game. You need to keep track of nationalities, accents, clothing details, relationships, professions, tattoos, timelines, death sequence, and ♥♥♥♥ knows what else. But the game refuses to provide any kind of system to actually facilitate that. And I'll be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ before I start alt-tabbing to excel ever again in my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ life, if I wanted spreadsheets I'd install EVE again. One might charitably describe the artstyle as hyperstylized. Or realistically as programmer art justified through the flimsy excuse of visual identiy. At least it's unique and didn't impact my enjoyment of the game before it started leaning into identifying small differences between characters, to which it does not lend itself. But it also did nothing to increase my enjoyment of the game. If you want to have good fun and discover a story that goes way more bonkers than you initially suspect, with some really strong and addictive gameplay for a couple hours, you could do worse. But if you expect a game to respect your time and be engaging all the way through then you'll likely bounce off the incredibly undercooked second half at least half as hard as I did. I was having such a fun time, and then the whole thing screetched to a halt because the game designer decided that the real test of skill was walking up and down the ship 54 times to find the right ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ memory to start pixel peeping the unpixelpeepable graphics, and noting down clues in your excel spreadsheet on the second monitor. I don't have half the patience for that kind of tedium, and neither should you.