Return of the Obra Dinn

[Unkillable Cat]

Lmao anthropology. The history of exploding pirates maybe? What a pedantic asshole. You sound like a Resetera admin

Anyone remember there being pirates in Obra Dinn, exploding or otherwise? Let me know if you do.

And with that I prove my point: You don't know what you're talking about.

 

[Humbaba]

Should I really explain why checking nationalities and technical details is no fun?

Yeah?

And I'm the one who's autistic?

Yeah?

The violence is not worth it

What did he mean by this

little conclusion

I mean, it's a mystery story after all.

Gameplay was not stimulating enough.

You're still not telling us why you think that.

Why don't you try harder to see what I mean before joining the circlejerk

Jordan Peterson is that you? It's not our fault you can't muster a convincing argument.

Also what circlejerk lmao, you're not important enough to have a circlejerk centered around you.

 

[Neuromancer]

Probably, he also "solved" the puzzles using a walkthrough.

 

[Zombra]

I think we should have looked for another game

We all seem to agree on this. I hear Call of Duty is very "stimulating" with lots of bright explosions and percussive gunfire, and has enough violence to make it "worth it".

 

[Nutria]

Has anyone made a decent ripoff of this yet? It should be its own genre by now.

 

[Humbaba]

It should! But the AAA industry shows no interest and a game like this is a lot harder and expensive to make than your usual indie game pixel art procedurally generated roguelite affair.

 

[Spukrian]

I really liked Return of the Obra Dinn. Solving something in is this game gave me that fantastic feeling of being really smart, just like a good puzzle game should. Fantastic music and voice acting. I was very engaged in the story and wanting to know more about what happened drove me on.

Some minor negative things though. I felt that the player should've been more in control over the pacing, I see no reason to not have a run/sprint button and waiting for the magical energy to manifest a new body sometimes felt like it took forever. The story felt like it was building something up a lot to the hidden chapter, but after it was unlocked it felt... I don't know, a bit anticlimactic maybe?

Overall great game! No replay value but there's room for such games too.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Finally got around to playing this, had been waiting for ages and then over Christmas Absalom came up out of nowhere and beat me about the head with a copy. Super cool game. Even though I wouldn't expect the guy would make another given he went from Papers Please to this (Which seems like he just likes doing his own thing as his whims take him) I'd definitely like more along these lines. Really well put together and it was a lot of fun figuring things out. Didn't do any walkthroughs/hints/spoilers though I did end up shotgunning some guesses on one or two people at the end. There's at least one case where a character's fate happens off screen and you learn it through dialog, but there were 1 or 2 more where for the life of me I couldn't find what happened to them and just knew what chapter they met their fates and had to assume. And given how well the clues and hints are placed for everything else I don't doubt that there IS info and I likely just missed it.

 

[Alternative Account]

Played this a few years ago, my favorite game that came out in the last 20 years. Breaking new ground in both mechanics and presentation. It makes you feel like a proper detective as you progress by making deductions from your observations. They way you piece together and experience the story is unlike anything else.

I'll wait for a few more years to play it again, hopefully I'll forget enough by then.

It would have been amazing if there was a second story, like investigating a failed expedition to some ancient ruins. But it is a masterpiece as is, and second story would have been to much to ask for given that it's developed by one person and there's astonishing amount of detail. Still, I'd love to play another game with the same mechanics.

 

[Tramboi]

Played this a few years ago, my favorite game that came out in the last 20 years. Breaking new ground in both mechanics and presentation. It makes you feel like a proper detective as you progress by making deductions from your observations. They way you piece together and experience the story is unlike anything else.

I'll wait for a few more years to play it again, hopefully I'll forget enough by then.

It would have been amazing if there was a second story, like investigating a failed expedition to some ancient ruins. But it is a masterpiece as is, and second story would have been to much to ask for given that it's developed by one person and there's astonishing amount of detail. Still, I'd love to play another game with the same mechanics.

