Makabb
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Return of the Obra Dinn review - prepare to be transported
Stirring stuff.
The Papers, Please creator offers up an intricate and mesmerising puzzle game with a rich and detailed sense of place.
Christian Donlan
Features Editor
"You can't stir things apart," says Thomasina, the brilliant teenage mathematician and physicist in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Thomasina is talking, I think, about entropy, and entropy is one of those fascinating, dizzying subjects that can make a person wish they had kicked off their Obra Dinn review with a close reading of a Bryan Ferry lyric instead. No matter, Thomasina is talking about the way that the present generally looks like the past after it's been through a blender. She is talking about the force that means we can remember yesterday and not tomorrow. (For more on all of this you could do a lot worse than tracking down James Gleick's wonderful book Time Travel: A History.) Sad stuff, I reckon, because there are so many things you might want to stir apart. Over the course of this morning alone I can think of two or three at least. You can't stir things apart: amazing, amazing line - so rich and funny and direct and unpatronising and profound. I often walk around my house when nobody is there speaking it aloud to myself and the cats. I will probably crochet it on something one of these days.
Anyway, in Return of the Obra Dinn, guess what? You can stir things apart, albeit only temporarily and with very limited agency. This transgression requires magic, which this wonderfully tactile and rigorous game is very happy to accomodate, and this magic is deployed in the name of a great bureaucratic truth. Lucas Pope, who once wrung such drama from the stamps and passports of a border crossing kiosk in Papers, Please, has now delivered a great "insurance adventure", a romance of book-keeping on the high seas, four years in the making. Speaking of four years, in 1803, the Obra Dinn, a merchant ship of 800 tons, 18 ft draught, was lost at sea with all 51 souls (or were there more?). In 1807 it is back, devoid of life, and ready for an audit and an inquest. It's your job to board the creaking ghost ship, starkly, ghoulishly bereft in powdery white lines picked out against a muddy sepia background, and uncover what happened and how much insurance is to be paid out. But with nobody left alive, how do you proceed? Magic. Magic of a most practical kind.
Your first tool is a magical pocketwatch that allows you to interrogate any sun-bleached skeleton you find on deck by revisiting the moment of its owner's death. Actually, you are transported to a moment a few seconds before their death: you hold out the pocketwatch, the hands spin madly (the arrow of time is having a funny spell), the music riffs bracingly, and then the Obra Dinn briskly stirs things apart. What follows is a very short audio drama - always far less than a minute - with the text appearing on the otherwise blank screen to the accompaniment of the spoken dialogue and the creaks and shudders of the good ship. Then, you are suddenly able to explore the very instant of death, frozen in place via a diorama that you can walk around and poke about in.
The choice of art styles really pays off. This game feels like no other.
What instants! A blast of lightning up in the rigging, the boom and backscatter of a runaway cannon. Nothing in Obra Dinn deserves to be spoiled, but the game is astonishingly good at capturing the strange otherworldliness of human chaos, that rupturing sense of affront at the sheer unlikeliness of what has come to pass. Heads are cleaved, skin is shredded, bones are splintered, and the bystanders! You never saw such bystanding - arrested while running away from calamity, running towards calamity, turning in surprise, or still, touchlingly, sweetly oblivious for a few nanoseconds more.
Next comes the second tool at your disposal, a magical book that breaks the Obra Dinn's damned voyage down into chapters. At the start of the game the chapter headings are all present but the pages are blank. They fill themselves in with each death you uncover - and frequently one death will lead to more, since the pocketwatch can move from a skeleton that's physically survived intact on the Obra Dinn to reveal, one at a time, the ghosts of other bodies, and other moments of death, that preceded them. This book! It doesn't just list the locations of bodies and record the dialogue from the audio clips, it also poses questions, always the same questions, and this is where the game itself comes to life. Who is this? the book will ask when you emerge from the frozen moment of death, and what killed them?
God, there are a lot of people on board. One of the most interesting observations in Obra Dinn is that a ship like this was a little world - dozens of people living together in almost unimaginably sweaty and elbows-to-armpits proximity. These people lived and worked together, and they were drawn from almost all nations of the earth. They made friends and enemies and they kept secrets.
