Return of the Obra Dinn

It's not that often that a conceptual game hits the mark so well as this one. Mechanics are like a huge cluedo game, nice and challenging but not enough to need a walk through. Atmosphere is awesome and the style is, well you've probably already seen it.

Boarding a ghost ship, you are given the chance to see and hear the scenes where most of the crew died, and you must figure out who perished by whose hand. Every time you get three right, the game tells you, and if you're a puzzle person you'll keep going back to revisit the ones you got wrong till you get 100%. Though, to state the obvious, with its scary monsters and many deaths, it's not suitable for children.

It is incredibly clever and well made detective game. I highly recommend to everybody to go into the game blind and just let it surprise you. I was just missing some other clues, like writing notes.

My first impressions, in order of appearing: 1. Oh god, I hate the controls 2. Oh god there's so much and I feel so lost 3. What the &@(*$!?? Repeat step 3 for at least an hour. It's a game unlike any others I've played so far, and yet it truly shows how some stories can be put to another level by video games. The story itself isn't overly complicated, but since the player has to connect all the dots by themself, the intensity of the experience rises up to the sky. It makes the game surprisingly hard - clues can be very small, hidden or otherwise easy to miss - but extremely rewarding. The way the story is discovered reminds me of Bloodborne, in a way. Nothing is given to you straight on a platter and many pieces make sense only after you piece together the larger context. Just as real detective work. If you like detective stories and mind-twisters, absolutely give this one a go, it's a real treat.

If you've played the GDC demo you haven't seen or felt 75% of the game. PROs --- - Original take on exploration genre - Art and presentation are AAA quality from a small studio - Story is polished, clever, but also simple and easy to follow - More on art: the renderer the developer created FLAWLESSLY creates a 3D Pixel Art world. Its incredible - Sound Design is nearly as impressive as the art. The voice talent is great - The game relies on the player having some intelligence to complete the game e.g. at times a character's accent is important to the story. CONs --- - The biggest CON is navigating between scenes once they have already been openned. I wonder why the developer didn't allow a shortcut through the journal and instead requires player to run around through the map to find corpses. Minor detail cons- - There are too many crew members to identify through elimination; if there was a shortcut to go between stories, it would have been fine - The epilogue is a little short - While the game puts a lot of attention on the crew and their duties, I didn't get the sense that character A and character F were actually "mates" in some very important cases. I wonder if using a different set up for identifying visually how everyone looked would make it easier to understand their professional relationships.