Play the case of the golden idol.
Now.

 

[Alternative Account]

Play the case of the golden idol.
Now.

I actually stumbled on Zombra's thread yesterday, looks promising.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Searched for threads for this outstanding game, and of course unlike Starfilth and Bear Sex 3, the game thread is a measly 5 pages since 2018. Codex really does have shitty tastes, don't it...

If you haven't played it yet, do so NAO (after punching yourself in the nuts). This game is probably better than anything you like.

I will also make spoiler replies to some of the earlier posters here, to show them how brilliant the game design is for this (and to think, it was made by one guy mostly). The thing is, the game has one slight flaw (that you can easily avoid with some self-discipline): if you narrow certain things down to a small number of choices, you can plug them into the game's structure, and use that to figure out which of those is correct. It's essentially like slightly cheating on a multiple choice exam in school, smart people can use that system to figure out stuff they don't really know. But, but, BUT, you can just avoid this by not doing it and only fill in stuff you can prove for sure with evidence, and then you will the true brilliance of this underrated game.

For example:

I do have one question where I'd like a clue: One of the easiest fates to identify is the Formosa guard who's executed by firing squad, as his name is spoken out loud and everything. However, what's troubling me is putting down exactly how he died. Obviously he was shot... but there are four men in the firing squad, plus their commanding officer and finally the Captain himself who reads out the sentence. Any idea on who of these I declare as the killer?

Spoiler

If you look carefully at the scene showing his execution, the 4 men in the firing squad each have a projectile trail of the musketball leaving their gun and flying toward the hung target. 3 of them continue onward after the target, meaning they missed. The 4th stops at the target in an explosion of blood/gore, showing you who killed him.

At around the 38 fates-mark I started to run into trouble, and resorted to brute-forcing some answers. Like the three Russians. I could determine their fates except for their names, so I just switched those around until it clicked.

Spoiler

2 of the russians were seamen, and 1 was a topman (according to the crew list). Per the glossary in your book, topmen got paid more for working the rigging and seamen worked on decks. The one with the ponytail was on the ropes up top in a lot of scenes, so he was easily the topman.

The other 2 were more challenging, but still could be elegantly deduced. One of them could be seen in multiple scenes using a smoking pipe and a bag slung over his shoulder. In the scene where the Indian guy is dying from sickness, all 3 russians are eating near their hammocks and playing cards, and one of the hammocks has this bag with the pipe slung on it, with a number you can use to look him up on the crew list. Once you know who he is, by a process of elimation, you know the third russian's name also. Elegant.

Then I did the same with the four Chinese topmen

Spoiler

Same exact thing here, if you take your time and examine each scene very carefuly, and then use deduction (sometimes in very challenging ways), you can deduce each individual Chinese sailor without having to use brute force. One of the most useful tricks for sailors (whether Russian, Chinese, or British) is to use the 2-3 scenes on the Gun Deck with their hammocks. The hammocks have their numbers from the crew list, and you can often use this information in addition to the other stuff going on in the scene (or even related scenes) to deduce their identities. It can be extremely clever, for example, the 2 British seamen who are brothers, one is killed by falling cargo and the other by the Kraken. From the crew list, you can quickly find 2 seamen with the same last name (brothers), but which one is which?

To figure this out, you can start from the scene with the Indian sailor dying of illness again (because of the hammocks in it, this is one of the most crucial scenes in the game, you should be coming back to it all the time). The journal tells you that one of the two brothers was in this scene. So if you can only find one of the hammocks with those 2 guys numbers, you can know which one it is and map the name with the face. However, neither of those 2 hammock numbers is in the scene.

So the leap of deduction here is to realize it's probably one of the 4 white-out hammocks you can barely discern at the edge of the scene. There are 4 people the journal claims who are in the scene who are not actually shown, so this makes sense if they are in those 4 partially rendered hammocks. And the leap is to find another scene that displays that part of the gundeck using other landmarks. You can do so so, and from that one, figure out the numbers of those 4 hammocks, and thus which brother it is. Simply beautiful, what other game gives you this kind of intelligent gameplay (other than maybe Ultima Underworld)?