Pope has done brilliant things with the intersection of human fallibility with the deathless rituals of bureaucracy before, but the game in his back catalogue that Obra Dinn most reminds me of is not Papers, Please, but 6 Degrees of Sabotage, a browser-based affair in which you uncover a saboteur by tracking their movements through varying crowds of suspects. And then, at the end, you have to be confident enough in your deductions to shoot the person you have picked out.
All of this feeds into the challenge of working out who they are. What clues do you have? The dialogue you've heard, for starters: did anyone use any names? Can you link those names to the people in the diorama? But wait, can you infer anything from the uniforms these people are wearing, from the accents they spoke in? Can you cross-reference what you've seen against a crew list in the book that gives names and nationalities? Can you match that to several pictures of life aboard the Obra Dinn that are included? Can you maybe take into account the location of the death, reviewing the maps of the ship's various decks, with helpful notes as to who worked where? Can you freestyle it just a little, assuming that people who are sat together in pictures may have had similar jobs? Actually, does the glossary listing the meanings of the various jobs provide any help?
Long story short, halfway through Obra Dinn I realised that what I was essentially playing was nautical murder Sudoku. In Sudoku - and stop me if you know this one - you must take a 9x9 grid and fill each 3x3 square of it with the numbers 1-9, each occurring only once. These numbers must also occur only once in each row and column of the wider grid. Luckily, there are a few numbers in place at the start to guide you. Amazingly, this is a recipe for genuine fun.
So how do you proceed? In Sudoku, you slice and dice. You deduct that a 4, say, in this row and that column must mean that the only remaining place for a 4 in this section is here. And so it is with Obra Dinn, but you're using accents, jobs, uniforms, and anything else that can be deployed. This man spoke with an American accent - how many Americans are there on the ship? This man claims to have a brother on board - how many brothers can I spot?
There's nothing quite like Obra Dinn, but if you're in the market for the next closest thing, it's probably 2000 to One: a Space Felony.
Once you've decided who died and what killed them - and the last part is often as tricky to divine as the first - you write them in the book where your answer appears in loose handwriting. Once you have three correct entries, the magical book magically confirms your deductions and the handwriting is replaced by the cold typewriter font of fact. Always these confirmations come in threes, so you can't just spam different names and different reasons for dying, I suspect, and there is a real thrill of satisfaction when you realise - yes! - you're slowly making headway. Over time, these individual deaths, presented in what initially seems like no real kind of order, slowly start to hint at a wider narrative. Keep stirring! There are wheels within wheels here, and ultimately, you can stitch all these scattered deaths together into a wider tragedy of great weirdness and richness, spotting people in early scenes who you've already seen killed in later scenes and realising that there was more to that death than initially seemed possible.
At the same time as the narrative unfolds - and speaking of unfolding, after my first playthrough, I was nowhere near the number of solved deaths needed to unlock the final twist and even now it eludes me - an oddly sensitive portrait of life onboard a merchant ship evolves. Despite the limited palette - perhaps because of it, eh readers? - the Obra Dinn is one of the most fully realised locations I've ever encountered in a game. It has carpenters, animals for slaughter, barrels and crates of mysterious stuff, a whole deck full of cannons.
It is a joy to poke around as the game slowly opens up new spaces. It is a pleasure - and a very harmonious pleasure - to come to an understanding of how different parts of the ship slot together, where people sleep, where they work, where they gather for a game of cards. That powdery white line that draws this bleak world is surprisingly adept at giving a sense of the material reality of the ship - razor sharp on the rarely-used stairs you use to climb aboard, breaking into radar-like speckles when ghosting an outline of waves into life. As your clues mount up and the images in the book become less and less fuzzy, so the world comes into focus. You are not just exploring a place, you are slowly getting a sense for it. What an astonishing game. What an incredible piece of work.
Review: Return of the Obra Dinn
2018-10-18 09:00:00by Patrick Hancock
19
My favorite game about being an insurance agent
This is the first game that actually made me feel like a detective. I've played tons of games that have tasked me with solving some mystery, only to have it boil down to either not being able to fail ,or just plain easy and boring.
