Return of the Obra Dinn

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Anonymous Bosch
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Return of the Obra Dinn

Post by Anonymous Bosch »

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Anyone else playing this? I got into it over the weekend, and it has me hooked something fierce.

It's basically a first-person logical deduction mystery game with a heavy emphasis on critical thinking from Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers, Please. It plays like a cross between The Terror by Dan Simmons and a classic detective mystery.

The Obra Dinn is in effect a ghost ship, riffing on the Mary Celeste where the ship has mysteriously returned to port devoid of all sixty of its crew and passengers. As a shipping agent, it’s your job to logically deduce exactly how and why each and every one met their demise. The most clever design decision the game makes is just how fully it embraces the concept that you are a detective. In order to identify who the people are and what happened to them you have two tools at your disposal: a logbook with a nifty book interface filled with useful artifacts of the Obra Dinn‘s voyage, and a mysterious pocket watch that helps shed light on the fates of the ship’s inhabitants. Whenever you discover the remains of one of the ship’s unfortunate crew, the pocket watch allows you to hear the last few seconds before the crew member’s death as a brief audio vignette and then freezes time, allowing you to investigate the often grisly death scene in detail to try and form a theory as to what transpired. Once inside a 'memento mori' the first thing you're compelled to do is examine (or zoom in on) the deceased body in front of you, matching their face to the artist's sketch in your book to commence the process of identification (one of the handier features of the book interface). Of course, putting names to faces tends to be a good deal trickier.

The visuals are all completely 3D, but rendered in a strikingly eerie art style that recalls the monochromatic visuals and dithering patterns of old school Apple Macintosh adventure games combined with the pen and ink illustrations of the early 19th century. Static screenshots really don't do the graphics justice as they're much more appealing in action, and the visuals draw you in far more effectively than if they were in full photorealistic colour. Suffice to say, it delivers a magnificently evocative method of storytelling as you glimpse into the lives of each person on board at crucial moments along the Obra Dinn's journey and piece together who they were, what they had to cope with, what motivated them, and how they responded when tragedy struck. The thematic music and audio details are extremely well done and highly atmospheric too, often conveying a variety of subtle but essential clues and information.

It's certainly not an easy game and doesn't spoon-feed any exposition; it forces you to rely exclusively on deductive reasoning and logic right from the get-go. There are no MacGuffins that provide you with convenient explanations to your puzzles. You have to examine each and every scene and often revisit them several times using the pocket watch. While that might sound like tedious backtracking, it plays out to be quite the opposite. You often uncover subtle new aspects that are critical to solving puzzles, like noticing key details at the margins of a scene or picking up on something else you'd previously overlooked. All of which makes the experience much more rewarding when the pieces click into place and you're able to suss things out with nothing more than logical deduction. It does an outstanding job of making you feel like a bona fide detective as you figure things out. But if you're anything like me, you'll likely need to keep a pen and paper handy to take notes and help 'mind map' your conjecture out for best results.

TL;DR summary: if you've ever enjoyed solving logic puzzles, you're sure to love this ingenious and morbidly fascinating game of deductive reasoning so do give it a whirl.
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." — P. J. O'Rourke
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MonkeyFinger
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Re: Return of the Obra Dinn

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Forgot about this, thanks for the reminder! 8-)
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MonkeyFinger
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Re: Return of the Obra Dinn

Post by MonkeyFinger »

Wasn't able to get to this until late last night (yay, production support!) so not much time with it but this is certainly... different! Need to go back and read through your post rather than just skim it, and have a better brain ready next time. And pen and paper, it would seem. :wink:

Thought the different "terminal emulation" options were a nice touch, went back to Macintosh for now... just because.
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Anonymous Bosch
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Re: Return of the Obra Dinn

Post by Anonymous Bosch »

I completed the game last night night and rest assured, every single person on the ship is identifiable definitively by logic without relying on any guess-work at all (I have the notes to prove it!)

Anyway, here are some non-spoilerific useful tips for playing the game:
  • While there's no visible option for playing the game in windowed mode in the settings, pressing left Alt + Enter will put the game into windowed mode.
  • Clicking on the ship's map within the book will show you exactly where you are.
  • When a death scene is first played and then fades out, that represents entry of the death scene into the book. You won't be able to enter details about the death until that has occurred.
  • Don't forget to use the 'zoom in' function to help identify the various individuals you come across. It'll bring up the artist's sketch for you, and shows exactly where that character appears in the sketch.
  • For 'cause of death', aim to be as tediously specific as possible.
  • Formosa = the colonial name for Taiwan.
  • The hour hand of the pocket watch shows the chapter in which a death occurs, while the minute hand shows the section within that chapter (and pressing tab while the watch is out takes you directly to that section of the book).
  • During extreme circumstances crew members will help where needed. But generally speaking, crew members focus on doing what they're best at during typical conditions.
  • The game doesn't fake you out with any cheap tricks or shenanigans. The ship's manifest is completely accurate in every detail.
  • When the watch begins vibrating to indicate the presence of another newly-discovered body, don't rush into left-clicking or hitting the spacebar. Always take your time to thoroughly explore around the scene you're in.
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." — P. J. O'Rourke
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