The game logged my playtime as 6 hours, 47 minutes, so it's not a long game. But WOW is it a fun ride, especially for puzzler fans.

If you avoided the brute force stuff and actually did all the deductive work, it would be closer to 13-15 hours. It's the kind of game you really gotta take your time to get the most out of it and see its true beauty.

 

[El Presidente]

I beat this game last night and I'm still processing my final thoughts on it. A couple friends and the internet at large have been selling me this as the greatest murder mystery game ever made, and I also soon realized the game has an elimination process not too unlike crosswords or, for much better examples, Sudoku and Picross, which are two games I love very much. So it has all the perfect ingredients and all the hype from all the right people, and because of that I think I'm leaving the Obra Dinn a little bit... disappointed, for lack of a better word. It absolutely doesn't deserve this word though, it's a great game and I had a lot of fun with it, many of the deaths are incredibly clever and entertaining to figure out, but it honestly still didn't live up to my (admittedly very high) expectations.

In short, despite being an entirely different beast altogether, I think The Last Express is the far superior older brother of this game - and make no mistake, Obra Dinn is Lucas Pope's The Last Express, there's no doubt in my mind about it, at all. He most definitely played it, loved it, and tried his hand on a very well thought variant, with the great addition of having the "identity/death/murderer" puzzles. If you guys haven't played The Last Express yet then I couldn't recommend it enough (well maybe keep your expectations in check to avoid what ended up happening to me with Return of the Obra Dinn ). It's also highly replayable too over the years, you can't see all there is to it in your first run, I remember in my fourth or so playthrough I was still finding new things and dialogues.

The one major con of Obra Dinn IMO is the repetitive nature of the moment-to-moment gameplay while you're unlocking all the corpses. I'm not sure if he could've structured the game in any other way, but really, hours of "go to memory, get ready to leave it, compass starts freaking out because there's another corpse inside the memory, click corpse, bring ghost thing to present day, ghost thing will slowly fly around to corpse's place in the present, rinse and repeat for dozens more corpses", I mean, c'mon. I genuinely disliked this unlocking structure. The other part of the game, which is analyzing the scenes, figuring out the deaths and putting all the story elements together, is stellar. Truly great, fun stuff. But this unlocking business is no small slice of the game. I think half of my play time was spent in this "unlocking phase". I have a feeling it would feel much better if all the corpses of a chapter would appear at once on the ship or something. I understand having much of the story presented in reverse was a great way to show how things were escalating in each of those situations, so he'd have to make that work as well. Maybe unlock each chapter of the book in the last page, then put all the corpses on the ship and show you the timeline on the map. I dunno, anything but having the player go from corpse to corpse for hours just to unlock all the timeline, having to watch the ghost animation for each one of them.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

To be honest, I don't really get your criticism. Any kind of deduction (including detective work) includes a process of elimination by default. Once you know this guy was there, or did this, you know he wasn't at this other place, and so on. So there is nothing wrong with this per se. I am wondering if you mean that you can use elimination to "cheat", ie once you know that it was one of 2 people, you can plug them into the game questions, and figure out who is the correct one without actually knowing, but if that's the case, as I mentioned in the post above, you can absolutely avoid this and deduce exactly the exact fates. But maybe I am just not understanding what you meant exactly.

As far as how the chapters unfold, with the repetitive follow the compass sequences, I also had similar thoughts, but honestly, it's not such a bid deal, you just gotta do it once, and it provides a certain broad overview for each chapter, before you delve into each scene in full detail.

