Return of the Obra Dinn

I've enjoyed a number of mystery games, even at their slowest, because of that amazing payoff. Maybe it's figuring out how the killer did it. Maybe it's working out who the killer is. Maybe it's when you THINK you knew what had happened, but a twist of fate and a late revelation actually shows it was the least expected thing. In some games, you already know who and how, but the climactic challenge is *proving* it. 99% of Obra Dinn's challenge and time spent is working out what is normally the very first piece of information in other mystery games: The identity of the victim. I think what made me realize how terrible this was, was when I got another notification that I had guessed (yes, guessed) 3 crew identities/deaths correctly, and kind of just breathed a sigh of exhausted relief; while cursing the fact that the 3 somehow hadn't involved someone whose identity I was absolutely certain of, and who had simply died in a nondescript way to a beast. These moments are supposed to be the thrilling payoff of a mystery, when it all adds up together, but just like Papers Please, it really does feel like you're just a man filling in paperwork. There's a little payoff soon after the discovery of a set of bodies where you learn what was generally happening in that chapter, and sometimes the surprise of that can be "mildly interesting" but that's the highest emotional swell this game gets. I will credit the game for its art style, and its unique design to mystery mechanics. I don't know of other games that work this way in either case, and it would certainly have been a risk setting out that way. An unfortunate glitch of fullscreen mode that prevents the mouse from working in other windows is particularly gruesome here given that lots of your inferences are meant to be made based on real-world information, like which languages are spoken in certain other 18th-century countries, and I would have liked checking Wikipedia in many cases.

This is a very unusual game, but it's such a boring gameplay. I gave up playing it pretty soon. I not new to adventure games, I love classic Sierra and Lucas games.

I won't repeat what others have said about the graphics or the atmosphere. However, the gameplay quickly becomes rather grinding. The choices of graphics may it quite uneasy to find clues and you soon end up switching back and forth between the various scenes, wondering "what I have overlooked there?". Such switching is unfortunately slow because of the various animations and effects. Compending this, the game asks you to qualify the various deaths, but the question "what killed X and how did they die?" doesn't always admit a precise answer, given the intentional vagueness of the graphical representations and the, let's say, surreal nature of some entities (is it a "creature"? is it an "enemy"? when you receive multiple flying pieces of metal (?) in your body, what is the accurate verb to describe your death?). In the end, I probably didn't go further than 25% of the game, and don't intend to come back to it.

Really enjoyed the game but with there was a little bit less brute force problem solving.

Game advertises controller support, but it in fact does not have it.