Return of the Obra Dinn Review

BY AMAN SIDHU

Please do not bother reading this article. Just buy the game.

Understandably, if you would rather not, please continue to read. I hope to convince you anyway.

This game is good, and I sincerely believe that jumping into it with minimal context is the best way to experience it. With that in mind, I will structure the review so it will progressively cover more and more spoilers. If you are intrigued by the initial premise, feel free to stop and experience all this game has to offer, letting it speak for itself better than whatever I can translate. Also, the game is a mystery; if you find yourself any bit interested, please stop, avoid reading into it, and buy the game. This complete review is for anyone who takes recommendations in their entirety.

One-sentence description: “Return of the Obra Dinn,” developed in 2018 by the same creator of “Papers, Please” Lucas Pope, is a mystery, adventure, puzzle game that requires the player to solve a series of whodunit-like cases on a derelict ship, The Obra Dinn.

Premise: “Return of the Obra Dinn” finds you playing as a local Insurance investigator tasked with exploring a derelict ship whose crew has been lost at sea for five years. While the character you play is an insurance agent, you quickly assume the role of a detective as you begin to piece together what happened to each member aboard the Obra Dinn. At the start of the game, you only have a few things, but enough to help you on your journey. In your inventory, you have: an odd, old stopwatch that allows the user to peer back to the time of death of another person, a ledger that records all the relevant details you come across in each case you explore on the ship, and other miscellaneous pieces of information whose purpose is realized as you play. To fully complete your task, you must determine the fate of each of the 60 members of the crew on your own, determining the cause of death, as well as, naming every single crew member.

Spoiler Zone (Starts broad, then talks about specifics):

What drew me into the game was the promise of a mystery/detective game like no other, and the game just delivers. The presentation of the game’s pixelized, black-and-white world immerses you in what feels like an old T.V. detective drama of the same look. Yet its ability to surprise you with striking imagery and set-pieces despite its deceptively simple-looking graphics fills already lively scenes with an added layer of awe. It was always a treat to look at. The cases you explore are structured in several distinct chapters that form the main narrative. They cover different peculiar events aboard the ship en route to its destination. These chapters are introduced non-linearly and often in reverse order of how they chronologically play out, which made me feel like I was watching Memento for the first time (good movie, go buy that too). Chapters also emphasize a string of deaths that occur during that event. Each time you step back in time through the use of the stopwatch, you are greeted first by only the voices of the present characters, then you are thrust into dioramas that capture a slice in time where someone has died. However, despite having this seemingly fantastical ability to go back in time, the game is not as straightforward with its problems. This therein lies the beauty of the game; it is the attention and care that went into crafting a complex yet coherent mystery where clues are scattered in every form of information provided to the player. Perhaps the most challenging part of the game, albeit probably the most satisfying, is determining the names of each person on the ship. The game rarely gives handouts with giving blatant name drops or even the rank/occupation of the characters in a scene, so it encourages inferring and deductive reasoning as the primary way to problem-solve. This concept is not taken for granted, which is why I love the game so much. It actually makes you feel like Batman, for real. Anytime that I thought I could exploit a piece of information, I always found an op-

Photo from https://store.steampowered.com/

portunity to, and I was rewarded for doing so. If I can share a moment I had (go to the OVER HERE to skip this hint), it would be the realization that a map given to you at the start contains specific information about the living quarters for each occupation on the ship (i.e. carpenters room, treasurer room). The first case in a chapter often happens in the middle of what I like to call “a day in the life,” meaning that people are generally at their stations on the ship. From this, I could quickly deduce the character’s jobs purely by the room they were in. OVER HERE This is just one of the many examples the games provide as instances where the solution does not lie by looking around the diorama or listening to the dialogue. It is also a testament to how organized the ledger you are given at the start is, and the quality of its UI to allow the player to quickly flip through the book and discern, at a glance, a wide range of information in a digestible fashion.

I will admit I was holding back on that intro because, like the deaths you come across, there is so much more going on. To reiterate, when I say the cause of death, I mean that the game wants you to articulate, in the best way you can, a sentence explaining their death, given a set of phrases from a word bank. For example, was someone murdered? Great, now tell me how they died (gun, crushed, overboard), the name of who died (Billy, Bobby, Bo), and tell me the name of the killer (Billi, Boby, Boe). As will come quickly apparent, the “name game” becomes an integral part of closing out cases of each individual, and the matter of fact of the death itself is often trivial in comparison.

There is not much left to say about the game, however, the soundtrack for the game is also so good. The music’s role is to quickly convey the emotion in the current flashback, capturing the energy of the dread to the plain hysteria present in so many of the scenes. This becomes juxtaposed with the quiet serenity of the boat when you finally snap back to reality, reminding you just how dead the ship is.

End of Spoiler Zone

Closing thoughts (Spoiler free): To close, in my personal opinion, a good game is like a good meal, it makes you say “goddamn” like how my friend Sam says it, and leaves you asking for more. But in this case, you will be asking for amnesia when you beat the game because it is that good. To rate the game, I don’t like using one specific rating scale, so the best way to describe my rating would be to say: This is like the Mike Wazowski of video games, or the “Trouble Man” of Mystery Whodunits.

(Spoiler Free) The game is available on Playstation, Xbox, Switch, and PC. I personally bought the game on Steam, and it ran great on my 6GB Nvidia 1060, 8 GB of RAM, with 3 Chrome tabs open, and it is $22.79 at the time of writing. If you do not want my word for it, there is currently an “Overwhelming Positive” rating for the game on Steam, and it has an 89 on Metacritic. It took me around 8 hours to beat, but please remember that I am a professional, so it is basically impossible to beat the game in less time.

Go buy it, weeeeeeeeeeeeeee. ◆