 

[El Presidente]

To be honest, I don't really get your criticism. Any kind of deduction (including detective work) includes a process of elimination by default. Once you know this guy was there, or did this, you know he wasn't at this other place, and so on. So there is nothing wrong with this per se. I am wondering if you mean that you can use elimination to "cheat", ie once you know that it was one of 2 people, you can plug them into the game questions, and figure out who is the correct one without actually knowing, but if that's the case, as I mentioned in the post above, you can absolutely avoid this and deduce exactly the exact fates. But maybe I am just not understanding what you meant exactly.

What? But I didn't criticize that I'm ok with the game having a process of elimination, I even praised that. Maybe I didn't word it very well? The only thing I criticized was pretty much the corpse unlocking stuff, which I found to be really annoying, and it makes for half of the game's play time. Yeah we all loved the scenes and murder analysis, but who loved unlocking corpses in this game? I can't imagine many people did, and it takes hours.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Maybe I misunderstood then, cause it sounded like Elimination > I was disappointed.

For me the unlocking didn't take that long. I would go through all the unlocking scenes without looking at them too deeply, then start from scene one in depth.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

P.S. Thanks for The Last Express recommendation. The Steam version has some bad reviews, is the GOG version good?

 

[El Presidente]

Also, about the story, first a small disappointment with the ending:

Spoiler

When you enter the monkey paw and you see the doctor shooting the monkey inside the lazarette (after a dialogue where he answers "nothing good" when being asked what he's doing), that was a big plot twist moment in my mind, like "ooohhh shit, so doctor Henry Evans was up no good the whole time? Holy shit I wasn't expecting this twist ". Then I entered the next corpses with big anticipation to see how that would unfold, aaaaand... it just didn't. Turns out dr. Evans sent the monkey inside the room just to leave a corpse there and bring its paw with him because uhhhh somehow he also knows about the existence of the magic corpse-reading compass, and knew that in the future someone would enter in it for him, or something? That didn't make a lot of sense to me, for a moment the game teased that there'll be a huge twist involving the doctor but it ends up being nothing? Or did I miss something and the doctor really was scheming? I don't get it. Made me think for a second that the doctor might've even poisoned the two indians that get sick in one of the early chapters (in my mind they both got sick because they drank from a barrel that got contaminated by the corpse of the stowaway boy that was hiding)

Few other things:

Spoiler

Guessing that the two english ladies and the boy that fled with the doctor would also be in Africa too was a bullshit stretch. I left the guess that they were alive in the UK (just assumed they went back to England) for a long time in the book, until I changed it to Africa and then the game acknowledged the correct answer. It's been 4 years in the game's timeline since the disappearance of the ship, why would these people still be together? So they became like a family? I don't suppose there's any way to get this information inside the ship?

Spoiler

About the formosans' agenda, the shell they were carrying, their magic treasure chest that spits magic fire that burns human limbs to ashes but only stuns mermaids, the "sea nazguls" that invaded the ship to rescue the mermaids... did I miss something or none of that was explained? According to dialogues, it was imperative that the treasure chest and the shell should not fall on the sea monsters' hands, but then it did and there was just no consequence? Didn't get any of that too, but I enjoyed this game's approach to this mystical stuff, I just couldn't figure out the lore behind any of it.

 

[El Presidente]

Maybe I misunderstood then, cause it sounded like Elimination > I was disappointed.

For me the unlocking didn't take that long. I would go through all the unlocking scenes without looking at them too deeply, then start from scene one in depth.

I should've done the same

P.S. Thanks for The Last Express recommendation. The Steam version has some bad reviews, is the GOG version good?

Yes grab the GOG version, it's the original game. Steam's "Gold Edition" (lol) version is a mobile "remaster" with awful and hideous mobile UI and it introduced dozens of bugs for no reason.

