A great tactical turn based RPG, with lite strategy elements and a 'it keeps going' sort of feel to it. There's a lot of meat here and enough to keep playing it fresh. Not too big, feels manageable and not randomly collecting 99 flowers. Runs at 100h playtime if you take your time but i'm sure it can be rushed to 40-50. Can be quite difficult but amazing amount of difficulty options.
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.
