Return of the Obra Dinn: Uncovering Fate on a Doomed Ship
Time to Beat: 9.9 Hours
Four years ago I reviewed the four year old game Papers, Please, by solo developer Lucas Pope. He followed up this success with 2018's Return of the Obra Dinn.
It's astonishing the difference in the two pieces, both mechanically and thematically. It's as if Pope wrote 1984 and Murder on the Orient Express. Both are well written, but distinct in genre, tone, and pacing. And like both books, both games are excellent.
I started playing Return of the Obra Dinn with my wife, but it didn't engage her attention. In the confusion of the summer I stopped playing for three months. I split my ten hours of playtime, with two hours in the spring, and eight after returning in the fall. Yet, I was able to return effortlessly to the duty of inspecting the calamity and identifying the bodies.
Built in 1796, the good ship Obra Dinn
departed Falmouth in 1802, and disappeared. Five years later it
mysteriously reappeared in Falmouth, but with every crew member
missing or dead. The East India Company sends its Chief Inspector to
assess the damage. With a logbook and a magic watch, the player must
determine the fates of the fifty-one crew members and nine
passengers.
Return of the Obra Dinn guides the player through a series of chapters. These are not ordered chronologically, but jumbled by the developer. The disorder seems designed to prevent the player from understanding the mystery prematurely. Without a full understanding of causes, the ship seems senselessly afflicted by calamity after calamity. Eventually chapters three and four reveal the source of the danger. The player plays through the chapters in an order which heightens the tension. The logbook opens with with chapter ten (The End), and continues onto seven (The Doom), nine, two, six, one, five, four, and three (Murder). Where is eight (Bargain)? More on that later.
After climbing aboard the East Indiaman
trade ship the inspector finds it eerily quiet, and the first body
only a few paces to the left. Upon approaching a corpse (which are
in various states of decay and destruction), the inspector flips open
his watch. The watch shows a different time for each body, with the
hour hand pointing to the chapter number, and the minute hand
displaying the order in which that person died in the particular
chapter. Left-clicking activates the watch. Immediately the screen
goes black. The player hears the sounds the character heard in the
few seconds before their death. The words are also displayed on the
screen. Then the player sees a still scene of the character's death;
a frozen tableau. The player can walk around to inspect the area.
They are confined to a limited space of the ship, though the size
varies from tiny to quite large. After an unnecessarily long delay
the game opens the logbook. It flips to the page for the dead
character. Every character, except those who die simultaneously by
the same cause, have their own page. The logbook displays the
character's face, their location of death, who else was present, and
the words that were spoken. The player can not review the scene by
looking in the book. Exiting from the book, the player sees the
scene again. They can leave through a magical door, or find another
dead body in the scene, if there is one.
With enough evidence, and some guesswork, the player figures out each fate. Each character's page asks the player two questions. Who is the victim? How did they die? The first question isn't as easy as it sounds. The logbook includes three helpful components; a ledger with the name of every crew member (and passenger) and their occupation, a picture with everyone's face, and a map of the ship. The goal is to match faces with names. For each face the logbook indicates whether the player has the information necessary to uncover the name of the character. If the player hasn't encountered any relevant information, the face is blurred. The face is sharply drawn if the player has the correct clues. Triangles above each portrait indicate the relative difficulty of discovering a person's identity. One triangle means The Obra Dinn contains an obvious clue, like a person saying their name. Two triangles means the player needs to use some deductive skills and insinuate based on circumstantial evidence. Three triangles means there are almost no clues or they are very obscure. To determine each identity players can use ethnicity, occupation, skin color, clothes, names, friends, gender, accents, shoe sizes and more. Determining a character based on their accent or skin color was difficult, because the game is rendered in only two colors, and I can't distinguish a Scottish accent from a Cantonese. Sometimes the player needs to make a guess or juggle names around into the logbook until something clicks. For the last ten to fifteen characters I stood on the top deck in one spot, moving names around in the notebook until I'd solved them all.
But that is only half of the mystery. More to follow soon.
Recent:
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Relevant:
Unfinished Games of 2021: Part II
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