Return of the Obra Din
Discover the fate of a stricken merchant ship in supremely clever maritime mystery.
DEVELOPER LUCAS POPE • PUBLISHER 3909 www.obradinn.com
The merchant vessel Obra Dinn drifts its way into port, crewless and abandoned, having disappeared some years earlier. You, an insurance investigator, climb aboard the derelict sailing ship and begin to try and make sense of what happened to the crew – with help from a magical pocket watch.
This curious artefact lets you visit the moments before a person’s death in an attempt to establish what happened to them. But with the fates of 60 sailors to determine, this is no easy task – especially as Return of the Obra Dinn, a few lean tutorials aside, steadfastly refuses to hold your hand.
This is a first-person puzzle game from Lucas Pope, creator of Papers, Please. It’s rendered with a bold art style that recalls the dithered visuals of Macintosh adventure games. But Obra Dinn is no less atmospheric for it. In fact, the sense of place created by its hard lines and limited palette is quite remarkable.
You’ll find bones of the former crew, and using the watch near them will whisk you away to a detailed vignette of the seconds before they died – be it an unfortunate accident, a brutal murder or something weirder.
Determining a cause of death is usually easy, because the evidence is right in front of you. You might see a man recoiling in pain as a shot from a flintlock rips through him, or another taking a fatal tumble down a stairway. The tricky part is discovering the identities of the people involved, which requires real detective work.
There are a few ways to find out who someone is. In some death scenes there’s a snippet of dialogue and you might hear a name being called out. Or you’ll have to look at where a person is on the ship, or what they’re doing, to establish their identity. Is the guy sawing wood in the workroom the carpenter, for example, or did other circumstances lead him there? Things are rarely that simple in this game.
As well as the watch you have a notebook at your disposal. Here you can cross-reference your deductions with a manifest outlining the roles and nationalities of the crew, an illustration of them all gathered on the deck and a glossary that explains some of the nautical terms you’ll have to tangle with: often important clues to who a person is.
Whenever you make three accurate deductions, the notebook etches in your conclusions permanently. This stops you brute-forcing your way through the game, randomly selecting names in the hope one sticks. But it also left me feeling at a loss sometimes, with no indication that I was hot or cold with my theories.
But then inspiration hits you. You’ll be fumbling around in the lower decks when something slides into place in your mind. A moment from a previous death scene that resonates with a current one. An identifying mark on a sailor. And in a brilliant flurry you’ll snap more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together and make the image a little clearer.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a stunningly clever thing and one of the best puzzle games on PC.
Whenever you make three accurate deductions, the notebook etches in your conclusions...