Return of the Obra Dinn Review

Single-player game, played on PC with keyboard and mouse.

You start the game looking at an old-timey poster advertising the return of the lost merchant vessel Obra Dinn. You, an insurance investigator for the East India company sometime in the 1800s, are called to find out what happened to the good ship and its inhabitants. You are given a book to record your findings and a mysterious pocket watch, and set off to discover who died on the Obra Dinn, and how. Took me about 8 hours to complete.

Graphics and Tone: The art style is unique in that it only used black and white (maybe sepia?) pixels to animate the 3D ship, and its memories, that you explore. The result gives the ship and story an old-time feel while still giving just enough detail to help you identify clues. The Obra Dinn is far out at sea when you arrive and your exploration is limited to it’s decks and rooms. The ship is completely abandoned, with only corpses and locked doors to find at first. However, this changes when you use your pocket watch.  The watch, when opened next to a corpse, shows you a snapshot of the 15 seconds leading up to that person’s demise. The story you unravel opens up piece by piece, slowly revealing the tragedies that befell the crew. It is generally grim work piecing together the who and how of a poor sailors demise, but the mystery behind the proceedings keeps you engaged to the end.

Mechanics: Your task to record the fates of all 60 crew can come off as extremely daunting. At first, all you have is a crew manifest, a quick glossary of naval terms, a map of the ship, and a few sketches of everyone on board. In order to complete your work, you must identify who each person in the sketches are, how they died, and who, if anyone, was responsible. If you correctly identify these details for three crew members, the book makes your solutions permanent, which in turn can help inform more clues in other fates. Finding memories and unlocking more of the ship to explore helps expand your limited knowledge. Since not all memories identify who is in them, multiple memories, in addition to using environment and sketches, are often needed to solve who is who.

Reasons why I like this game: I really enjoyed the naval traditions and setting in this game, and how it is used. Life at sea and the enclosed nature of sailing across the ocean makes them perfect for telling stories. So many books and movies use this setting, and Obra Dinn takes it further by incorporating the life on a ship into the mechanics themselves. What the crew’s jobs are and who they work with are critical to solving their fates. What I enjoyed most though was how the gameplay was broken into two parts: finding clues aboard the ship, then putting them together in your notebook. Swapping between these two phases is completely up to you. Need more clues? Explore the ship. Think you’ve seen that guy somewhere before? Pop open your notebook and look him up. At no point are you prevented from either activity, which means you are free to solve the fates at your own pace, no pressure. The amount of freedom this gives you is something I appreciated a lot, mostly because it took me a long time to piece everything together.

Reasons why I don’t like it: The big sticking point of this game is that, once you’ve solved the mystery and completed the game, you can’t exactly do it again later. Some games you can come back to months or years later and will enjoy the gameplay, but with Obra Dinn once you’ve solved the mystery, that’s it, it’s been solved. I can’t really hold it against the game, but it does make me sad knowing that, despite how much I enjoyed it, I can’t really go back and do it again. There is something to be said for that first-time experience with a lot of other games and media, and how sometimes you can’t capture those same feelings, revelations, or moments twice. You can certainly go back and play through this game again, but the effect would be more than significantly diminished, as the solutions, not the mechanics of play, are the chief focus of the game.

Things that made the game great for me: Obra Dinn is, at its core, a puzzle to be logicked through and solved. The difference between a jigsaw puzzle or a Mensa mind bender and this game is the discovery of the story behind the fate of the crew. The two phases of play help blend the larger story, what happened to the ship, and the smaller fates of what happened to the crew together in a way that is more than the sum of is parts. On its own, the larger story is just played in memories and can be completely told without opening your notebook. Investigating all the smaller fates and solving them is purely a puzzle, but, due to its context in the greater story, feels like you are giving closure to those men and women. While you are, in the end, just an insurance agent, and the game just a puzzle, how it is presented gets you to buy into the story itself, which is a huge victory for a game in my opinion.

Things that ruined the game for me: Not a thing.

Overall: As packaged and presented, the Return of the Obra Dinn delivers on its premise fantastically. If you want a mystery to explore and solve, and can dig a nautical theme, this game is for you.

That feeling: You are the sole housekeeper of a fraternity house coming into work after a particularly legendary weekend. Things start of benign at first; a knocked over lamp, someone’s pants in the fridge, the usual. As you walk further in though, things get progressively more ridiculous. There’s unconscious bodies everywhere, the remains of the salt water aquarium decorating the floor, a bull moose on the upper patio, several missing people, no one can give you a clear story of what happened, and the resale value of the house has clearly taken a substantial hit. As you survey the damage, you are conflicted. On one hand, you really want to know how everything fell apart over the course of the weekend. On the other hand, cleaning it up is going to be a mammoth effort.