Lucas Pope detective game? Sign me up. You’re a surveyor for the East India Company who is investigating what happened on the Obra Dinn, which was declaired missing at sea in 1802, but after 5 years has drifted into port with no visible crew aboard.
Your job is to figure out the identities and fates of each of the crew members, using exploration, logical deduction, and a healthy bit of logical elimination. Oh and a magic pocket watch that can let you witness what happened at the exact moment of someone’s death.
Return of the Obra Dinn is drawn entirely in a stunning 1-bit graphical style, which is an impressive technological feat considering it’s a first person exploration game. The quality of the effects such as blood, gunshots, large crashing waves, is incredibly crisp especially when the game only uses two colours. Hell you can even change those two colours for an aesthetic you like, and by “change those two colours”, I mean “change the monitor you’re using”.
When you board the Obra Dinn, you’ll find most of the ship inaccessable, except for the top deck, and a corpse outside the captains quarters, and then you’ll get the only two items you’ll be using for the whole game, the book, and the pocketwatch.
The book is where you document the story of the Obra Dinn. You start with a floorplan of the ship, a crew manifesto detailing the names, roles, and nationalities of the 60 people aboard the Obra Dinn at the time it set sail, and some artist sketches depicting life aboard the ship. Thankfully the artist sketches includes the faces of all 60 passengers. Unfortuntely, faces aren’t names, and thats where the game’s challenge comes in.
After getting the pocketwatch, if you approach a corpse, you’ll hold the pocketwatch up. Clicking on the corpse will play a short animation before blacking out the screen and beginning the scene. You’ll hear what happened leading up to the death, and then at the exact moment of the death, you’ll see the scene. Not just the victim and the cause, but also who else was around nearby, and what everyone was doing. With enough information, you’re able to piece together a timeline, and eventually figure out whos who.
Here’s a little tip for when you’re past the half way point and jumping around trying to solve stuff, when you mouse over a corpse you’ve already seen, the watch will display a time. The hour hand points to the chapter, the minute hand points to the section. So a time of 5 past 10 means Chapter X Part 1.
This game does not include a hint system, but it does have a validation system in place, which is to help confirm information, whist also disincentivising guessing until you’re down to very few remaining options. For each person, you need to pin a name to a face, and also discern how they died, and if they were murdered or killed in battle, you have to figure out who exactly killed them too. Figuring out exactly how is the easy part. It’s the who that will always be more difficult. Once you correctly enter any 3 fates, all 3 will be validated at once to confirm your progress. This means that if you’re confident on two, and are tied between two or 3 options for a third, then and only then can you reasonably guess. It also means that if you have 3 guesses, and it does not validate, then one of your guesses is wrong. If you get a forth guess correct to validate, then the one that was not validated is wrong.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/653530 £16.75
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/return-of-the-obra-dinn £15.49
Switch: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Return-of-the-Obra-Dinn-1633060.html £17.99
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