Platform: PC
Developer: Lucas Pope
Publisher: 3909 LLC
Release Date: October 18th, 2018
Genre: Puzzle
Nerd Rating: 9 out of 10
Reviewed by Nips
I…
I was not ready for Return of the Obra Dinn. I had played Lucas Pope’s previous game, Papers, Please, and liked it quite a bit. But I wasn’t ready for this. Never have I felt quite like a swashbuckling pirate, gentleman, and investigator all at the same time. Never have I felt the eerie silence of an empty naval ship or stood atop the deck while tasting the salt in the air, or felt the windchill of an oncoming storm at sea. But Return of the Obra Dinn has fixed all that. It seems that with its final breath, 2018 had one more surprise in store for me.
In August of 2013, indie developer Lucas Pope stunned the video game world with the runaway success of his weird border security simulator, Papers, Please. I mean, c’mon. A game where you have to check immigrants’ papers? It sounds rote. It sounds boring. Where is the fun in that? Well, it just so turns out that Papers, Please was an exercise in turning the mundane into the entertaining, because no one ever thought that they could have so much fun doing something so repetitive. So fans of the game waited. And waited. And waited. And, five years later, in 2018, Lucas Pope finally came out with his latest title, Return of the Obra Dinn. And boy, did this game surprise.
The premise is this: The Obra Dinn, a shipping vessel owned by the notorious and historical East India Trading Company, has vanished mysteriously during one of its voyages along the west coast of Africa. Years later, the Obra Dinn has reappeared in the middle of the ocean, but there’s something wrong. None of its crew are on board; everyone is dead. That’s where you come in. An employee of the East India Trading Company (Lucas Pope sure does like job simulators), your job is to analyze the bodies scattered throughout the ship and figure out exactly how each crew member met their untimely fate. But you don’t have to rely solely on the evidence of your eyes; Return of the Obra Dinn isn’t that simple. In your possession is a magical timepiece that mysteriously allows you to hear and see the events surrounding the death of each crew member!
Someone’s getting shot.
Now that is a launch point for a unique and exciting game. Cutting my teeth on my first few deaths in Return of the Obra Dinn, I activated the first handful of corpses located in and around the captain’s quarters in an effort to figure out what was going on. I was immediately stunned by the game’s central mechanic. Not only can you hear what was going on right before each person died, but you’re treated to an eye-candy spectacle in the form of a 3D snapshot of everything that was going on at the exact instant of the person’s death. You can look and even walk around the ship in order to get a look at the murder from different angles, just to make sure you get it right.
And, when you think you’ve figured out how they died, you only have to enter three pieces of information into your journal: Who the person is, how they died, and who killed them. Seems simple enough right? Well, sometimes. But most of the time, no. Very much no. The first handful of deaths may be a relative walk in the park, but not all of them are quite as clear-cut. Some deaths are red herrings; a character may appear to die one way but actually die due to a different cause. The names of other characters may elude you for a very long time, meaning you have to pay close attention to small details and conversations that seem innocuous at first. It all comes down to cross-referencing the different memories and portraits of death in order to paint a clearer picture of the whole of what happened on the Obra Dinn.
So, what’s to stop someone from brute-forcing their way through the game? You know, beat the game by choosing every possible option for every possible character? Having played a few point-and-click titles in my day, the thought of trying everything did come to mind. Well, Return of the Obra Dinn discourages this type of gameplay in some very creative ways. For one, the number of crew members is huge. There are 60 deaths you have to figure out, and guessing someone’s name correctly on a whim simply isn’t going to happen that often, if at all. Not only that, but you have to get two names right for each death: The deceased and their killer. Secondly, the number of ways people can die are quite multitudinous (yes I used that word) and therefore very hard to get right on a simple guess. Finally, and most importantly, Return of the Obra Dinn doesn’t tell you whether you’re right or not until you’ve gotten three fates right at the same time. Sure, you could guess around and get some of the crew’s fates correct, but you’re not about to guess three fates correctly in a row. In this way, Return of the Obra Dinn keeps players honest, forcing them to really pay attention to what’s going on in the memories uncovered by the magic timepiece.
With every three fates that you guess correctly, you get just a little bit closer to your end goal of finding out what the barnacles went on during this fateful voyage. In order to do that, you have to put your ol’ Sherlock Holmes detective hat on. Paying attention to little clues like character details, bits of dialogue, props, character positioning, character names, the potential relationships between characters, even environmental clues such as who puts their hat up where will help you puzzle things out. Few of the fates in Return of the Obra Dinn are cut-and-dry; the majority of them require you to pay attention and remember all of these details in order to get to the bottom of things. When all of the pieces of the puzzle fall perfectly in place, you really feel like the shrewd detective worthy of the East India Trading Company’s trust.
