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Return of the Obra Dinn


DisturbedSwan
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Started this last night, I went in almost completely blind only knowing that it was set on a ship and was a puzzle game made by Papers Please creator, Lucas Pope.

 

The first thing you notice is the visuals, it has an old school Macintosh look about it, you can change it to LCD, Commodore and other old school looking visual designs in the settings but I stuck with the original and it is incredibly cool. Quite migraine inducing though and a bit weird, definitely takes some getting used to but it gives the game such a unique vibe and style to it that I've never really experienced before.

 

I am absolutely useless at Puzzle games so I knew I was going to get stuck a lot. I didn't know I was so useless at them that I'd spend the first twenty minutes aimlessly walking around the ship not knowing I'd had some equipment to pick up on the lifeboat before I could do anything though :lol: 

 

Once I got a book from the lifeboat things clicked into place. You have to study the whole book (the game pops up with a notification telling you so) to find out various bits of information like a sketch of the entire crew, a glossary of nautical terms, a crew manifest, a map of the ship and a load of blank chapters that have yet to be filled. Your job is to find out what happened to everyone aboard. After getting the book you get a compass with a skull symbol on the top.

 

The book itself has a very dense, slow, real feel to it much like the various papers/passports/stamps you handle in Papers Please. Things are explained to you in a brief tutorial and information section in the book but it doesn't hold your hand at all and just lets you get on with it once you know that you're trying to find out the fate of everyone aboard the Obra Dinn and roughly know the ways that you go about that task.

 

So essentially it's a murder mystery game. You walk up to a skeleton on the floor of the ship, hold your compass over it and a 'memory' will play out where you'll go back in time and see how that person died, with time completely frozen in the memory. Once in the memory you study details like weapons certain people are holding and faces to try to determine who they are and who they've killed, eventually marking in the book their fate once you've come to a conclusion. One scenario leads to another so you may find a skeleton which leads inside to another skeleton which unlocks another memory and so on until you've navigated through a stream of consciousness  to fly through a whole scene and hopefully come up with a solution. One scene leads straight into another too so it's got a fantastic flow about it.

 

It's a little bit obtuse though, similar to Papers Please. It can feel frustrating to not really know at all whether you got a guess right or not and just have to assume your deductions are correct despite it possibly affecting the next scene and the suspects/victims that may come out of that. All you know is whether you got a person's fate correct (at the moment I just have one person ticked off I believe) but don't know if you've got their identity, murder weapon etc. correct so it can interfere with others in a particular scene.

 

The game starts from the end as well and goes back in time, so the first chapter is literally 'The End' and then you go back and find out how the fuck that all ended up happening. Early days but so far it's intriguing, obtuse, mysterious and incredibly compelling all at the same time. I do wish I wasn't so confused by everything as it does feel like I'm just being swept along without fully understanding everything but fingers crossed everything clicks into place after awhile. Definitely one of the most unique and innovative games I've played in a long time.

 

Spoiler

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Cheers for the summary @Blakey

 

Definitely going to get this but (similar to you) I had very little idea what it was about or what it involved. It had my attention purely because I was a huge, huge fan of Papers, Please and have been looking out for the next Lucas Pope game.

 

Haven't got anything off Steam for aaaaaaaaages though so once I manage to get back into my account i'll probably make a purchase. 

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  • 5 months later...

I’ve played this for just over an hour. Blakey gives a pretty thorough description of how it works.

 

In terms of knowing whether you are right or not, once you have entered the fates of three people (name, cause of death and by whom if relevant) the game will then tell you if that information is correct or not. I happened to have the fates of those three people correct so the game then “imprints” those facts into the book. I don’t know yet what happens if you are incorrect.

 

But in the course of the first hour alone I was flying back through memories and chapters, in most cases only being able to fill in the cause of death (and sometimes not with 100% confidence).

 

It’s a very interesting and unique game. It looks beautiful and the music is very well done as well. 

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Up to three hours in this ridiculously addictive game now. Solved 9 fates correctly so far.

 

How the game notifies you if you are right or wrong is more straightforward than I thought - basically the game tells you every time that you have solved three fates correctly. So you know at that point that everything else (that you inputted all the information for) is at least partially wrong.

 

The game also grades crew members according to how difficult it should be for you to identify them. There are little triangles above each person’s picture. One triangle means easy and three triangles means difficult. So you know that you should be able to identify the people who are graded “easy”.

 

The game contains characters of multiple backgrounds and languages and that part reminds me of The Last Express. 

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  • 7 months later...

I picked this up after hearing it compared to Outer Wilds. So far its about listening to sounds of people dying horribly and trying to identify who they are.

 

I mean I hate being super reductive like that, but so far it's really gross and not enjoyable. I'm sure there's an interesting narrative beneath the monochrome guts and viscera but I dont know that I'm interested in finding out right now.

 

Edit

I tried this some more. Got 9 identities I think, out of 60. I still really dislike it. The mechanic of unlocking memories is really tedious and the monochrome visuals make it really hard to understand what you are seeing sometimes

 

I was expecting something a bit more textual, like diary entries and ledgers and stuff. Rather than this time travel thing where you watch people murder each other. It weakens the narrative imo because all the major bits of story tend to be linked to massacres. It's a far cry from the really interesting relationships you could explore in Outer Wilds

 

You're supposed to piece it together based off their position on the ship and relationships to each other but it results almost in a sort of pixel hunt to see if you can find different people at different points of time. It doesnt really make you feel like a detective or you're doing an audit or anything like that, it's just a repetitive and boring time travel game

 

 

So yeah I really hate this lol

 

Edit 2, 15 out of 60 solved. I dont know why I keep trying to give this a chance. I keep wanting to find some thing in it that wins me over but its just a very hard to look at game of Cluedo unfortunately

 

I keep hearing such great things about this game from critics I respect but there just doesnt seem to be anything here really

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  • 10 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Started it today, NS (docked) and not sure if I can really add much to the comments above.

 

Played for around 1 HR and solved 3 fates, and unlocked various parts of the story, but I'm never actually too sure of whether I'm doing things right (when more unlocks) or if I'm just stumbling blindly onwards (maybe that's part of the experience..)

 

It's caught my interest though, so I will continue.

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I've done 4 hrs and I'm not really finding much fun here either. I seemed to unlock various flashbacks but none ever really seem to give quite enough clues, in particular who the people are - so I'm lacking much enthusiasm to continue (I'm hitting the point where I either give it a break, of reach for a guide - I'll opt for the former, so I may return to this another time, and probably start over).

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I think it feels a bit like tackling the Times cryptic crossword, when you're actually just in the mood for the quick clues in The Sun.

 

Papers Please was enjoyable to a point, but then felt a bit too much like doing actual work to be fun

 

So I get what they're trying to do, and why some love them, but it's not the degree of escapism I want.

 

e.g. I enjoyed about half the puzzles in The Witness, but when later ones just became more complex variants on a repeated theme the fun went.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well. This is one of the most over-rated games I’ve ever played in my entire life. I don’t like it, at all.

 

I spent ages going “what the fuck am I meant to be doing”. I had to resort to a guide, as I was absolutely clueless. And after an hour of playing it, I just don’t give a fuck. 
 

So I’m done with this. I cannot be arsed with it.

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