 

[Lord of Riva]

Also, about the story, first a small disappointment with the ending:

Spoiler

When you enter the monkey paw and you see the doctor shooting the monkey inside the lazarette (after a dialogue where he answers "nothing good" when being asked what he's doing), that was a big plot twist moment in my mind, like "ooohhh shit, so doctor Henry Evans was up no good the whole time? Holy shit I wasn't expecting this twist ". Then I entered the next corpses with big anticipation to see how that would unfold, aaaaand... it just didn't. Turns out dr. Evans sent the monkey inside the room just to leave a corpse there and bring its paw with him because uhhhh somehow he also knows about the existence of the magic corpse-reading compass, and knew that in the future someone would enter in it for him, or something? That didn't make a lot of sense to me, for a moment the game teased that there'll be a huge twist involving the doctor but it ends up being nothing? Or did I miss something and the doctor really was scheming? I don't get it. Made me think for a second that the doctor might've even poisoned the two indians that get sick in one of the early chapters (in my mind they both got sick because they drank from a barrel that got contaminated by the corpse of the stowaway boy that was hiding)

Few other things:

Spoiler

Guessing that the two english ladies and the boy that fled with the doctor would also be in Africa too was a bullshit stretch. I left the guess that they were alive in the UK (just assumed they went back to England) for a long time in the book, until I changed it to Africa and then the game acknowledged the correct answer. It's been 4 years in the game's timeline since the disappearance of the ship, why would these people still be together? So they became like a family? I don't suppose there's any way to get this information inside the ship?

Spoiler

About the formosans' agenda, the shell they were carrying, their magic treasure chest that spits magic fire that burns human limbs to ashes but only stuns mermaids, the "sea nazguls" that invaded the ship to rescue the mermaids... did I miss something or none of that was explained? According to dialogues, it was imperative that the treasure chest and the shell should not fall on the sea monsters' hands, but then it did and there was just no consequence? Didn't get any of that too, but I enjoyed this game's approach to this mystical stuff, I just couldn't figure out the lore behind any of it.

The game is great, I expected some wild twist with the "final" corpses and it's just literally "these things were never cleared up so you can't figure it out as easily by reverse conclusions."

Was very anticlimactic and hampered the game somewhat but aside from that I could only critique the graphics, that while stylish, made it hard for me to see certain details that would have made things easier for me (but that may be a me problem, I even had trouble identifying the uniforms) which is pretty nitpicky.

I hope to see more games like these, it was fun crunching through this one.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Also, about the story, first a small disappointment with the ending:

Spoiler

When you enter the monkey paw and you see the doctor shooting the monkey inside the lazarette (after a dialogue where he answers "nothing good" when being asked what he's doing), that was a big plot twist moment in my mind, like "ooohhh shit, so doctor Henry Evans was up no good the whole time? Holy shit I wasn't expecting this twist ". Then I entered the next corpses with big anticipation to see how that would unfold, aaaaand... it just didn't. Turns out dr. Evans sent the monkey inside the room just to leave a corpse there and bring its paw with him because uhhhh somehow he also knows about the existence of the magic corpse-reading compass, and knew that in the future someone would enter in it for him, or something? That didn't make a lot of sense to me, for a moment the game teased that there'll be a huge twist involving the doctor but it ends up being nothing? Or did I miss something and the doctor really was scheming? I don't get it. Made me think for a second that the doctor might've even poisoned the two indians that get sick in one of the early chapters (in my mind they both got sick because they drank from a barrel that got contaminated by the corpse of the stowaway boy that was hiding)

Few other things:

Spoiler

Guessing that the two english ladies and the boy that fled with the doctor would also be in Africa too was a bullshit stretch. I left the guess that they were alive in the UK (just assumed they went back to England) for a long time in the book, until I changed it to Africa and then the game acknowledged the correct answer. It's been 4 years in the game's timeline since the disappearance of the ship, why would these people still be together? So they became like a family? I don't suppose there's any way to get this information inside the ship?

Spoiler

About the formosans' agenda, the shell they were carrying, their magic treasure chest that spits magic fire that burns human limbs to ashes but only stuns mermaids, the "sea nazguls" that invaded the ship to rescue the mermaids... did I miss something or none of that was explained? According to dialogues, it was imperative that the treasure chest and the shell should not fall on the sea monsters' hands, but then it did and there was just no consequence? Didn't get any of that too, but I enjoyed this game's approach to this mystical stuff, I just couldn't figure out the lore behind any of it.