Of course, this system is not without its flaws. In order to keep Return of the Obra Dinn from being too obvious, it seems Lucas Pope opted for the nuclear option, making some of the clues super hard to find in order to increase the level of difficulty. Some of the clues in this game took me forever to notice, and some of them I probably would have never found on my own! I remember there was this point where I got stuck, thinking that I had figured out as many fates as I was supposed to, but it turned out I was missing a minuscule clue that’s only present in one or two memories. Once I figured that out (with some friendly help), the game blew wide open and I was able to carry on towards the end. While some players will probably notice and understand the implication this particular clue, some will definitely not, making the experience feel a lot more difficult and esoteric than it probably needs to be. I’m all for the whole paying attention to details thing, but I just wasn’t about to waste my time scouring the ship from top to bottom searching for a clue that I didn’t even know existed. I played this game to have fun, dammit!
That said, Return of the Obra Dinn achieves something quite magical on a pretty consistent basis. Every time I got my next batch of three fates right and the game blanked out with the simple message “Well done,” my heart would skip a beat, making me feel like a real life detective on an authentic shipping vessel. This is accomplished in no small part due to the open-endedness of Return of the Obra Dinn’s gameplay. Unlike those point-and-click detective adventures or games like L.A. Noire with linear progression and very few fail states, Return of the Obra Dinn constructs a true mystery story in that each player is going to have their own unique path towards success. The game isn’t standing over your shoulder, helping you put the pieces together; you have to rely on your own wit and observational skills alone to figure things out.
There’s another game from recent memory that had open-ended elements like this, and I loved it very much, as well. Her Story is a mystery game where you have to uncover the truth about the death of a woman’s husband using chopped up archival interview footage. But, these interview clips are not laid out in front of you. Your only tool is a search function that will scour the database for relevant keywords. So, the only barriers to your progress are your own powers of observation and reasoning. Picking up on relevant details from some clips will offer insights on future terms you should search for. Return of the Obra Dinn works a lot like this, only in a much, much more complex way. Almost none of the memories in this game operate as an isolated chunk. Every single piece of this game is in conversation with the others, and you will almost never find all the information you need to complete a given fate in its respective memory. Instead, each fate will often lead you with your tail tucked between your legs, and it’s not until later, when you’ve seen more relevant memories, that you can start to piece them all together.
So, being a mystery game, Return of the Obra Dinn better have a pretty compelling story, right? Right! Of course, very little of this game’s story involves the player. Instead, the player is given a fractured glimpse of the tumultuous story that happened to the other characters, who just so happen to be dead. From shipping accidents, plague, murder, intrigue, and visits by mythical ocean beasts, the crew of the Obra Dinn experienced the whole gamut during what can only be described as the worst month at sea ever. Lucas Pope was very creative in coming up with new ways for his characters to be dying all the time, and there’s a real sense of characterization in the majority of the game’s 60+ characters.
Not only that, but Return of the Obra Dinn features some superb voice-over by the most authentic-sounding group of voice actors, including English, Scottish Irish, French, and Russian, among many more accents. All this is accenuated by what I can only describe as the most tastefully cheeky soundtrack that I’ve ever heard. Featuring traditional string, woodwind, and brass instruments, Return of the Obra Dinn’s soundtrack consists of a bunch of catchy ditties that mark your progression and help to enhance the already thick atmosphere. Seriously, when it comes to best video game soundtracks, Return of the Obra Dinn would get my vote any day for 2018.
Finally, it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room: The art style. Oh, and what an art style it is. That elegant forest green hue contrasting against an almost blinding white while characters and textures are realized with either stark blocks of color or that weird dot-like shadowing. Simply beautiful. I don’t know much about computer graphics, but I am super impressed by Return of the Obra Dinn’s unique visual style. It turns out that this style is known as 1-bit, meaning that there are only two possible values for each pixel (green or white, in this case.)
Pictured here: The IBM 5151 trying to hide my Nerd Bacon watermark.
Not only that, but Return of the Obra Dinn also features a healthy variety of alternative color palettes. Funnily enough, each of these palettes will mimic the appearance of older computer monitors, such as the Macintosh, which is really, really cool. Personally, my favorite is the Mac’s traditional green and white, but I don’t mind the grey on light-grey of the IBM 8503, and the glaring neon and dark green of the IBM 5151 is such an eyesore that it’s almost funny.
And there we have it. Just one month ago, I thought Hitman 2 was my favorite game from 2018, but Return of the Obra Dinn just might take the cake. It’s stunning, original in concept, and features some of the most mentally-engaging gameplay that I’ve seen in any recent game. At the very least, I can safely say that it’s my favorite detective game of all time (sorry, Carmen Sandiego). With this fantastic opus, Lucas Pope asserts himself as one of the true video game auteurs of our time. I am definitely looking forward to what he has in store for us next. Let’s just hope it comes a little sooner than five years this time.
