Return of the Obra Dinn (PC)
In 1802, the trade ship Obra Dinn left port with 60 souls aboard but never made it to its destination. Five years later, the vessel appears once more in English waters, no sign of any of her crew or passengers to be found. As an inspector you are sent aboard to learn the fate of those who never made it back, but as you poke around the deck of the ship you find very little to guide your work. Your forensics may have failed you, but luckily you were sent with a special item that will give a supernatural look at the events that went down aboard the Obra Dinn: the Memento Mortem, a stopwatch that can take its user back to the moment of a person’s death.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery game where your evidence takes the form of snapshots in time that you’re freely able to walk around in. The Memento Mortem can only capture the exact moment of a death though, and while you’ll be able to hear some of the noise and conversations that came before someone meets their unfortunate end, the actual instant someone dies is the only space you are able to see. Luckily you are free to walk around the immediate area of someone’s death, getting a good look at who might be present, what circumstances might have lead to their demise, and even eventually finding the bodies of others in those memories to start chaining together a sequence of deaths that tell the story of how things went so awry on the Obra Dinn. When you begin though, your early investigations actually show you the final few aboard the Obra Dinn who died, the intrigue of how things progressed to such a point heightened as you keep building your picture of events backwards based on how each death can tell you more about the things that happened before or open up new areas of the ship previously locked off.
Luckily, you won’t need to keep the identifies of 60 characters in your head for this hefty investigation. A journal is provided with a manifest of everyone who was aboard the Obra Dinn and can be opened at most any time to reference the specific chronological placement of a death, and thanks to a sketch artist being one of the crew members on the Obra Dinn, you also have a set of images with the faces of every crew member who you’ll need to label. Over time you’ll be able to start attaching info to these individuals, usually starting with their cause of death as the game will helpfully match a person with their face in your journal so you don’t need to strain too hard to identify them. The game does use a rather striking style meant to evoke the look of early home computers that tried to compensate for limited colors with creative detail placement, this appearance and its black and white palette helping to pull the player’s mind back to an earlier time and feels appropriate for a story set in the early 19th century. The music lends an unusual hand in this, sometimes feeling like an appropriate jaunty tune for a journey on the high seas and other times mysterious or even a little energetic as you walk around the scene of a murder. The soundtrack can give life to events as well or even impress upon you the unusual circumstances you witness or almost serve as bells tolling for the unfortunate souls whose fate you now witness frozen in time. The music will fade after a while though if you need to contemplate things in silence, and while you can adjust certain aspects of the display to make things more visible, this visual presentation’s mood suits some of the darker sights in the memories well and adds to the mystery at the cost of a few little moments of clarity. Since every memory you enter is an unmoving moment in time, if someone is being attacked from a certain angle it can be a little hard to notice a small implement like a knife entering flesh, and your job as inspector requires you to specifically identify every passenger and their cause of death unless you want to leave the ship early and get the weaker ending for it.
Luckily, there is some leniency in regards to the cause of death. So long as its close enough in concept the game may deem your judgment correct, but in order to prevent too much guesswork, you’ll only be told if you made the right call once three people have had their fate correctly entered into the journal. Since you’ll often need to figure out who even died, how they were killed, and sometimes even the identity of their attacker, this does minimize the efficacy of trying to brute force solutions, although when there are only a few people from a certain country or from a similar family on board, it is possible to slip in a few guesses by swapping the names until you have them right. For the most part though, your work aboard the Obra Dinn is going to be a heavily involved investigation where only a few clues are given easily. Sure, you’ll definitely be able to spot the cause of death for a fair few crew members, but not every death can be visited with your watch and some even have fates outside of losing their life. The journal has many possible causes of death to sort through, some you’d never expect to see but arise anyway and others red herrings to ensure that the mysterious circumstances aboard the vessel won’t become immediately clear. Even as you see certain events and think you must have figured out what caused the Obra Dinn to be emptied of its crew, you’ll find more and more information as you see more of the past, one chapter even containing the last two fates but only available once you’ve figured out the rest of the story. That chapter is unfortunately rather plain and not excised for the sake of being some interesting bit of information that made the fate of the Obra Dinn click into place, but even placing all the details of how the story comes together is a fine little puzzle in itself.