Return of the Obra Dinn forces you to use deductive reasoning and logic without spoon-feeding answers. It also sports a unique visual style and some wonderful little tunes! If you've ever wanted to really think like a detective, this is the game for you. Leave it to Lucas Pope, developer of Papers, Please, to absolutely knock it out of the park...again.
Return of the Obra Dinn (Mac, Windows [reviewed])
Developer: Lucas Pope
Publisher: 3909 LLC
Released: October 18, 2018
MSRP: $19.99
The less known about what actually happens in Obra Dinn (or should I say on the Obra Dinn), the better. As players first explore the ship, they will come into the possession of a magical pocketwatch-looking-thing that allows them to "re-live" the moment of death for any corpse found on the ship. Each time, the sounds and dialogue that led up to the event will play and, just as the moment of death occurs, the player is instantly transported to that spot and time. From there, they may explore the surrounding area and examine the scene, frozen in time.
The first time at a scene is limited -- the screen will fade to black soon enough and then it's time to move on. It is possible to re-visit any and all of these memories at will, and there is no time limit in successive visits. The goal is quite simple -- log the names and cause of death for each of the 60 people aboard the ship. This may sound tedious when reading it, but trust me, it is anything but.
Again, I'm not going to give anything away. But the pacing at the beginning of Obra Dinn is a masterpiece. The game gets your attention with a small-scale scene, with bits of intrigue strewn about, then BAM! It hits you with the "OH SH--" moment and instantly changes...well, everything. And just when you think you've got it figured out, BAM! Another crazy moment that comes out of nowhere. Seriously, don't get comfortable in your assumptions.
Return of the Obra Dinn gives players everything they need to succeed. With a handy-dandy notebook in tow, access to things like a list of the crew members, a map of the boat and its route, and crew sketches are readily available at all times. As players explore each memory, they can zoom in on a character and the game will display where they are in the sketches. From there, it's up to the player to mark down who they are, how they died, and who killed them.
Things are decided by choosing from a list. When picking the name of someone, the game will display the list of crew members for the player to select from. Certain verbs are available to choose from when deciding how someone died, and the crew list comes up once again when choosing who the murderer was (if applicable). It's all very intuitive, though navigating the book can feel clunky after each scene has been explored and it's time to cross-reference people and events from different sections.
The mechanics are simple (think Clue on crack), the story is epic and surprising, and there's enough mystery here to keep players guessing for quite some time. After viewing each memory, the player has a chance to basically finish the game, but they won't get the "good" ending. That will take a lot more time. Lucas Pope lists it at anywhere between 6 and 40 hours, depending on your deductive reasoning skills. I still haven't finished every single person and their cause of death, but at the pace I've been heading in, I'd expect to finish up in about 10 - 12 hours. Maybe that's "not enough time" for you to justify a $20 purchase, but considering how exciting and enthralling each moment of Obra Dinn is, I'd say it is absolutely worth it.
The visuals harken back to the Macintosh era of graphics, though there are color filters to emulate your favorite old-school one-color screens. Lucas Pope uses this to great effect and certain scenes are absolutely breathtaking. The visuals absolutely had to be clean, as deciphering the cause of death often requires a keen sense of observation (though many times it is very obvious).
Small musical cues are also used perfectly. I didn't notice how catchy these were at first until I found myself mimicking them in the shower. They are only a few seconds long, and I love them all so much! Special shoutouts to the voice actors as well. More than usual, the voice actors accurately representing their characters is of the utmost importance as players may recognize an accent or voice inflection that allows them to pinpoint the identity of someone on the ship. Everyone in the sound department did a tremendous job.
This is a game I can not stop thinking about. I think about it at work -- either remembering crazy moments I didn't see coming, or reflecting on recently discovered information and its implications. This is absolutely a "thinking man's game," and it's one that I hope other developers (or Mr. Pope himself) decide to ape and expand on. Despite the fact that this isn't a detective game, I've never felt more like a dick.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
Return of the Obra Dinn reviewed by Patrick Hancock
9.5
Ah, that must be it.There had been 'demos' out for a while, showcasing only parts of the game.
