GAME CLEAR No. 273 -- Return of the Obra Dinn

Return of the Obra Dinn (2018, Multiplatform)

Developer: Lucas Pope
Console Port Developer: Warp Digital
Publisher: 3909 LLC.
Clear Version: PS4
Clear Platform: PS4 Pro/PS5
Clear Date: 1/23/26

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Why should I care?
Obra Dinn is a thrilling mystery paired with brilliant and unique audiovisual presentation. A great time if you enjoy making fuzzy deductions.

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If it weren’t for Return of the Obra Dinn, we wouldn’t have the great game about being an early 19th-century insurance investigator. You may not have thought we needed such a thing, but I can assure you we’d be poorer as a society for its absence. Upon starting the game, you assume the mantle thereof, tasked with determining the fate of the eponymous merchant ship. The Obra Dinn had been missing for five years, presumed lost at sea, but it has returned, and thus certain interested estates must be compensated accordingly. Armed with your wits, your notebook, and a pocket watch that can see the past, you’ll unravel a story of “adventure and tragedy” at sea that will have you both scratching your head and feeling like a genius throughout.

That pocket watch is the crux of it all, of course. There wouldn’t be a ton of forensic evidence left on a ship adrift for half a decade. Called the Memento Mortem, the timepiece allows you to see the exact moment of death — frozen in time — of any corpse (or remainder thereof) you happen upon. Additionally, you’re treated to the audio and voice-acted dialog of the moments preceding said fatality. You may then explore the scene and nearby vicinity of the ship in that precise moment to your heart’s content. Using what you glean, you are to determine the fate of all sixty of the Obra Dinn’s passengers and crew. Because of the nature of your trusty watch, figuring out how someone died is often quite easy. The trouble is determining who each individual is. It’s not like they walked around the ship with nametags on. This is vital for the completion of the insurance report, however.

Doing your best to figure out these details is where the fun comes in. Seldom is definitive evidence provided. You have a list of names and their corresponding occupations and nationalities. From there, you must associate all of the deaths you see with the appropriate name.

Sometimes, you’ll get lucky. Someone will have said their name just before they perished. This is exceedingly rare. Other times you’ll have to make assumptions based on their accent, attire, where they sleep, whom they associate with, or what they tended to be doing. Your only lens into the past is through the many poor souls’ moments of death. You will often have to glean more about folks by their actions during these scenes. Usually this will be more informative than their fates alone.

Frequently, this means you will be forced to make guesses. You may feel 95% confident about those guesses, but they will nevertheless seldom be definitively, incontrovertibly true. This is not a true deduction game in that way. You are not expected to completely fill out the book with guesswork, though. Every time you get three fates correct, the book magically confirms them as true. These things then become fact, a scaffolding you can use to make further educated guesses and logical leaps.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a tale of greed, betrayal, and disaster. You will have a general idea of the events that took place long before you can put names to the faces of the many valiant and many dastardly seafarers. Reviewing the events with increased clarity, however, can be far more rewarding than even the initial viewing. I certainly was never bored despite rewatching and exploring certain critical events a dozen times or more. The thrill of sliding another piece of the puzzle into place is more than worth the anguish and hand-wringing of wondering what blasted detail I’m supposed to notice to figure out how to distinguish the identity of, say, the 4th Mate’s steward.

Critically, by the time I got to the end of the game, there was basically no one for whom I was like “how the hell was I supposed to know that?” There was one small detail I couldn’t unearth and had to cheese out by process of elimination using the book’s lock-in mechanic. I ultimately googled it after finishing the game discovered it was actually plainly presented in one scene, I just missed it because of my own tunnel vision and despite repeated viewings. It is both quite challenging and completely reasonable to complete the book with the information presented. Puzzling nirvana.

I’m also certain that pacing the decks of the Obra Dinn time and again were made tenfold more enjoyable by Lucas Pope’s singular aesthetic vision. The mood and atmosphere of the task at hand is brought to life beautifully with the game’s 1-bit color scheme and excellent score.

The visuals were inspired by old black-and-white Macintosh computers. It works astonishingly well in a 3D context and makes for a game that looks unlike any other I’ve played. Very infrequently, it can make a face or small detail a bit difficult to parse, but it was obviously never insurmountable. The look also has a starkness to it that suits the setting of a doomed English ship.

The music complements the action just as brilliantly. When you are walking about the ship in the present, there is in fact no music. You must simply sit with the stillness of the graveyard that the ship serves as. Maybe you’ll be treated to the creaking of wood or the sound of falling rain. In the past, though, upbeat strings herald moments of valor, mystery, and strife. Booming brass accompanies visions of the horrors of the sea.

The atmosphere is as brilliant as the tale it exists to present and an equal part of the gestalt that makes this game so special. It took me awhile to get around to this game, but I’m so glad I did. It’s a special and creative work whose mysteries are as fun to solve as they are to marvel at. I enjoyed playing through it with my partner on the couch, which is something its slow pace and detective gameplay are suited for. Perhaps making Obra Dinn a social experience runs a bit contrary to the intended vibe of the game, but I don’t regret it one bit. However you choose to play, I hope that you do. The East India Company is counting on you.