While some memories will have pretty easy clues like saying a name aloud, as you start to make your way through more memories you’ll find clues require a much closer eye to uncover. Rather than always keeping your eye on the death being focused on you may need to wander off and see the activities of those not involved, this sometimes the only way to know how a certain person could have met their end. Other times you may be able to reach another point in the ship where people are going about regular business and can start to observe relationships, there being many clever and subtle interactions that make things click. What kind of work someone is doing, what they’re wearing, and many other tiny elements can be the breakthrough needed to finally pin an identity to someone, and when the journal starts sealing in those sussed out identities it’s satisfying to know your sharp eye thinned down the options a tiny bit more.
The actual grander story of the Obra Dinn’s misfortune may not be as complex as one might think entering it, but the fact that each crew member’s reaction and involvement in it is given thought and leads to small but meaningful events along its course fleshes out that narrative into something more fascinating. Human drama can arise amidst such circumstances and emotions can lead to harsh decisions, and since Return of the Obra Dinn isn’t trying to spoon feed you too much information to preserve its meticulous investigations, there’s also a more natural air to these moments. Some memories hardly have dialogue at all and since you’re seeing the point of death you’re not often going to be able to witness things like people honoring the fallen or plotting their next action. Once you’ve seen every memory, returning to them later to pick apart small details can be a bit less exciting than getting those huge reveals and unexpected developments, especially since a few characters are meant to be deductions done by process of elimination rather than having that “aha!” moment of a series of clues slipping into place. If all 60 people required a laborious investigation though it would likely get tiresome, so a good range of difficult to deduce identities and ones that have simpler clues ensures you’re not adrift too long after you have all the information available and just need to put it in the right place.
THE VERDICT: Return of the Obra Dinn brings you back to the moment of death for many of the ghost ship’s missing crew, but it’s not merely so you can figure out how that individual died. Memories are layered trips into understanding how characters interacted and how the plot unfolded, opportunities to peer into the small elements of a person’s life that can end up being a decisive clue into figuring out who they were. While deaths are often huge events, quietly walking around the murders and accidents to find the subtle elements of a person’s life can provide just as much information, the gradual investigative work more satisfying because it often leans on less obvious clues and clever deductions. The helpful bumps from your journal keep it from being overwhelming as well, the work surprisingly manageable despite its complexity and the methodology used perhaps more fascinating than the still intriguing course of events aboard the Obra Dinn.
And so, I give Return of the Obra Dinn for PC…
A GREAT rating. The Memento Mortem is an excellent tool used for a unique method of solving a multi-layered mystery, perhaps the only issue with it being that most of the 60 characters are defined more by what they are than who they are. Naturally as an investigation these are the important details, but it does mean the story you piece together from the jumbled sequence of events could have been more compelling if you got to know the people involved better. There is still a strong sense that these people did live their lives as members of a functioning ship though, many people appearing in memories they don’t give any clues to their identity during it but are present because they are doing work, talking with a friend, or simply living their life in the background. Return of the Obra Dinn knows how to place the kind of clue that can be easily overlooked until you realize you must tighten your focus on even the small goings-on while also rarely feeling like you must extrapolate from overly precise details, and by having moments where the clues are a bit clearer, deductive reasoning can start to angle you towards more productive lines of thought instead of being flummoxed thanks to how many characters could have conceivably been in play. It’s that balance of giving you some details up front and expecting you to dig deeper for others that makes unraveling the truth feel possible while still granting the player moments where they feel clever for spotting a detail the game didn’t shove your attention towards.
Finding the truth hidden in the clues on hand is the core of a mystery, and Return of the Obra Dinn’s handling of such clues makes it a remarkably more interesting investigation than even something like footage of an event can sometimes allow. Walking about the space of a murder gives you more of a vantage than a single lens into the world would, and since the end of a life can be more complex than simply how that person was killed, it gives you more room to find clues that can tie together a large batch of individuals without resorting to the kinds of evidence that might strain believability. Personally collecting all the relevant info and realizing without outside assistance what a new angle of attack for finding more useful details could be makes the investigation of the Obra Dinn engaging and personal without being obnoxiously difficult, this artful and creative mystery game crafting those memories of death intelligently so it wouldn’t need to compromise its concept or structure to get important information into your hands.