The game is set in 1807 with the player assuming the role of an unnamed investigator for the East India Company. The Obra Dinn, a merchant ship missing for five years, has reappeared off the coast of England with no surviving crew or passengers. The player is dispatched to the ghost ship to perform an appraisal, reconstruct the events of the voyage, and determine the fates of all sixty souls aboard, providing a cause of death for those deceased or a probable current location for those presumed living. Investigation is accomplished through the use of the "Memento Mortem", a pocket watch capable of recreating a death at the moment it occurred. The game, played in first-person perspective, uses a "1-bit" monochromatic graphical style inspired by games on early Macintosh computers.
Gameplay
The Memento Mortem being used to investigate the cause of death of one of the crewmembers
The Obra Dinn, insured by the East India Company, went missing in 1803 as it was to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. It has since washed up in port with all sixty passengers and crew dead or missing.[1] The player is tasked with determining the fate of all souls on board, including their names, where and how they met their fate, who or what their killer was, and their location should they be alive.[2]
Return of the Obra Dinn is effectively one large logic puzzle.[3][4] The game is played as a first-person adventure game, allowing the player to fully explore the Obra Dinn, using a monochromatic dithering style to mimic the shading and color methods of early computer games.[5][6][7] To help track their progress, the player is given a logbook that includes a drawing of all the crew members, the crew roster, and a plan of the ship. They are also given the Memento Mortem, a pocketwatch-like device that can be used on a corpse. When activated, the player will hear the events that transpired in the seconds immediately before death, and can then explore the moment of death frozen in time. This is used to identify who was present, to capture moments in other rooms or on other decks, and to make note of details at the scene. These are used to help connect the faces of crewmates to their names and roles. While exploring a moment of death, the player can use the pocketwatch again to explore the fate of corpses captured in the vision.[8]
With each death, the logbook automatically fills in basic information. The player is tasked only with naming those present and accurately describing their cause of death. Naming the crew is done through small clues, inferences, and logical deduction – mainly, narrowing possibilities as the game progresses. The causes of death are selected out of a catalogue, and some deaths will accept more than one solution. The player can revise their logbook as they gain more information, but to deter guesswork, correct "fates" are validated only in sets of three, with the exception of the last six fates discovered in a playthrough, which are validated in pairs.[5]
Plot
The Obra Dinn, an East Indiaman trade ship, departs from Falmouth to the Orient in 1802 with 51 crewmen and 9 passengers. The ship fails to meet her rendezvous at the Cape of Good Hope and is declared lost. Five years later, the vessel suddenly reappears off the coast of England with every soul either dead or missing. The East India Company sends a newly appointed "Chief Inspector" to determine what happened aboard the ship. The inspector receives a copy of the Obra Dinn's logbook, drawings of the passengers and crew, and the Memento Mortem from Henry Evans, the ship's surgeon. The Mortem, when used on a corpse or its traces, enables the user to observe the exact moment of the corpse's death, frozen in time. With this and the logbook, the inspector sets out to unravel the fate of all 60 aboard.
The Obra Dinn carried a number of passengers, including a traveling musician, a wealthy Englishwoman and her companion, and two Formosan nobles and their guards transporting an exquisite treasure chest. Initial calamity struck only a few days in, with one crew member crushed to death by unsecured cargo, and two others dying of pneumonia despite Evans' best attempts to save them.
Shortly after reaching the Canary Islands, the Obra Dinn's second lieutenant is committing theft when the musician catches him in the act; the lieutenant stabs him and frames one of the Formosan guards. The captain, bound to obey Company regulations, has the man executed by firing squad. The lieutenant then organizes a small party of men to steal the chest and take the nobles hostage aboard two of the ship's launches.
Three mermaids then ambush the boats, killing most of the group. The mermaids' attack is stopped only when the male Formosan uses a magical shell pulled from the chest to stun the mermaids at the cost of his life. The lieutenant ties the boats together and returns to the Obra Dinn along with the captured mermaids, only to be fatally shot by the surviving Formosan guard as he approaches. As they are brought aboard, the mermaids, who hold shells of their own, lash out and kill several crewmen before they can be locked safely away in the lazarette.
The captain orders the ship to return to England. The mermaids use magic to summon a terrible storm, allowing a pair of sea demons mounted on giant spider crabs to attempt to rescue them. The demons are killed, but the crew suffer heavy casualties. Shortly after, the mermaids summon a kraken, which kills more of the crew and badly damages the ship. The captain, having figured out the truth, goes to the lazarette and kills two of the mermaids before the third sends the kraken away. The surviving mermaid is set free, but only after agreeing to guide the ship back home.
The surviving passengers and some of the crew decide to abandon the Obra Dinn and make for the western coast of Africa, but only Evans and his boat reach safety. Evans kills his pet monkey in the lazarette and keeps its paw. The handful of survivors still aboard gradually turn on each other, before finally trying to seize control of the ship. The captain manages to kill them all in hand-to-hand combat, but with his wife already dead from injuries sustained during the kraken attack, he commits suicide with a pistol.
