An Insurance Adventure with Minimal Colour
Developer:
Lucas Pope
Release Date:
Oct 18, 2018
Oct 18, 2019 (for consoles)
Platforms:
PC/ Mac/PS4/ XB1/Switch
Price:
$19.99
In Return of the Obra Dinn, the player takes the role of an insurance adjuster for the London office East India Company in 1807. The Obra Dinn, insured by the East India Company, had previously gone missing in 1803 as it was to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, but since washed up in port with all of its sixty-man crew dead or missing. The player is tasked to determine the fate of all of the crew members, including their names, where and how they met their fate, if they were killed, who their killer was, and their location should they be alive.
The game is played out from a first-person view, allowing the player to explore the Obra Dinn, using a monochromatic dithering style that mimics approaches that games on early home computers like the Macintosh had used to simulate shading and color. To help complete the task, the player is given a log book that includes a drawing of all the crew members, the crew roster, and layouts of the ship. They are also given the "Memento Mortem", a pocket watch-like device that can be activated when the player encounters one of the corpses on the ship. The Memento Mortem plays back the audio of the moments before the person's death, and allows the player to explore the area around the frozen moment of death to identify who was present and other visual details. Once players have seen each moment, the log book automatically fills in some of the details of that event (such as the location, the visual identity of the crew members present at the event, and the dialog heard in the moments before death), allowing the player to cross reference this information with other information already learned. In some cases, the Memento Mortem will react following this process to reveal another death, guiding the player to where that corpse lays before repeating the investigation process. Certain sections of the ship are not available until the player has observed all the death moments in a certain area. The player can review these memories at any time to observe any new clues they might have missed following later investigation.
Ultimately, Return of the Obra Dinn is a large logic puzzle requiring the player to use deductive reasoning to determine the fate of each crew member; fates are selected from a predefined list of verbs - because some of the deaths are visually ambiguous, the game allows for some leeway and accepts more than one solution. The game does not provide explicit clues for how each crew member died or towards their identity, requiring the player to narrow possibilities down by exclusion. The player can refine their guesses as they gain more information; the game is only over once the player has correctly identified the names and fates. When a player has properly established the names and reasons for death for any three, the game affirms this information to the player, locking those changes and effectively reducing the complexity of the puzzle.
Destructoid 9.5/10
Washington Post 9/10
Gamespot 9/10
metacritic
opencritic
RELEVANT THREADS
Return of the Obra Dinn OT (original release)
Return of the Obra Dinn was amazing! Any other games like it?
Return of the Obra Dinn is the best detective game since Crime and Punishment and Her Story
Lucas Pope talks Switch Port
Papers, Please OT
ABOUT THE DEVELOPER
Lucas Pope is an American-born video game developer, currently residing in Saitama, Japan. He is best known for independent, experimental games, notably for his 2013 game Papers, Please and his 2018 game Return of the Obra Dinn, both of which won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize as part of the Independent Games Festival, among other awards
