Return of the Obra Dinn

This is probably a pretty good game for a person who it sucks its teeth into. I found it to be interesting, but was near immediately turned off by its at first linear nature, its stop-and-go pacing, and its leaps of faith with deductions. I went through the main course of the story, learning the fates of the crew of the ship, making my deductions, enjoying the music and atmosphere. But every new scene introduction was stilted while it paused, making an animation and music stinger, loads, has you surveys, and boots you out again. This happens over and over until you unlock all the scenes and then are able to hop between them freely, which is nice. My struggle with this game is the fact that it is both linear and open-ended. The fact that the story goes through segmented chapters, all relayed to you in the form of a frozen scene, makes gameplay and deduction feel very jarring and stilted. Rather than feeling like I am a genius detective I feel more like I am being hand-held from painting to painting in a museum and asked to find Waldo. I know that this is a minority opinion, but I am left disappointed in a game that many seem to think is genius and fantastic. If this game does not sink its teeth in you, like it did for me, you will be left with a bunch of unlocked scenes and clues but little motivation to actually go back with a fine tooth comb and search for ways to make everything come together. I just did not care at the end of the game that I hadn't deduced everything and tied up all the loose ends, because I knew that the gameplay loop to get that done was confusing, stilted, and boring. I was at the end left with a partially completed puzzle, where I could see the time and work it would take to complete it, and I just decided to put it back in the box.

Return of the Obra Dinn plays very uniquely and feels entirely alien. It feels knowable but unknown. That's the best way to sum my time on the Obra Dinn. You play as a claims investigator in the age of sail investigating the mystical return of a ship with no crew with the help of a magical pocket watch. You have to identify all the 60 crew of a ship and how they died and who killed them from standstill memories of the moment of their death and some audio cues and lines of dialogue. All you have to help you are three pictures of the crew together, a crew manifest, and the ability for the book you're using to tag correct crew ID and their deaths in bulks of three. The game lays its story out bare and allows the player to slam their head against its wall as much as they want. It plays as a very free-form crime puzzler, maybe a very complex twist on Cluedo, but i was amazed to see the amount of reasoning and deduction the player can employ from just observing the environment. I never saw 'game pieces' or the design strings behind it, and i was entirely focused on the actual characters and the world, trying to discern details in this very uniquely shaded game. While some elements do stand out as Rosetta Stones for solving the identity of certain members of the crew, even at the end when i had unlocked all the corpses and had free reign over the ship, it still wasn't easy, moreso the fact that unlocking sections of the ship require a very keen eye and may be very easily missed. After finishing it, i can definitely say that it was easier and less daunting than it originally seemed, and some puzzle pieces may have been a bit too hamfisted compared to the extreme subtlety of others, but i never felt i had no avenues open to me. However, sometimes i just tried to fit pegs in holes with no real logic behind it and the game obliged me, a bit to its detriment. However, it is a balancing act and i would have much rather what we got now than a much more nitpicky experience.

Of non-Linear story-telling! Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the finest of narrative capabilities that Indie titles, and even all the other kinds of game, are able to offer, where it's up to you to piece together the entirety of the tragic events that will lead to the unexpected outcome of a lost story of a ship and its crew. I won't tell anything else for fear of ruining the plot (the game itself doesn't last long if you understand the majority of the roles and personal relationship of the crew) but with that said : the settings, along with graphics that allows to live the adventure like if it was run in a old engine, the soundtracks and the designs, are top notch. So, in to keep it short, a investigating game with a lot of exploration and deep brain thinking that manages to entertain and be captivating to the final little tiny bit? Sign me up!

Not used to playing games of this genre. Did not feel like i was stuck at any point, there was always something new to discover. Felt like the game was written and designed by a genius.

The game doesn't give any hints or spoilers away, which makes it really fun to discover fates and identities. But some for some of the later characters I just had to try different things to see what works because there wasn't any information to distinguish between them. Maybe I missed some minor clues, but after hours of going through every detail I doubt it. The game also has really interesting/scary story that reminds me of the old-school tales about the sea which I love.