Return of the Obra Dinn

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.

What a unique premise and what a great game. Each scene is a beautifully crafted diorama - pore over it in detail. If you can find all the 'clues', no guesswork is needed to identify who's who. I have moderate motion sickness (many first person games cause it for me, third person games are usually OK). The dithering effect here caused me motion sickness but the game was amazing enough that completing it was still entirely worth it. Short play sessions and playing the game in a much smaller 'window' helped immensely.

This is a very good idea for a strategy game, and atmospherically it works well - the music is great and one is easily able to get into the game. However, for a game that really requires you to notice fine details of various scenes, I find the graphical choice of basically rendering everything with monochrome graphics to be... odd, to say the least. I found myself really squinting a lot of the time and not being able to make out what was going on in various scenes because the graphics were just so grainy and unclear. Maybe this was intentional, making it harder to figure stuff out, but I think it would've been better if they'd just had clear, multi-colour graphics frankly.