As you may have realised from the overall content of this blog, I’m a huge fan of solving mysteries when I play games.
Unfortunately, that comes with the side effect that most of the games I adore are single-play only. This includes games like the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective board game, CosyKiller’s postal mystery boxes, and the countless escape rooms I’ve done.
If you’re looking for replayability, then Return of the Obra Dinn is not for you. However, if you’re looking for an immaculate mystery game, then look no further.
Return of the Obra Dinn
In 1802, the merchant ship Obra Dinn set out from London for the Orient with over 200 tons of trade goods. Six months later it hadn’t met its rendezvous point at the Cape of Good Hope and was declared lost at sea.
Early this morning of October 14th, 1807, the Obra Dinn drifted into port at Falmouth with damaged sails and no visible crew. As insurance investigator for the East India Company’s London Office, dispatch immediately to Falmouth, find means to board the ship, and prepare an assessment of damages.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a first-person mystery adventure based on exploration and logical deduction.
About the game
You rock up on the ship and start running into dead bodies.
Luckily for you, you have a magic pocket watch that lets you get a snapshot scene of the moment the corpse in front of you died, along with some of the dialogue immediately prior, which you can walk around and explore.
From these individual moments, you need to work out who each person is, the method of their death and who (if anyone) was responsible for it.
And along the way, you will piece together the mystery of what happened onboard the ship that led to the demise of so many unfortunate souls.
What I loved
The best thing about this game is that it is entirely logic based. While sometimes you will need to make educated guesses, you will never need to make a complete stab in the dark. This makes the game incredibly satisfying to play, especially if you play it “strictly”, and don’t cycle through options to get the right one locked in.
The game genuinely feels realistically like you are solving a mystery. The mechanical elements of the game are minimal, and the whole focus of the game is on unpiecing the plot. There’s no lockboxes, jigsaw or other unrelated puzzle elements – just the story of what happened on the ship, told to you in brief out-of-order vignettes.
To solve the puzzle, you will need to look carefully at each snapshot moment for clues. However, only in the first one or two will you find all the information you need neatly in one scene. For most of them, you will need to trawl through multiple memories and track the person down in various different scenes. You will need to look for small details, like clothing, or get specific angles on scenes to determine what exactly the cause of death was. It’s very in-depth and very clever.
The game doesn’t punish you. Sometimes there are multiple different correct answers – for example, if someone was shot by a cannon held by multiple people, any of the people actually holding the cannon is correct as the culprit. And there is a long list of methods of death, but any description of the death that realistically describes the death may be counted as correct. There also aren’t any red herrings or deliberately misleading bits.
Although there is minimal live dialogue in the game, the voice acting within the snapshot scenes is incredible. They make great use of accents and sound effects to bring the still moments of death to life.
Your notebook is an invaluable tool. It contains a map of the ship, a passenger manifest and a sketch of all the individuals onboard the ship (with a clever in-game conceit). It also lists the “chapters” that the deaths are sorted into – this is where you enter your answers.
You work through the chapters (and the deaths) in a non-linear order, with a certain part of the plot sealed off until the end. This allows the game to feel fairly open-ended, but without risks that you will run into something earlier than you’re supposed to.
There are several moments within the game where your understanding of it will radically shift. I won’t spoiler these for you – they need to be played to be properly experienced.
What I didn’t like
Firstly, there is no tutorial. It’s a learn-as-you-do game that doesn’t really tell you any of the mechanics. Some aspects are more obvious, such as figuring out how to use the pocket watch, but some bits, such as being able to mark a crew member as an unknown topman or unknown steward, rather than as a specific character, are less clear.
Navigation through the game is quite laborious. The ship itself is large, and some parts of it can only be accessed through specific paths. You can find yourself walking around quite a lot, particularly towards the end of the game when you are working through the final few people.
The game relies to a certain extent on stereotypical attributes. For each person, you have a photo, a name, a job title and a nationality, and that nationality field does do some heavy lifting in places for helping you work out who people are. In some places it makes it satisfying to work it out, but in others it feels a bit uncomfortable with my modern sensibilities as opposed to nineteenth century ones.
The art style is distinctive, but it can be hard to stare at for a while. Someone I know can’t play the game as it gives her migraines, and I myself found it occasionally tricky to see the type of details you are looking for.
Finally, for me it was a shame there isn’t an in-game notepad for freeform note taking. As mentioned, you can mark people as having a specific job, but you can’t put down multiple possible options or rule specific names out. There is also no in-game hint feature, so if you get stuck you need to either do without, or brave the spoilery depths of the internet.
Summary
Return of the Obra Dinn will remain one of my favourite games for a long time. I even managed to replay it recently – I definitely remembered some things from my original play, but forgot enough of the details to make it enjoyable all over again.
If you enjoy logic puzzles, I can’t imagine that you won’t love this game. Head over to Steam to buy it now.
Note: I first found out about this game through my brother, Gar1onriva, who has recorded a First Impressions video of the game (and then a second, third, all the way up to seventh, as he played through the whole game). If you’re planning on playing the game, I’d recommend jumping straight in, but if you’re on the fence then give them a watch until you’re convinced.