Lucas Pope, Return of the Obra Dinn
Sometime in 2019 I read a review or two of Return of the Obra Dinn, and I figured it sounded like it was right up my alley so I picked it up. I proceeded to play it for an hour or two and got past what's basically the intro scenes. At which point I said "this requires brain power, perhaps i'll dig into it next weekend when i have time."
As you may or not recall, "not enough time/space/energy/brain" has been a consistent refrain of mine for several years now, which is why I didn't pick up Obra Dinn for at least two and a half years. But time/space/energy/brain has been returning of late, which is why I picked it back up this morning and played through the whole thing in one ten-hour burst.
The plot: it's 1807 and the schooner Obra Dinn has just returned to London... empty and deserted. You're an insurance investigator sent to find out what happened. To aid you, you have a journal that fills in automatically as you find things out, and a ... spirit compass ... that lets you hear someone's last words and wander around in a freeze-frame of their dying moment.
So you're wandering around this ship, putting names to faces (the journal includes a ship's roster and a few sketches that cover everyone on board). As you find more corpses / death-spots, you find out more and more of what happened to the various crewmembers, and to the ship itself. It's atmospheric as anything. The art's in a deliberately lo-res dithered line-art style, which isn't my thing but is a very specific aesthetic, and it ... it doesn't detract. The sound's great, but then it would have to be.
And ... it's a puzzle-game. Observation and deduction. Everything matters. Languages, accents, clothing, scars. (Faces don't matter, thankfully: the game helpfully matches each person to a specific sketch in the journal, so even if you haven't figured out who they are you can say "ah, this is the same Russian as previously" or whatever.) It's really well-done.
It's set up so that you /can/ guess if you really want to but it won't necessarily help you much. There are sixty people on the ship, each of whom needs to be matched with their name/picture and their fate (plenty of options, ranging from "spiked by strange creature" through "electrocuted" and on to "alive and well in Africa"), and the game confirms your anwswers in groups of three. So when you get stuck the answer is generally "go work on something else and you'll make some progress, and maybe figure out something about how to sort out those four functionally identical sailors." I blind-guessed (from a limited selection) ... mm ... maybe a half-dozen times? And I went to the internet for hints on the last two deaths, one of which was badly clued and the other I could have brute-forced but I was ready to be done.
The pacing's a little odd towards the end, I think. Though that's inherent to it being a game, I think. "Okay, I have all the pieces of the story, now I have to wander around and find the clues I missed. And... done with that, and now I get the epilogue, which ... isn't puzzly at all. Boo."
It's also ... there's a distance to the story. I mean, nature of the beast, but... the ending hangs together and makes for a satisfactory resolution to the Obra Dinn... but I'm just an observer. At the end of the game my avatar literally puts the journal back on the shelf. I guess I'm looking for more of a sense of agency from a game.
Still. Recommended, if you're at all into puzzly things.
Sometime in 2019 I read a review or two of Return of the Obra Dinn, and I figured it sounded like it was right up my alley so I picked it up. I proceeded to play it for an hour or two and got past what's basically the intro scenes. At which point I said "this requires brain power, perhaps i'll dig into it next weekend when i have time."
As you may or not recall, "not enough time/space/energy/brain" has been a consistent refrain of mine for several years now, which is why I didn't pick up Obra Dinn for at least two and a half years. But time/space/energy/brain has been returning of late, which is why I picked it back up this morning and played through the whole thing in one ten-hour burst.
The plot: it's 1807 and the schooner Obra Dinn has just returned to London... empty and deserted. You're an insurance investigator sent to find out what happened. To aid you, you have a journal that fills in automatically as you find things out, and a ... spirit compass ... that lets you hear someone's last words and wander around in a freeze-frame of their dying moment.
So you're wandering around this ship, putting names to faces (the journal includes a ship's roster and a few sketches that cover everyone on board). As you find more corpses / death-spots, you find out more and more of what happened to the various crewmembers, and to the ship itself. It's atmospheric as anything. The art's in a deliberately lo-res dithered line-art style, which isn't my thing but is a very specific aesthetic, and it ... it doesn't detract. The sound's great, but then it would have to be.
And ... it's a puzzle-game. Observation and deduction. Everything matters. Languages, accents, clothing, scars. (Faces don't matter, thankfully: the game helpfully matches each person to a specific sketch in the journal, so even if you haven't figured out who they are you can say "ah, this is the same Russian as previously" or whatever.) It's really well-done.
It's set up so that you /can/ guess if you really want to but it won't necessarily help you much. There are sixty people on the ship, each of whom needs to be matched with their name/picture and their fate (plenty of options, ranging from "spiked by strange creature" through "electrocuted" and on to "alive and well in Africa"), and the game confirms your anwswers in groups of three. So when you get stuck the answer is generally "go work on something else and you'll make some progress, and maybe figure out something about how to sort out those four functionally identical sailors." I blind-guessed (from a limited selection) ... mm ... maybe a half-dozen times? And I went to the internet for hints on the last two deaths, one of which was badly clued and the other I could have brute-forced but I was ready to be done.
The pacing's a little odd towards the end, I think. Though that's inherent to it being a game, I think. "Okay, I have all the pieces of the story, now I have to wander around and find the clues I missed. And... done with that, and now I get the epilogue, which ... isn't puzzly at all. Boo."
It's also ... there's a distance to the story. I mean, nature of the beast, but... the ending hangs together and makes for a satisfactory resolution to the Obra Dinn... but I'm just an observer. At the end of the game my avatar literally puts the journal back on the shelf. I guess I'm looking for more of a sense of agency from a game.
Still. Recommended, if you're at all into puzzly things.