Return Of The Obra Dinn

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Return of the Obra Dinn stands as something wholly unique, a challenging detective game that empowers you to solve its mysteries through actual investigation.

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.

A beautifully constructed and powerfully atmospheric mystery that you really have to work to...