This game has been a bit of a sleeper hit, and attracted a lot of critical acclaim. I must admit, I’m generally wary of such games – I know what I like, and this didn’t sound like it – but when I picked upThe Return of the Obra Dinn as part of a bundle, I thought I would give it a shot.
I think it’s probably fair to say I underestimated the game – at a number of different levels. The first thing that you notice is that it is deliberately quite old-fashioned. The graphics are monochramatic – the old black and green line drawing of the first age of computer gaming – and this is very much a design choice from the developers. In fact, you can change the setting so that it looks more like a Commodore 64, or a Spectrum, or similar. It’s an… interesting choice, and to be honest, not one that I greatly enjoyed. I think I understand why this was decided upon – but more of that later.
The second thing you notice is that there’s very little in the form of in game guidance or documentation. You have a journal that you can consult, that basically explains the purpose of the game and gives you information about the situation in which you find yourself, but for the rest of it, it’s up to you to work out how it all operates. This is not as serious as it might be; there’s actually not that much you CAN do in this game, beyond undertaking a few actions.
In this way, it’s very different to other games you find. There’s something of the minimize philosophy about it – rather than seeking to add more and more and more to games (mini games, crafting, levelling, multiplayer, VR etc etc), The Return of the Obra Dinn is a conscious effort to take as much away as possible, and to see if it’s still possible to create an enthralling game. It generally gets it right.
In short, you take on the role of an investigator, boarding a ship called THe Obra Dinn. There is no one left alive on board, and your mission is to investigate and determine how the crew and passengers died. The mechanisms for this investigation are twofold: a notebook that describes the voyage, and a stopwatch that can send you back in time to view snapshots, at which different passengers and crew died.
And so begins the mystery. You don’t know who any of the crew are, so you don’t know who dies at each scene – they’re not wearing name tags that tell you their name! Instead, you must use every clue you can find – the hat they’re wearing, the accent they’re speaking in, whether someone else calls them by a name or rank, even what they are doing or what bunk they ‘re in to identify them and work out how they died. At first, I was worried this was just a slightly more sophisticated logic puzzle, but it’s significantly more challenging than that. The game is quite open in stating that there will need to be guesses and assumptions based on limited evidence. The level of detail, though, is astounding. One one memborable occasion, I worked out the identity of one passenger based on the presence of a wedding ring – this makes the game much more than your usual point and click evidence adventure.
Strongly recommended.