Return of the Obra Dinn

Obra Dinn is a murder mystery on an empty shipping vessel, where you have to determine what happened to the crew and passangers before the ship reappared empty. The premise is adequtely spooky, but the set-up of how you actually view the events used to solve the mystery is a little contrived, though easily ignored. The game's graphical style was offputting to me for the longest time, and I still find them a bit hard on the eyes for long sessions, but they work for the game's mood, tone, and mechanics. The music is great, even when it doesn't tonally fit a scene, just because it's so well written and produced. When it does fit, it gives the game great horror feeling. The voice acting and modeling was distinct and diverse, which helps add realism to the somewhat abstract world. There's also some neat twists on the chain of events the player will find that really helped make the game structurally very memorable. I unfortunately found myself being a little less attentive and found myself in a pretty aggressive loop of going through memories many times to catch little details to identify people. Doing this requires you to travel the ship to find a specific memory, and some are locked behind other memories. Locking memories to others led to a lot of speeding through segments just to reach one specific point, which was less enjoyable and more like a chore. I also felt the ending sequence didn't quite have the impact maybe Lucas Pope was going for. I loved playing through this and I'd love for Lucas Pope to consider doing another game expanding on these ideas.

Very nice aestetic with a switchable palette to emulate many diffrent popular late 80's computers; a little hard on the eyes at first, but you get used to it after about half an hour. Identifying the Chinese Topmen is the most frustrating part of the game, but you can get them all eventually. (Copyed over from my Steam Review)

Great experience of a game. Basically the board game Clue (Cluedo) on steroids. Your goal is to find out what happened on the ship, and what happened to everyone... but this isn't as easy as it sounds. The game is all about trying to find details in what is happening, and making connections... again not as easy as it sounds as some connections are pretty obvious while others take a bit of a guess. Overall, this is a great game but it does suffer from some negatives. First, the art style, while really cool, does make some details really difficult to see. Second, there isn't a hint system or even a tutorial, so it can be difficult to figure out what is going on at first. Third, even if you are correct there isn't any immediate confirmation, though you do get confirmation once you solve 3 instances. Lastly, the biggest one is that there really isn't any replaying this game. All in all, if you get it on sale I think it is worth it to give it a go.

One of the most immersive, interesting and fresh experiences in gaming that I ever had. A breakthrough in terms of visual effects, old-school gaming, with a perfect balance of great voice acting and perfect storytelling. This game is a pinnacle of "show, don't tell" examples and it's amazing how it can keep you engaged without ever giving you animated scenes at all during the investigation. A game like this would never be possible back in the day of its origins, but it would never be possible today without the influence of the old monitor aesthetics. And god, the surprises are awesome. I can't recommend this enough. It's hard to explain but with half an hour of gameplay you will surely know what I mean.

The art style is fantastic (I recommend play on LCD display setting) The story, acting and writing are fantastic The gameplay mechanic itself is first one ever to make me feel like I'm actually an investigator. Took me several evening to beat - about 12 hours total, but I say it was worth every cent