Return of the Obra Dinn

A ship lost at sea, now found again, void of life. You're an insurance agent who's job is to investigate what happened to every single crew member and passenger on the ship. To help you on your way, your employer has given you a magical pocketwatch that allows you to see the moment of a person's death. And so you explore a number of scenes trying to figure out, who is who and what happened to them. The gameplay involves mainly looking around and making connections (in your head) and looking at your little book and making more connections. You need to fill out the victim's name and the way they died, and - if they were murdered - who killed them. Wild guesses won't get you too far, since the game only confirms correct answers after every three correct guesses. It does help a bit, though, since that means all your other guesses at the time must be incorrect. I took about 5 hours to find all scenes and I got about half the crew correct. After you unlock all scenes, you have the option to leave and end the game, but you can rewind the save and come back to complete your book. The story of the ship has huge gaps, but that's by design. The game *is* filling out those gaps with deduction, intuition and imagination. You start from the final chapter (of the ship) and it's pretty straight forward since there's just a handful of people left on the ship. As you continue, the scenes become more complex with ten or more characters in almost every chapter. Each chapter is a short story or a scene and you get to investigate the 3D image of each death that happens in that time. I recommend this game if you enjoy gathering information and making deductions. And you'll need a bit of patience if you want to fully compete it.

I picked this up because I like mystery/puzzle games, and it satisfied my urge perfectly. The presentation is wonderful, using old-school computer graphics that evoke 19th century ink prints, and atmospheric music, especially the plucky stings that accompany screen changes and pop ups. The voice acting is also great. The puzzle itself is reminiscent of grid or table-based logic puzzles, with the main thrust of this game being the identification of its protagonists. The big difference is that there are no logic statements to combine and compare - instead you are given a series of still-shot tableaus to walk around and examine, together with some dialogue. Very little is spelled out for you - the only things you are given are the location of the bodies, the continuity of characters between different scenes, and some info on their jobs and nationality. Despite the similarity to a logic puzzle, you cannot, in fact, use pure logic to work everything out. You will need to use contextual clues and a sometimes a bit of constrained guesswork to find some of the answers. The answers themselves are validated in sets of threes to discourage brute forcing, but also to avoid the complete uncertainty of no validation, which I found to be a nice balance. In reaction to some of the reviews here, I never needed to completely brute force an answer, but there were times I need to cycle through a couple of options to find the right one. At the risk of spoilers, I will also say there isn't much in the way of big twists or sudden reveals. That isn't to say the ending isn't clever or a little bit funny, but the reveal is gradual, the story getting clearer as you solve the puzzle. I also got invested in some of the characters, including some that have very little dialogue, just from seeing how they reacted to the events as they unfolded. This game manages to be a fresh take on puzzle games despite using some old ideas, and it is executed close to perfection. Fully recommended.

Your brain will boil. Your eyes will bleed. Your hands will pull your hair out of your head. but in the end you will know what satifaction means.

I really enjoyed the atmosphere that graphics, visuals and music created. Really well made. In the beginning, it was hard to appreciate given how much you are required to pay attention to details and connect people all over the place. However, as I entered the 3rd hour it became exponencially better: travelling on the boat by memory in memory and confirming hypothetis was really rapid and well crafted. However, in the end, this stopped, completely. The bad part is that not-so-many people are very difficult if not near to impossible to identify since there is no clear part, and that's a fact. Also, the same applies to some deaths, which are – how can I put it – creatively interpreted by the game, meaning you have to guess and hope that's how it's consired correct. I admit I had to resort to the wiki to confirm identities and fix how I thought the deaths happened.

I haven't played point and click games since I was 7 and don't even THINK I've played detective games. This is a work of art. PRO TIP: Take out notebook out keep notes.