Bit of an experience with this one. This is the game I was in the middle of when I was hospitalized years ago. After that I kinda stopped gaming for a few months and my PC died so I didn't have a way to play. Now I do again and fortunately I had forgotten enough after three years to fully enjoy the deduction based gameplay despite having to replay half of it.

So what is this? Well it's a game from the Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope who seems to have a knack for making a captivating experience out of an otherwise dull occupation. Return of the Obra Dinn has you fill the shoes of an insurance agent tasked to investigate the titular ship that found its way back to English waters with no crew remaining and find out why that happened.

The core gameplay is a beautiful thing and can really make you feel smart. Basically what you do is you search around the ship from a first person perspective in a 3D space and find the remains of the crew. You're armed with a book that has the ship manifest with simple descriptions of characters, two images from an artist on the ship depicting the whole crew through both, a layout of each of the ship's decks, and a glossary to help you define some seafaring terms like what a midshipman is or the various decks.

The book also has a plethora of blank pages you need to fill out by learning what happened. You do this with the OTHER object in your possession, a magic pocket watch that allows you to see the final moments of a live of whoever's remains you observe. Basically you activate the watch and it plays audio similar to a radio play where you hear the person's final moments and then it shows you the moment of their death frozen in time. You're then free to look around it and note to yourself who all is involved and what's happening. You can focus on people in the scene and it'll show you their face in the mentioned artist's images in the book and it's also worth really looking around for all sorts of details that could help you identify other people the scene isn't even about. Through these scenes you can find other bodies to investigate and the ship will open up more after completing scenes.

It was really a fantastic experience. There were a lot of times I was able to just look around and piece answers together with what was shown in the various scenes but I also encountered times where I just didn't know an answer and would google stuff to help me out. Like with one instance the game shows you a guy with like tribal body tattoos and I was like "ok most people here are from places that don't usually do that kind of thing in the 1800s" so I googled "tribal body tattoo" + [whatever country in the origin list I didn't know much about] and ended up being pretty sure I knew where the guy in the game was from and thus could match his name to his face. It's a wonderful feeling. There's a lot of similar things to that too where you gotta have a sharp eye like if someone is wearing a wedding ring or even keeping track where they sleep and what shoes they have on. Hell there's even some fates you discover on the outer fringes of a scene that doesn't even prominently feature the characters!

It's all expertly woven together. All the fates intertwine and it tells a most compelling story. It's brought together in a nice little package of atmosphere with various songs to set the mood of each scene. Also the sound design coupled with the
radio play descriptors of a scene make for a super immersive experience. I mean, I don't know for sure what a man being torn apart by a fantasy beast sounds like but it feels like Pope does with all this. Oh also the game is entirely 1-bit color palette so it give the feel of playing something like Oregon Trail in a way. The whole thing together just works so well.

SO yeah this is a pretty excellent game. It made me feel smart and really compelled me to do all the everything just by being masterfully atmospheric and presenting a tale that keeps on giving. I'm reminded of The Outer Wilds or Myst in how it felt to play but the way it's presented and how you explore the story in chapters give it enough of its own feeling to call it a pretty unique experience. I know some would argue that detective type gameplay can only be enjoyed fully once since you know everything on subsequent playthroughs but I think since it has enough style Obra Dinn could still be worth Returning to (lol) the same way one might revisit a good book. Definitely recommend to anyone to give a chance but those who like figuring stuff out will be who enjoys it the most.

A genuinely magical game that’s kept me thinking about it and will continue having this grip on me for quite some time. Games that utilise the medium to such an extent that their identity hinges on the interactive element being present are some of the most fun ones to let sit with you, and this is one of my favourite instances of it. Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the greatest mystery games I’ve played and a lot of this is owed to the structure of the game, forgoing crafting a mystery specifically designed to surprise the player with its various twists and instead laying it all out bare and forcing you to pick everything apart to fully grasp the finer details of things. The mystery and story themselves are not the important aspects here, it’s just trying to immerse you into the role of a detective without any handholding beyond the bare essentials, and it does so perfectly.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery/puzzle game that revolves around incomplete information and assumption, often leaving little to no definitive evidence and forcing you to jump all around to place with increasingly tenuous lines of logic as you feel yourself going insane. It was quite funny taking a step back after combing through a few scenes in excruciating detail and just thinking “wow, this is deranged” but that’s just how the game is. The player is likely to find all of the story beats of the game rather early on without knowing the fates of the vast majority of the cast, and then the rest of the game boils down to going between the relevant scenes in the game to try and figure out how to deduce some of them, which would seem like an experience that would feel stagnant very quickly, but is saved due to the sense of progression that will take place despite it all just looking like cleanup at first. The progression gates in this game are entirely dependent on and driven by the player, hinging on multiple big realisations on how they need to approach their investigations. This culminates in a deeply rewarding loop of thinking that you’ve hit the logical endpoint of what you achieve on your own, before realising a new detail that leads you down a new line of logic to discover someone, and then applying this newfound understanding of how to figure something out to other characters. A contributing factor to how this is so successful is due to the plethora of approaches that you’re expected to work out, sometimes really being as simple but uncertain feeling as “this guy hangs around this other guy a lot, they’re probably in the same field”.

The way that your answers are confirmed is a clever way of limiting the ability to brute force a lot of puzzle answers as well, since you’ve only got confirmation on whether you’re correct or not once you have 3 correct answers simultaneously written down. While some amount of guesswork was an expected element of this game’s design, by structuring it like this, players are still forced to confidently deduce 2 other people before they can start taking real shots in the dark with incomplete assumptions, solving a problem I’ve seen time and time again in deduction games where people will often resort to total guesswork the moment they’re met with some confusion and uncertainty. The presentation goes a long way in tying everything together as well, being visually striking while having the effect of being simple enough to make the important details easier to pinpoint while simultaneously obscuring everything just enough to invite uncertainty into every observation. I adore whenever a game can keep me thinking for so long after I’m done with it, and I love it even more when it does so through something as esoteric as it is here. Total masterpiece, something new to add to my list of favourites.

Conceptually, pretty fantastic, and the closest thing I've experienced to Outer Wilds since playing it a couple years ago. However, there are a few key mechanics (or lack thereof) that make this a less freeing adventure than I might hope. For one thing, I hate the fact that you can't take notes on characters, such as their attitudes towards other characters, their assumed associations, etc. Leaving me to try to remember all the faces and all the little facts I discovered about them is pretty aggravating when, if provided with a notes feature, I could feel proud of myself for putting things together faster than the game wanted me to. Another thing that bothers me is the part where the game says "oh hey, there's another body over there to check out, go check it out!" Like, yeah, sure, I'd love to, but right now I want to further inspect the scene you just showed me, as well as refer to my journal to try to piece things together. Just a bit more on rails than I would like.

Visually striking, memorable, and at times morbidly hilarious, it is truly unlike anything I have ever experienced. To see a game use its gameplay elements in such clever ways to communicate information (and even reward the especially perceptive) to lead the player on so seamlessly makes me believe that Lucas Pope knew exactly what he was doing the entire time. Every decision this game makes is deliberate and extremely well-executed, making its seemingly bold choice of being a hands-off detective game pay off tenfold. This game could not have worked had it not pulled off its concepts so well, and yet it did. It is easily my favorite game of all-time, and I don't think it will be dethroned any time soon.

Supremacia Lucas Pope. Só vai lá e joga.

"Capitão, mas que belas bol-"

✨️: 9