RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN

Developer/publisher 3909 LLC Format PC

It might have won several individual awards, but Obra

Dinn wouldn’t be in the upper reaches of this list if all those parts didn’t serve the whole quite so well. No game in 2019 looked or sounded like this, but more importantly, nothing this year – or, for that matter, any previous year – played quite like it. For once, a detective game demands some proper investigative work, rather than spoon-feeding solutions to you as soon as you pick up vital evidence. And yet all of its conceptual cleverness is facilitated by a contrivance that’s pure videogame: a pocket watch that can rewind time. Lucas Pope doesn’t try to explain it, and he’s right not to. It’s simply a device you need for the game to work, and so you quickly accept it as part of the fiction.

So no, it doesn’t add up that sound travels slower than light, even when travelling backwards. But separating audio and video allows Pope to spring several surprises upon the player. The first one comes after you’ve solved the cause of death for the first three corpses, as you discover that this is more than just a standard mutiny – and something way beyond our earthly ken. The next comes when you eventually head below deck, and there are plenty more shocks to come thereafter. Other games may have moved us more this year than Return Of The Obra Dinn, but none has caused so many sharp intakes of breath.

In playing with the chronology of events, Pope can control the pace of revelations, ensuring that even as you’re flitting between decks and the bodies are piling up, all the major drama doesn’t happen at once, nor do you face a long wait for ship to go down. Beneath that attractive surface, you can almost hear its interlocking cogs ticking and whirring with quiet precision – much like a pocket watch, you might say.