The Obra Dinn has lost all its crew, and it’s up to you to reveal their fates.
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Developer Lucas Pope is someone who’s known for thinking outside the box with his games, as is typified by his 2013 release Papers, Please, which put you in the shoes of an officer policing the border of a fictional dystopia. Papers was unique because it told its story through the mechanic of passport-checking, and this same desire to tell stories through innovative mechanics persists into his new release, Return of the Obra Dinn.
The titular Obra Dinn is a ghost ship that has lost all of its crew, and you play as an investigator tasked with finding out what happened to the crew and why, all on behalf of a man known as Henry Evans. How is this possible though? Well, it’s pretty easy when you have a pocket watch that lets you go back to the moment of death of each corpse you discover.
The game slowly unravels from the first corpse you find, and after you get transported to a moment frozen in time where the person lost their life more things will happen like doors opening or further corpses appearing. It’s only by following the ever-growing trail that you can get a grasp of what’s happened on board, but the trouble is that these events aren’t revealed in chronological order; the bodies are jumbled up in terms of the order they perished in.
Your goal, as it were, is to enter crucial bits of information in your logbook for each crew member: who they were, how they died, and (in some cases) who killed them. As time progresses and you see more of the narrative unfold, events will become clearer for many of the crew members, and the game regularly reminds you how many of the 60 brave souls you’ve determined the fate of. It’s a dangling carrot to keep pursuing, and with every sliver of information you can pin down, it really feels like an accomplishment. It’s a bit like Fullbright’s Tacoma in the sense that you’re using audio and the environment to work out what’s happened.
The trouble is that this is incredibly challenging in itself, because there are only a handful of moments in the dialogue that you’re given (which precedes the frozen moment in time) where names are mentioned, so at times it’s like a murder-mystery version of Sudoku as you speculate at the names before you get solid evidence as to who they are. It’s about guessing and using deductive reasoning to narrow down your options.
Then there’s the trouble of finding out where next to look, as doors open and corpses appear in random places. This has no set order either, so it’s not as simple as following one set trail of breadcrumbs. Even when you find all the bodies you still need to identify how they all died, and it’s the perfect kind of puzzle for people who are looking for something unique and different.
The key here is to pay attention to every little detail, as you’ll find certain characters reappearing time and time again in the story, and it’s about tracing the links between them and rearranging the story so that you know what happened on board. This isn’t just about hearing what’s being said, but about identifying who is in each moment that’s been frozen in time (and thus who witnesses certain deaths).
Return of the Obra Dinn is a marvel in terms of its style, because everything in this first-person puzzler is given this 1-bit monochromatic visual style reminiscent of the old type of Macintosh, although other filters like that of the Commodore 64 can be added as well. Its starkly black and white nature is also reminiscent of other games like Mad World too, and it works incredibly well to reproduce this feeling of living in an old 18th or 19th-century document, as does the vintage style of text we get on screen.
Speaking of these old documents, we’re also reminded of classic tales of the sea with the events of this game too, stories which touch upon the supernatural and the fantastical, telling tales of wealth, greed, and heroism. It’s a proper rip-roaring yarn once you piece it all together and realise how events unfolded, but as with most ghost ships, it’s not without its fair share of tragedy. The soundtrack underpins these weird and wonderful events nicely too, as it’s sea-shanty-esque tone really compliments what’s going on.
The ship itself is dense, in the sense that it’s not overly large in terms of the scale, but the game keeps you searching for hours in order to unlock various compartments and work out where to look for clues. Not everything is straightforward, as you’d imagine, and it’s only by thinking outside the box that you can figure out where to go. Even the ending makes use of the ship and the pocket watch in even more interesting ways, so the game never stops surprising.
We can’t imagine how hard it must have been interweaving the tales of 60 different individuals together and keeping track of them, let alone deploying that into a jumbled, non-linear story, but Pope has done a marvellous job at creating this wonderful web of stories. It touches upon the fantastical, the tragic, and the downright spectacular, and with a wrapping as gorgeous as the style used here, it’s one to watch for anyone who likes a conundrum or just an undeniably unique experience.
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Keyword: Return of the Obra Dinn