I can see the brilliance in Return Of The Obra Dinn, a first person puzzle game that puts you in charge of identifying all passengers of a boat just returning to port, figuring out how they were killed, and who - or what - caused their deaths. With a novel framing of being part of an insurance company and doing all of this for insurance reasons - using a mystical watch that lets you see the moment of death of any corpse - you navigate the four levels of the boat, watch death scenes, re-watch them, try to figure out who’s who and - if you’re not me - piece together things on your own. I had an okay time with this game that turned sour the moment when I had no new scenes to view and was left to my own devices. I just couldn’t figure anything out, so I resorted to cheating. But this is not the only way this game can go and I still recognize how brilliant it is, I just couldn’t get through the whole thing by myself.
The game’s style is striking and that’s one of the first thing you see, looking like an old Apple II product, with funny option names and a dry sense of humor, this suits the game well although at some points it’s hard to tell what the mess of pixels in front of you is supposed to represent. This can be called style and a conscious decision, but it just annoyed me when that happened. You start with a very small part of the boat available and solve a few easy deaths. These led me to think that the whole game would be somehow like this, a few self-contained skirmishes that you can figure out with a few tricks of deduction. The game cleverly only shows you correct answers if you get three of them at once, so you can’t just try every answer for each character, you’d need to get three right. You also get ‘ratings’ that vaguely hint at how tricky people are to identify, which made it more frustrating when I couldn’t figure out who some ‘easy’ difficulty guesses were.
The boat’s story goes through a few phases with strange creatures attacking and a mutiny taking place, all giving you very vague hints about certain characters while remaining completely silent about others. The game tells you to infer as much as you can from the situations you’re thrown in by trying to piece together people’s identities from where they are on the boat, on photos, how they speak, with whom they speak and what they talk about but a lot of characters are just never well defined going through the story. I had to cheat and find answers for many of them because the game is very sparse with hints. Some of them are pretty straightforward - or even tricky, but were still possible to figure out, which felt really good - but when I got at the end of the story content and was left to figure everything out from already available information, things kinda fell apart.
It’s also not super great moving around, you need to wait for some weird balls of light to slowly show you the way to the next corpse during some segments and when you’re investigating a moment of death it takes a weird amount of time before you can proceed in the identification process. Worse yet is how when you want to move between scenes, you have to do it manually and walk everywhere. I wish you could just track these scenes and go back-and-forth at will. But my main problem with Return Of The Obra Dinn is completely how invested you have to be in order to finish it.
It’s not a tired-after-work-and-want-to-relax kind of game, you have to really put on your thinking caps and maybe I wasn’t in the right mind space to do so. I still can recognize that it’s a neat puzzle game, but for me it was more of a chore than anything else.