Also, slight correction: I thought I'd made a post about this game in the Current Year. My bad. It was over two years ago.
Return of the Obra Dinn review
By Andy Kelly 2 hours ago
The merchant vessel Obra Dinn drifts into port, crewless and mysteriously abandoned, having disappeared some years earlier. You climb aboard, an insurance investigator, and begin to try and make sense of what happened to the crew—with a little help from a magical pocket watch.
This curious, arcane artifact, decorated with an ominous engraving of a grinning skull, lets you visit the moments before a person’s death in an attempt to establish what happened to them. But with the fates of sixty sailors to determine, this is no easy task—especially as Return of the Obra Dinn, a few lean tutorials aside, steadfastly refuses to hold your hand.
This is a first-person puzzle game from Lucas Pope, creator of the acclaimed Papers, Please. It’s completely 3D, but rendered with a bold, beautiful art style that recalls the 1-bit dithered visuals of old Macintosh adventure games. But the Obra Dinn is no less atmospheric for it. In fact, the sense of place created by its hard lines and limited palette is quite remarkable.
As you explore the ship you’ll find piles of sun-bleached bones that used to be the crew, and activating the pocket watch near them will whisk you away to a static, but wonderfully detailed, vignette of the seconds before they died—be it an unfortunate accident, a brutal murder, or something altogether weirder. And it’s here where your investigation really begins.
Determining the cause of death is normally the easiest part, because the evidence is right in front of you. You might see a man recoiling in pain as a shot from a flintlock pistol rips through him, or another taking a fatal tumble down a stairway. But the tricky part is discovering the identities of the people involved, which requires some real detective work.
There are a few ways to find out who someone is. In some death scenes there’s a short snippet of dialogue, and you might hear a name being called out. Or you’ll have to look at where a person is on the ship, or what they’re doing, to establish their identity. It’s safe to assume the guy in the workshop sawing a plank of wood is the carpenter, for example. But then again, maybe he isn’t. Things are rarely that simple in this game.
As well as the watch you have a notebook at your disposal. Here you can cross-reference your deductions with a manifest outlining the roles and nationalities of the crew, an illustration of them all gathered on the deck, and a glossary that explains some of the obscure, archaic nautical terms you’ll have to tangle with: often important clues to who a person is.
Whenever you make three accurate deductions, the notebook etches your conclusions—name, cause of death, and in some cases their killer—into the book permanently. This stops you brute-forcing your way through the game, randomly selecting names for each crew member from the manifest in the hope one sticks. But it also left me feeling at a loss sometimes, with no indication that I was hot or cold with my (sometimes way off the mark) theories.
But then something hits you. You’ll be fumbling around in the lower decks, bouncing your head off the oak hull, when something slides into place in your mind. A moment from a previously-visited death scene that suddenly resonates with the current one. An identifying mark on a sailor. An accent in a dialogue snippet. And in a brilliant Sherlock-style flurry you’ll snap more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together and make the image a little clearer.
These moments of success are rare, but all the more satisfying for it. A lot of my time with Return of the Obra Dinn was spent wandering the ship, tugging at loose threads, and seemingly getting nowhere. But knowing those moments of clarity were waiting to emerge kept me playing, even as the mind-map I was creating of the crew grew increasingly massive and unwieldy.
The game paints a vivid picture of life aboard the Obra Dinn, and with each chapter—unlocked by exploring and locating more bodies—a larger story begins to take shape. I won’t go into specifics about what befell the crew, because getting to the root of that is the core of the game, but I can say that this has to be the unluckiest merchant ship in the world, with so much chaos and calamity occurring on-board it’s amazing the thing is still floating.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a stunningly clever thing and one of the best puzzle games on PC. It not only presents you with a vast, complex, and interconnected mystery to solve, but trusts in your intelligence enough to let you do it yourself with almost no hints, markers, or guides interfering in the process. Few games have this much confidence in the player, and it’s a deeply satisfying experience as a result, even if I did occasionally feel like I’d hit a dead end.
The Verdict
90
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Return of the Obra Dinn
A beautifully constructed and powerfully atmospheric mystery that you really have to work to solve.