Return of the Obra Dinn

Oldschool visuals and great voice acting work great together to create a convincing atmosphere. Its hard detective work is a lot of fun, if you like this type of game! absolutely recommended!!

Concept of this game is rather simple yet ingenious and brilliantly executed. You're dropped on the titular ghost ship with a crew manifest (containing names, nationalities and roles) and sketches by an on-board artist depicting all of them. Your only job is to determine what happened to every single one of those 60 individuals. To make things more interesting, you got this magic pocket watch which, upon finding a corpse, allows to witness and explore a static scene of one's death. This should make the task easy, right? Well, despite the ubiquity of death, dead giveaways are a rare luxury. Vast majority of identities must be deduced by means such as language, accent, appearance, bits of dialogue and minute details found across the memories, or a process of elimination to succeed. Every time any three fates get correctly established, game confirms it - which makes brute-forcing harder while saving you time should you err. There are no stages or detached sections; it's a singular, giant puzzle and it will feel overwhelming. Screenshots don't do justice to how good it looks in action. These minimalistic graphics combined with fantastic music, sound design and voice acting make for such an incredible atmosphere that it's nothing short of an audiovisual masterpiece. I finished it twice over a week. First time around I missed many clues and ended up gaming the validating system a bit by taking educated, but still, guesses. I wasn't entirely satisfied with that and during the second run decided to never identify anyone until I found a solid evidence to back it up. Despite knowing the solutions beforehand, it proved to be no less enjoyable in addition to allowing me to fully appreciate how intricately woven the whole thing is, which is easy to miss when relying on guesswork. Indeed, turns out everybody can be pinpointed based only on logical reasoning rather than broad assumptions. And I bet there aren't many games to make you feel more like a genius by figuring it out.

I don't often buy a game as soon as it comes out, but was too excited about this one to wait! It's just as good (and creepy) as promised. No hand-holding here. You really do need to use proper observation and logical deduction to work out what happened aboard the Obra Dinn, and I expect things will only get trickier as the game progresses. The violent and sometimes horrible deaths mean it definitely isn't for everyone, but if the trailer appeals to you, you'll probably enjoy the game. The first-person view can be pretty rough on those of us who are prone to motion sickness, but you can slow down the "look" movement in the options, which helps. I'm face-blind and was nervous that I might be forced to identify all the characters by sight. If anyone else is worried about this, it seems to be OK. The logbook includes a large picture of everyone aboard, and you can zoom in on each individual in each death scene to match them against this picture, so they can be identified by location rather than facial features. In the logbook itself, each character is given a pop-up containing all known or deduced information about them.

This is a gorgeously detailed detective story of sailors, monsters and curses, created by Lucas Pope, whose previous work was the brilliant "Papers, Please". Set in the early 19th Century, and rendered in monochrome graphics designed to evoke the feel of (specifically) early Apple computers, the game wrings gorgous art out of self-imposed limitation. Each pixel seems filled with ominous meaning. You play an insurance assessor tasked with determining the fate of the 60 crew members missing from the ghost ship Obra Dinn, and you are armed with a magical stopwatch capable of replaying the moment of a person's death. Each memory is a glorious 3D frozen tableau, every element clearly caught in the middle of dynamic motion, each actor's face full of emotion, suggesting a story that spins out in a dozen directions that beg to be followed. You work from nothing more than a list that shows the names of crewmembers paired with their nationality and role on the ship, plus a series of hand-drawn artist impressions of the ship that capture the faces of the crew. It's up to you to match faces with names, and then determine the fate of each individual along with who (if anyone) is responsible. In accomplishing this, sometimes you're lucky enough to hear people named by other crewmembers, but more often you're working from accents, affiliations, uniforms, hammock positioning, distinguishing tattoos, or eventually just a process of elimination. There's no hand-holding - the game is a giant crossword for you to solve in whatever order suits you, picking at the problems that intrigue you and deferring thorny ones for later. Even at the end, while the broad strokes of the Obra Dinn's tragedy become clear, the sea keeps for itself some of the darker secrets. The whole thing is short enough to finish in a single afternoon, but the experience will stay with you long afterwards. Five stars.

The game took me 8 hours to complete 100% (I think, I don't know if GOG counts the time when paused). It was very entertaining, not a kind of game you find often, and some things didn't go as I expected at all. A couple of bodies where difficult to find (the one in the window of a cabin, and the one in the barrel). Several identities I found by trial and error (specially within the same rank), but I don't know if I just missed clues. All in all, money well spent.