Reviewers Liked
- Unique art style
- Logic puzzles
- Deft, minimal characterizations heighten your investment to the narrative
- Stunning monochrome visuals
Reviewers Didn't Like
- Easy to miss some portions of the story
Return Of The Obra Dinn
Return of the Obra Dinn stands as something wholly unique, a challenging detective game that empowers you to solve its mysteries through actual investigation.
-- As reviewed by ign.com
89
8.9
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Expert reviews and ratings
By gotgame.com
on
Return of the Obra Dinn is a must play not just for fans of puzzle games, but fans of games in general. The game achieves exactly what it sets out to do, and then does so much more. For the price you pay, there's a lot to explore, and multiple endings...
By nintendoworldreport.com
on
Many games over the years have used the idea of solving somebody's cause of death as their main gameplay hook, but no game I can think of has ever done it quite the same way as Return of the Obra Dinn. The newest game from designer Lucas Pope (developer...
By ztgd.com
on
Return of the Obra Dinn is a unique experience worth every penny. I can’t recommend this game enough. There is nothing quite like it.
By New Game Network
on
It's easy to respect something like Return of the Obra Dinn. Puzzling together clues from each death scene is tricky and rewarding, but the motivation for doing so is lacking. There's no one to care about on the ship, no reason to uncover the mystery other than to prove you've done it, and it holds the game back from being exceptional.
By Trusted Reviews
on
Return of the Obra Dinn is a bleak ditty but offers solid meat for puzzle fans to get their teeth into, with a similar love of paperwork and information cataloging that won fans for Pope's previous title, Papers Please.
By Bit-tech.net
on
There are a couple of areas where Obra Dinn falters. The voice acting, while for the most part fine, does betray hints of amateurishness. In particular, a few accents can be hard to decipher, especially problematic in a game where an accent can be the key to unlocking a person’s identity. Also, much as I love the art-style, it can make certain scenes difficult to take in. I’ve wrongly labelled several causes of death because I couldn’t clearly see what was happening.
By in.ign.com
on
This investigative story skillfully straddles the line between an adventure game, a puzzle game, and a gruesome, supernatural, Moby Dick-themed version of Guess Who. At its core, it's a detective game, but you're not out on a mission for justice or...
By ign.com
on
Return of the Obra Dinn stands as something wholly unique, a challenging detective game that empowers you to solve its mysteries through actual investigation.
By GameSpot
on
It also delivers a wonderfully evocative method of storytelling as you gain glimpses into the lives of each person on board at vital moments along the Obra Dinn's journey and piece together who they were, what they had to deal, what motivated them, and how they responded when tragedy struck. You may only see them in scratchy monochrome stills and hear them in brief snatches of urgent conversation, if at all, but if you're paying attention then you should feel like you know (almost) every one of these sixty people intimately by the end of the game.
By PC Gamer
on
A beautifully constructed and powerfully atmospheric mystery that you really have to work to...
By Engadget
on
So how do you categorize a beast like gaming on the PC? With decades of titles to pluck from (and the first port of call for most indie titles, too), there's so much to choose from. Gaming on your PC adds the benefits of (nearly always flawless)...
By theguardian.com
on
Built by Rockstar, wealthy makers of Grand Theft Auto, the game has a scope and intricacy no other company would now dare (or perhaps could afford) to create. It continues the studio’s tenacious pursuit of the blockbuster video game as a form of interactive cinema, pushing the player along somewhat inflexible, pre-written narrative lines. But for those who yield to its spell, this is game-making at its most grand and astonishing.
By eurogamer.net
on
"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...
By Le Journal du Geek
on
Return Of The Obra Dinn est un tour de force artistique, un Cluedo géant où tout pas en avant est un fantastique fuel pour la satisfaction et l’âme du joueur. Parce qu’en attendant, Lucas Pope, en quatre ans, il vous fait ENCORE un jeu novateur et parfaitement ficelé tout en faisant progresser le medium. Tranquille.