I didn't really delve too much into the back-story stuff. The game is meant as a detective game, and we are not provided data for the background stuff (who are the sea creatures, what exactly are the shells, etc), so I stuck to the shipmen fates, but I felt like the story was good for this kind of game, very atmospheric, and mysterious enough, with enough unanswered questions to keep things real.

Spoiler

As far as the women and the boat, once you figure out that the doctor is the one who wrote you from Africa, and he left the ship on that boat with the other 3, it became pretty obvious that the game meant for you to interpret that as them all being in Africa. From a real life perspective, that might seem overly simplified, but there is only so much you can cover with a game like this, and all in all, it was well done imo.
If you really want a RL explanation, this was in very early 1800s, so perhaps it wasn't very easy for 2 women and a boy to travel around from Africa back to Europe at that time, compared to say late Victorian age.

For the shells, some onboard wanted to keep it away from them, but others were only driven by greed (wanted to sell the shells), others traded them for returning the ship, etc. Although that was also beautifully done, the third mate traded the sea creatures freedom with the shell in exchange for a promise to return the ship, which they did, but they got him with semantics, by that point no one was alive onboard. I thought that was a nice touch.

I hope to see more games like these, it was fun crunching through this one.

Yeah, definitely. I think there is a bit of a Renaissance in interesting cerebral games lately, aside from this one, Talos Principle 1 and 2, Outer Wilds, Chants of Senaar, probably others I don't know about. The industry really needs this bad, as most modern games have such braindead gameplay.

 

[El Presidente]

Yeah, when it comes to puzzle/adventure games we're eating good. They're also making a sequel to Case of the golden idol too.

I heard nice things about this one but didn't play it yet

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Any other games besides The Last Express that scratch that detective itch? From what I understand most (like the Sherlock Holmes games) don't really offer as much in terms of deduction/observation.

Before Obra Dinn, the only games that I felt like were great in this department were Ultima Underworlds and Arx Fatalis (you really had to think in them).

 

[Arryosha]

I had the same repetitiveness complaint, which I felt could have been addressed by having fewer murders to solve but more complex mysteries to work through to solve them. That would also have allowed for more development of the characters. But definitely a great game nonetheless.

This thread has a lot of great recommendations:

Games with good "Detective Mechanics"

 

[Borelli]

Finished this today, while the logical deduction mechanics are good, the atmosphere, music and the voice acting is what makes the game top notch.

Have the exact same two nitpicks as Yahtzee does in his reviews, first one is that when you enter the memory for the first time you can't leave whenever you want but have to wait,
not a problem late game with 10+ characters in a memory, but early game it's like there are 2 guys in a room i checked them out in 15 seconds why i have to sit for a whole minute.
Second one is that early game when you are just getting into it and learning about the book the game likes to blast music in your ear, similar to music in Papers, Please intro i guess.

Had to look up hints twice, first time i did not realize the numbers on the hammocks correspond to the crew number,
second time because

the guy who plays dice on the left with the chinese on the sketch i also though was chinese, i mean, he was in the interrogation scene so i thought he was the one talking since he held the formosan prisoner,
even though he looked african when you zoom in, in the sketch his skin was a different color

and couple more mistakes i made were

the guy who rows a boat and gets speared by a mermaid, he understands chinese, has similar clothes as them, but his voice sounded irish/scottish or something so i swore he should be Alexander Booth

i also logically thought that since this is 1800, a white american would outrank a black one

the people who took the boat in Doom part 1, i logically deduced that since they went 5 minutes before the kraken, they must have been eaten by it, and i was correct.
Only later did i realize that the official solution is that you can clearly see the boat is in the air in the later chapters but my focus was always on the kraken lol.

could not realize which brother was which so i went guessing, the hammock hint could have helper here.