LOST AT SEA, 1803
the good ship
"OBRA DINN"
----------------
Built 1796, London ~ 800 tons, 18ft draught
Captain R. WITTEREL ~ Crew 51 men
Last voyage to Orient ~ Cape rendezvous unmet
----------------
Contact East India Cy. London Office
for enquiries or testimonyAn Insurance Adventure wit...
LOST AT SEA, 1803
the good ship
"OBRA DINN"
----------------
Built 1796, London ~ 800 tons, 18ft draught
Captain R. WITTEREL ~ Crew 51 men
Last voyage to Orient ~ Cape rendezvous unmet
----------------
Contact East India Cy. London Office
for enquiries or testimony
An Insurance Adventure with Minimal Color
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.
I really enjoyed the presentation of the game. Tbh it's a first time I saw this well executed monochrome image. Graphics got me intrigued and the plot kept me playing. It took me almost 10 hours to 100% the game.
The plot is amazing. It's hard to predict what will happen next, while the events remain believable.
Pacing is great, but it fell of a little in the last part of the game.
Some of the puzzles at the very end (sorting out top-men and sea-men) were a bit too convoluted for my taste. Guess it's just a part of playing an adventure game ;)
The idea is to have players walk through lo-fi vignettes to solve an insurance claim.
You have seen the screenshots? Yeah, those are 3D stills you navigate trough. The grainy look stops being a problem when you see the scenes from multiple angles. The screenshots do not do the visual beauty enough justice.
The voice acting is done by proper voice actors. It is about the most important aspect of the game and it has been given the most attention. Since you are walking through stills, the real action is delivered in good old teichoscopia.
Not gonna spoil it. It starts out as some sort of mutiny with you walking through a black and white still of somebody being shot in the face with a front-loaded pistol. And within 10-15 minutes you will see something that will make you swear in surprise.
You can finish it in 6 hours or so. You may get stuck on puzzles. Basically you walk through scenes and try to match the people in the scenes to the people in the log book of the ship. And you have to note down their fate in your insurance form.
You are an insurance agent after all. With a weird clock that grants you vision of how people died.
I replay Return of the Obra Dinn every couple years and each time it's great fun and training for my deductive skills. It is a detective game in which you have to deduce the exact identities and fates of entire ship crew. There's mystery, there's detective work and there's interesting sory. I highly recommend to anyone who likes the "who did it?" type of play.
The 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 onboard 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 you 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. The 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, the 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. The 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, I decided to never identify anyone until I found 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, it turns out everybody can be pinpointed based only on logical reasoning rather than broad assumptions. And I bet there aren't many games that make you feel more like a genius by figuring it out.
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