Return Of The Obra Dinn

Insurance inspection is not a profession I expected to produce one of the best games I've ever played, and yet. Return of the Obra Dinn begins with a merchant ship reappearing five years after vanishing, everyone aboard either dead or gone, and the East India Company wanting the paperwork settled. You get a ledger and a pocket watch that takes you back to the instant of each person's death. The rest is your problem. The job is deduction with no scaffolding whatsoever. Sixty souls, and not one of them wears a name tag or waits around to be interviewed. You work things out sideways instead: from accents, tattoos, who's bunking near whom, the belongings around someone's bed, or the fact that the crew is screaming “Captain!” at one particular man, which is the whole deduction, because the manifest lists only one. I spent an embarrassing amount of time on two sailors I'd narrowed down to a coin flip, staring at the same scenes over and over, convinced the tell had to be in there somewhere, until I finally gave up on logic and guessed. The book never corrects you. It waits. Fates only lock in when you get three right at once, which means you can be certain about someone for an hour before the book quietly refuses to confirm them, and then you realize your entire theory rests on a mistake you can't find yet. That's the trap, and I could not stop. The 1-bit art does a lot of quiet work. Every death scene looks like an engraving, and because all you can do is walk through these frozen tableaux and stare, you start noticing things you would miss entirely in motion. The game hands you its ending early and never really builds to a twist. You piece the shape of it together long before the last fates fall, and it seems to know that. What got me wasn't any single revelation but the getting there: the way the last few obscure sailors fall into place on nothing but a shoe and a hunch, and the book seals them in like it never doubted you.

So glad I came back to this game after all these years and saw it through to the end (without ANY guide/help tyvm! lol). I highly recommend figuring everything out on your own. The game is 100x more fun when you force yourself to figure it all out. Also, the game is doable on your own. This isn't like some mystery/adventure games where puzzle solving takes these crazy leaps in logic or you have to find the most minute of details yet it's still extremely tough because fck you that's why. No, Obra Din is able to be beaten by most people without help imo. You definitely need to pay attention to all of the info you have at hand and go back to the crime scenes time and time again to reexamine things because stuff you might have assumed as fact might actually not be so. For example, one death I had figured/was certain for a large portion of the game (after I found the person's death scene) was a man I who had been spiked by a beast. I put that down as the death and after solving many other deaths I finally realized that I had this person's death wrong. I went back and examined the scene and the next scene and before it...I discovered a bullet hole in the wall behind him where he was resting/tending to his spike wound. Ends up he got shot by friendly fire in a battle with a beast. Stuff like that you MUST pay attention to. Pro-tip: the game shows you projectile pathways for a reason (in the form of visible air currents essentially that shows the path where it came from so you can tell whose it was). Stuff like that made this experience so much fun. Over the past year I've found that these first person mystery games are probably my new favorite genre BUT there just aren't many of them! If you liked/love Return of the Obra Dinn, here are some games that you must play if you haven't already: - Seance of Blake Manor - Blue Prince - The Rootrees Are Dead - Chants of Sennaar - Strange Antiquities and Strange Horticulture I wish I could think of more (and, indeed, I might be forgetting a couple) but like I said, there just aren't many in this genre. Yes, there are adventure games but I feel like these games, (with the exception of Rootrees, SH & SA), are all much more interactive than your typical point and click adventure game and that's probably why I like them. Blue Prince and Seance at Blake Manor were especially unique in that regard. Of all the games I've mentioned I would say BLue Prince is the most difficult, has the longest playtime, and is easily the most fun. I spent over 100 hours in that game easily I'd say. Anyways, before this turns into a Blue Prince review, play Obra Dinn if you are on the fence because it is easily a classic of the genre. Then go play those others lol.

The game is an absolute treat. It is so very very close to being a perfect game. I am in equal parts happy and sad that it fell just slightly short of being perfect Visually 10/10 The premise 10/10 The execution 8/10 The idea in and of itself has lots of intrigue. A detective in the 1800s investigating the loss of one of his majesty's ships. It was this premise alone that made me buy the game. The art style is great too, it really gives the game a creepy atmosphere. HOWEVER, I have three main gripes with how the game is executed. [olist] [*] When encountering a new scene, you are forced to sit around for a scripted fade out. I found that when this happened I either had too little time to do any deduction or too much time given the emptiness of the scene [*] The art style makes it very hard to read what's being shown sometimes. In particular: [spoiler] fire and things on fire read very poorly [/spoiler] [*] I feel the game was needlessly obtuse and should have done more to communicate the level of detail that goes into a scene. A Rubik's Cube is hard on its own but it is a thousand times harder when you don't know the objective is to make all sides one solid color. Even the simplest puzzle can become impossible if you don't know the nature of the puzzle. In particular, you should pay attention to [spoiler] outfits, shoes, accents, hammock numbers, even skin color (bearing in mind skin color is another thing that the artstyle makes hard to read) [/spoiler] [/olist]