Return of the Obra Dinn is a retro-styled puzzle-mystery game. You play as an insurance adjuster, going onto a ghost ship and trying to figure out what happened to everyone on board. Along with your job assignment, you are given two tools: a journal and an ominous looking pocket watch with a skull on its face.
The game has a striking visual theme – it is entirely in black and white, and is designed to look “old”, and yet it is very obvious that the 3D models in it are of much more modern vintage. The “retro” deliberately obscures some details – like color – and makes the entire game look like old 19th century drawings found in books – examples of which appear inside your journal.
The journal serves as the player’s guide through the game. It has a complete list of all 60 members of the crew, along with some drawings that depict the crew in various scenes. Each crew member or passenger’s face appears once in these drawings (with a couple deliberate exceptions), but there is no connection between the images and the names.
The goal of the game is to figure out who each of the people were, connecting the names to the images, and determine the ultimate fate of everyone onboard the Obra Dinn during its final voyage.
The pocket watch is the central conceit of the game – when you approach a corpse, you can activate the pocket watch to be brought to the moment of that corpse’s death. This allows you to hear what was going on in the lead up to the death, and see (in a still image) what is going on when they die, and try to make inferences about how they died, who or what killed them (if anything), and who they actually were.
As the game progresses, you fill in a series of sequential events in the journal, split up into ten chapters. Each pair of pages corresponds to a single scene viewed through the watch. In some cases, some people “disappear” from the story after a certain chapter, and you have to figure out why – what happened to them? Did they leave the ship in some way? Fall overboard? Die in such a way that they left no corpse on board?
Early on, this is pretty simple – people will say their names or positions, or cry out at each other. But as the game goes on, things get increasingly difficult.
Some people are only referred to by name in other scenes. Sometimes, someone will be injured, then die some time later, requiring the player to find the scene where they were originally wounded. Sometimes, people are injured, but pull through and recover, causing them to reappear in later scenes.
After viewing nine of the chapters, you are invited to leave the Obra Dinn. But at this point, there’s a good chance you’ll have filled in only about half the names on your list, maybe less. At this point, you have to start getting increasingly clever – many people are never actually named or ranked even once in the entire game, requiring you to infer their identity from their uniform or attire, their accent (the nationality of each of the crew members is noted in the crew list), who they spend their time interacting with (for instance, the captain and mates have stewards, while people like the surgeon and carpenter have mates who serve as a helper), and various other things.
This is a game about taking in all sorts of details, and making educated guesses and inferences based on information. Oftentimes, seemingly inconsequential details will actually give away someone’s identity, and various aspects of the journal itself can even give hints.
The game does a very good job of getting the player all the information they need, but doing so subtly; exploring these scenes is rewarded, as is noticing various things going on in the background, listening to voices and accents, and looking at what people are doing and who they hang out with to try and figure out what their jobs might be.
By the end of the game, you will likely be feeling quite smart for having figured it all out – and because the game does play fair, it is possible to figure everything out, often in a couple different ways.
The game also assists you by “locking in” correct guesses, but only in sets of three – that is to say, if you correctly identify three people’s names, visual identity, and cause of death (including who/what killed them, if anything), the scribbled in information is replaced by typeset information, allowing you to gradually whittle down your list of unknown people with confidence. This can even be exploited, if you have two known correct answers and know that a third person must be one of a few people, as you can cycle through those guesses to find the correct one. This is not required in most cases (though there are a couple people I have no idea how you are “supposed” to determine their identities) but it is a handy tool in your toolbox if need be.
Despite the seemingly intimidating 60 characters, the game is not overly long. Indeed, it actually all fell together pretty well at the end, with a chain of logical deductions and eliminations combined with figuring out various groups of people allowing me to completely solve the game, and not drag on forever having to review scenes over and over again. I spent about about six and a half hours to get through the first nine chapters and identify half the characters, and about nine hours in total to identify everyone and unlock the full ending.
While all this is well and good, that is not to say the game is perfect. The game does have some nice features – like being able to bookmark every scene a particular character appears in based on the drawing in the book (which doesn’t tell you their name) – but actually navigating between scenes can be a chore after you’ve completed the game, as you cannot quickly jump between unconnected scenes and must instead exit out onto the ship to look around. A few of the scenes can ONLY be accessed by jumping between scenes as well, which can be annoying later on in the game if you need to go back and look at those scenes.
Likewise, the audio that plays at the start of every scene often contains vitally important hints in the accents used by various characters, but if you need to listen to it again, the only way to do so is to exit the memory, then re-enter it – which is a chore.
And while the plot is serviceable, it isn’t exactly amazing – it is a series of awful events that happen to people, but it doesn’t feel like it has anything to really say, simply serving as a backdrop for a fun puzzle game.
Those quibbles aside, this is quite a solid game. The visuals work pretty well and help to both obscure and highlight useful information in a very stylish way. The chains of inferences about the various characters can be quite clever, and the fact that you can logically eliminate people in various ways helps to both assist the player in solving the puzzles as well as making them feel clever for finding some minor detail that helps them unravel a particular person’s identity.
4.0