Return of the Obra Dinn

I seem to have a habit of abandoning games due to frustration with the core gameplay mechanics, giving it another go 5+ years later, and only then getting completely hooked. It happened with Just Cause 2, World of Warcraft, Stardew Valley, ARK Survival Evolved, and now it’s happened with Return of the Obra Dinn, Lucas Pope’s latest bureaucracy-themed indie game.

Set on an 1800s ghost ship that mysteriously returned to dock with none of its passengers or crew aboard, the player controls an insurance inspector who boards the vessel tasked with learning the fates of all 60 missing persons. The core gameplay mechanic through which you do this is a magic stopwatch that, once attuned to a corpse, lets you hear and witness the last moment of that person’s life.

And what a mechanic it is! Combining investigation, discovery, logical deduction, and a hint of morbid voyeurism, the Memento Mortem is an entrancing gadget that never stops being exciting to use. The first time you tour the ship, unlocking events out of sequence and having only scattered notions on how everything connects, its nonetheless thrilling every time you unlock a new death memory. Obra Dinn has one of the best gameplay/story integrations of any game I’ve played, since the investigative focus and limited player abilities ensures you are getting more familiar with both the mechanics and the storyline at the same time, with everything you do.

The story is also wonderful, with plenty of twists and turns that easily drove me to constantly want to learn more. I remember when a very early death scene had something crazy in it that made me think, “kinda blew the big reveal right at the beginning, didn’t ya?” But no, I had no idea just how much was in store for me after that. Inevitably I found myself bonding with the crewmen on the Obra Dinn despite them barely qualifying as characters beyond a single death puzzle each. Most aren’t voice-acted, nobody’s animated and plenty of them are little more than background characters in the ultimate narrative of the vessel, but seeing them pop up constantly and piecing together their individual journeys through the boat’s sordid final voyage, always culminating in their untimely death, gave me a camaraderie with these pixels that I never expected going in.

Speaking of pixels, the 1-bit artstyle is fascinating to look at, there really aren’t any other games like it in our current generation. I will admit it gets somewhat tough on the eyes after a few hours, but I couldn’t put the game down and come back later, I had to walk through the death scenes a few more times and try to piece together another fate before logging off for the night. The web of characters and murders and storylines is commendably complicated without losing the forest for the trees, I can only imagine how long Pope must have spent detailing it all out. It really is a remarkable feat of narrative design how well Obra Dinn’s mystery works in the end of it all.

One particular accolade I need to mention is how many different languages Pope localized his game into. Unlike regular games, this is an insane dedication to international audiences considering how many core mechanics rely on deduction through English customs, idioms, and accents. So many elements would need to be entirely redesigned (even down to the journal’s sentence structure like “[Name] [Died] [by Murderer] [With Qualifier]“) that I can’t believe this game currently supports 14 different languages.

If it’s not obvious, I highly recommend this game to literally anyone. I’m being very vague on the progression and details because you really should go play it with as few spoilers as possible, not because there’s some game-altering twist like in Doki Doki Literature Club or Undertale, just because it’s a very unique experience you’ll only ever get once. I am incredibly sad I can never play Obra Dinn again and get the same feelings I did linking clues and deducing fates the first time around. Don’t ruin that for yourself, go enjoy it and don’t rush yourself through the game. That forlorn boat will give you as much time as you need.