Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery adventure game from Lucas Pope, best known for Papers, Please. And it’s quite a unique experience.
The main puzzle concept that is found surprisingly rarely in games. It’s a huge “whodunnit” type puzzle, where you piece together narrative shown to you out of order and try to figure out what happened, to whom, how and why. You might’ve seen something similar done as a one-off puzzle in something like a Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes game, or, very differently, in Her Story. But I’ve never seen a game be specifically like this. The premise is rather simple – a ship returns with dead bodies on board and you, with some mysterious clock that lets you watch final moments of some people on board, need to clear the fates of every single person who was on board. Which usually involves first understanding who they are from the list of people on board (and referencing the picture), then what they were doing, where, why, with whom and what happened, ultimately resulting in their unlucky (or in some cases lucky) fate.
Every memory is presented as a freeze frame you can explore with some great voice acting and ambience that usually contains hints, which opens with a more dramatic presentation but is later available for you to revisit at any point if you need more references. You can select actors while in the memory or from the list, which simplifies things and helps with clearer referencing and the game gradually opens up as you see more and more of those scenes. After a set amount of scenes have been seen and the game expects you to be able to cross reference and deduct the fates of people, you can finish the game, either after a thorough investigation or after a halfhearted attempt, with the former letting you get an extended ending and additional chapter of the story. Once you’ve filled in the names and fates of three people correctly, the game acknowledges that and those people disappear from the list of suggestions for unidentified people. It’s a rather simplistic, yet extremely engaging approach that both motivates you to be very careful with your investigation, but also requires some guessing at times.
Sadly, it does become a bit clunky and frustrating in the last parts of your investigation, once you’ve seen all memories and, by then, probably easily identified about a half of the crew, as quite a lot of the rest will require at least a bit of guessing. There are good hints, sometimes very hard to notice at first, in how people relate to each other, where they are found at different parts of the story and what they do, so, for example, most of the more unique ship jobs, tend to be easily identifiable. But then you’d have, let’s say, 4 Chinese topmen, none of whom are ever identified by name, or a bunch of officers with no real story or outstanding events tied to them, and you must start guessing who is who. This also involves manually finding the correct scene you want to rewatch to refresh your memory and entering it, then exiting it, finding the next one and etc. It becomes a bit annoying and confusing at that point and, what is especially a shame, the final chapter doesn’t really expand the story in such a meaningful way to be locked behind the full completion anyway.
But the game is still extremely interesting, the story is good and full of quite unexpected supernatural twists that are somewhat reminiscent of how normalcy and magic combined in the classic The Last Express, the 1-bit color depth style is effective and makes some of the implied or even seen gore and horror be less gross and more effective and the music complements the journey quite well without getting tired. If you like games that allow you to really dive into untangling the mystery, restoring the chronology and feeling like a detective and you can excuse some occasional quality of life deficiencies, this game is an absolute must have. Otherwise, I would highly suggest you at least check it out, as it is a unique and exciting experience that’s worth your time.