Return of the Obra Dinn Review - Dragonflame323

The year is 1807. Four years prior, in 1803, the good ship Obra Dinn had gone missing and been deemed lost at sea after a failed sailing excursion around the Cape of Good Hope, along with all 60 of the ship’s crew and passengers. Their fates presently remain unknown.  You play as the role of an insurance agent investigator for the London office branch of the East India Company. The company has sent word to you that the Obra Dinn has miraculously found its way back to port and given you the task of traveling to Falmouth Port where the ship currently resides in order to assess all the necessary damages of the ship. Most importantly, you are to examine any clues or remaining evidence for what might’ve happened to the people responsible for maintaining this ship.  

Almost immediately to aid you in this endeavor, a mysterious case containing a pocket watch and a book with the title page “Return of the Obra Dinn:  A Catalogue of Adventure and Tragedy” is sent to you. It comes with a preface note signed by the author Henry Evans, expressly written to request the investigator of the ship to use the Memento Mortem pocket watch in tandem with the book to discover the identity and fate of everyone aboard. Though many of the book’s chapters remain blank, determining the fates of everyone on the ship will slowly reveal the contents of each chapter. Thus, the completion of the book is left by a mysterious and somehow knowing stranger in your timely hands.

Such is the intriguing impetus for the narrative in Return of the Obra Dinn, from which the rest of the game follows in neat and concentrated gameplay segments. In these segments, after exploring the ship’s decks or confines and discovering the remains of a person’s corpse, you will then use the aforementioned pocket watch to travel back in time to the very moment of that person’s death.After watching the scene play out, you are then treated as a moving body in a still image of a metaphorical time capsule for that scene, allowing you to move through its environment and analyze each person that was present to piece together the context that might’ve lead to the unfortunate events for that soul’s demise. Once you feel confident that you’ve been able to determine the fate of a person on the ship — universally inscribed within the book as: “Who died?”, “in what manner?” and, if applicable,”by whose hand?” — you can then fill in those blanks, and once three correctly described fates are written, they will be magically typeset into the book as factual events. This narrows down the list of the 60 possible crew or passengers who have perished and moves you closer to unraveling the truth behind these events.  

The ship’s decks will gradually open up as you progress through the game, and eventually after a certain amount of simplistic 3D exploration (with a limited set of interactions), you will have discovered every remaining corpse that was left behind on the ship. At this point, you can leave the ship and end the game regardless of finishing the book proper, but in order to reach the true ending of this game, you will have to do what the game underscores as making assumptions and deductions based on using only a partial amount of evidence. As the saying goes, once everything that can be solved has been solved, the only thing left remaining must be the truth. 

The way you match faces to names is to use a handy crew manifest that lists the names, ethnicities, and occupations of all the crew and passengers, as well as an artist sketch of everyone who was aboard. Each time you zoom into a person’s face within a memory, the backdrop will hone in on that person’s depiction in the sketch behind them in real time. Opening the book at this point will show everyone within the artist sketch who is present at the time of that memory. This smart and convenient system, along with the book’s ability to bookmark all relevant memories in which any person was present, is what allows the inherent fun of cross-checking tangibly between these various memories, the facts that you’ve cemented as reality so far, and ultimately, your own logic and deductions. These checks can be done seamlessly at any time as you’re actively playing the game. It’s simple, but done in an innovative way that you’ll come to appreciate, especially once you recognize the complexity that this game can have.

As a remark to its playability, Return of the Obra Dinn can seem overwhelming and complex from the start. You have 60 identities to figure out, each with their own fate that corresponds to over 20 manners of dying, and each of whom could have possibly been murdered by any of the other 59 people on the ship, or even a beast or foreign enemy. This is one of those games where it is very handy to have your own notes written up, as there are various clues in the ship’s environments that will become relevant later, but are easy to forget. Perhaps you’ll see an item that belongs to someone hanging in their room, or you’ll spot something very specific about someone’s attire in a memory; invariably, these things will indeed show up again later. Lucas Pope (the sole developer of this game) was very smart in designing this game in such a way that rewards players who look into these finer details and take note of whether they appear to be consistent across the game’s timeline and follow-up character appearances. Taking note of these small tidbits alongside your own major deductions or thoughts about what’s going on in the plot will almost certainly enhance your playtime. As someone who binged this game, there were some unnecessary struggles I had to go through that would’ve been mitigated had I tangibly written everything as I was figuring it out. There are few other negatives I could say about this game; the game’s unique monochrome style and graininess did make it difficult to make out some of the more bombastic deaths in the game and how someone might’ve died in such moments, but luckily the game was designed to be able to interpret a fate in multiple ways. Generally, if you believe you’re in the ballpark of accuracy of what you think happened in someone’s death, it’s usually accurate enough to press on, and I had very few problems that weren’t circumvented by this.

All in all, I found myself captivated with Return of the Obra Dinn for well longer than the average player’s completion time. For about 29 hours, I made it a point to not only witness my surroundings and take in the usual shock of what had happened (all presented with an aesthetically suitable and unique fanciful tune that is musically consistent across the whole game), but to analyze each scene as a page into a story whose characters I surprisingly found myself beginning to actually care about. Even as the in-game as well as out-of game impartial bystander that I was, I found myself invested into their tragic stories, which at times were suitably tragic in an almost indescribable way. By this I mean, the game has a certain aloofness and avoidance that permeates throughout. You often see very horrible things happen to these people, and as you are piecing things together, you don’t really understand or know why these events could deservedly happen to them. But within the limited context in what you see that character had done — in their cadence, disposition, and even within their own relationships (perhaps you had only earlier witnessed them risking their own life to save a friend they truly cared about) — it somehow builds a window into that character’s soul and helps you recognize the depth of their own humanity. And I believe that recognition and building of humanity is the major motif and most important theme that Return of the Obra Dinn truly succeeds in.  Though there is surprisingly very little writing by the end, and the payoff had left me wondering about the significance of what it all meant, what I felt playing this game was without a doubt one of the most satisfying and endearing interactive-narrative driven games in the genre I’ve ever had the joy to experience.

Return of The Obra Dinn is a masterclass in its genre, and I would award it a 9.5/10.