The inspector eventually catalogues the fates of 58 of the 60 souls aboard, leaving shortly before a sudden storm sinks the damaged Obra Dinn. The completed logbook is mailed back to Evans, and an insurance report is written, compensating or fining the estates of lost crewmen, depending on their conduct. A year later, Jane Bird, one of the survivors who fled with Evans, mails the book back to the inspector along with the monkey's paw and a letter saying that Evans had died shortly after receiving the logbook back. The inspector uses the Mortem on the monkey's paw in order to deduce what happened in the lazarette and catalogue the last two fates, thereby completing the whole story of the Obra Dinn for their personal collection.
Development
Over the course of his career, American video game designer Lucas Pope had developed an appreciation of "1-bit" graphics used in many early Macintosh games. Following his prior game Papers, Please, Pope had wanted to use the 1-bit aesthetic in an experimental game, leading him to develop a game engine that allowed the player to move in a three dimensional space, rendered in a vintage style.[1] Pope wanted to ensure the game was visually legible from most angles, challenging him on some of the rendering aspects. Separately, he found that while the 1-bit graphics worked fine when displayed in an on-screen window, at full screen resolution, players suffered from motion sickness. Rendering routines were modified to create the equivalent of motion blur for this dithering approach. At one point, Pope had considered creating a cathode ray tube render effect, but opted against this.[9]
With the style in place, Pope worked backwards to determine what game to make. His initial idea was one where the player character repeatedly died; the player would see the events of the death from their corpse, and would then be transported back one minute to manipulate the environment so as to recreate that death. However, Pope found this technically challenging, and instead sparked the idea of using freeze-frame flashbacks depicting moments of death to tell a story.[1]
The game's narrative took the longest portion of development. Pope teased Return of the Obra Dinn in 2014 while completing Papers, Please, anticipating a release the next year.[1] Instead, it took four more years. Pope released a limited demo for the 2016 Game Developers Conference, which had only six fates for the player to deduce.[10] Feedback from this was positive, so he began to expand the game's story more than he expected. Internally, Pope created spreadsheets to link all the various characters and their fates, and to ensure that players would be able to logically follow chains of deaths.[10] This ended with him writing the necessary dialog for some scenes and hiring voice actors, provided by locals Pope auditioned, who could mimic the accents of the time period.[1][10]
With a more complete story, Pope created a new demo to take to PAX Australia in November 2016, adding thirteen additional characters to the original demo. However, unlike the first demo, the deaths were presented out of chronological order, and players were confused about how to progress.[10] Pope realized this confusion would become worse with the full cast of characters. He found a solution by having ten events in the narrative serve as a catalyst for deaths, breaking the story into sections and allowing the plot to be more digestible to the player.[1][10] Dividing the game into "chapters" then led to the creation of the logbook, serving as the timeline for the game and cataloguing the ship's crew in the same manner as the real East India Company.[10]
Pope stated he was not worried about how well Return of the Obra Dinn would perform financially, as he was still earning appreciable revenue from Papers, Please. He considered Obra Dinn a passion project and did not pressure himself with deadlines or marketing.[1]Return of the Obra Dinn was released for macOS and Windows computers on October 17, 2018, published by the Japanese-based studio 3909. Versions for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, ported by Warp Digital, were released on October 18, 2019.[11][12] Physical editions were released through Limited Run Games for the PS4 and Nintendo Switch in 2020.[13]
Return of the Obra Dinn received "generally favorable reviews", according to review aggregator website Metacritic.[14]Polygon's Colin Campbell recommended the game, saying "Return of the Obra Dinn takes the whodunit's conventions and twists them into kaleidoscopic narratives that are perplexing and delightful. This isn't merely a great game, it's the work of an intense and creative intelligence."[22] Patrick Hancock for Destructoid commented that Pope had "knocked it out of the park" as a follow-up to Papers, Please, and commented that even after finishing the game, he "could not stop thinking about" it.[16]Game Informer's Javy Gwaltney called the art style "visually arresting", and praised the pacing and thought put into the game. However, they were less praising of the ending, commenting that the "ultimate payoff fails to complement the thoughtful gameplay".[17]
The game received praise for being unique. Andreas Inderwildi of Rock Paper Shotgun commented that the game was more than just about logical reasoning, but that players were supposed to take into account how humans would act in an emergency.[23] In his review for Eurogamer, Christian Donlan commented that the graphical style in the game made it "feel like no other", and likened it to Sudoku.[8]Gamasutra's Katherine Cross praised the game's minimalist feel, and that the characters "came off as people".[24] Tom Marks for IGN described the game as being full of life, despite the use of still images to convey the story.[19]
Some outlets favorably compared the game to Her Story, a similar mystery-driven game where the player must work out the timeline of events and come to conclusions using numerous video clips. Campbell commented that the two games both made him reach for "a notepad and pen",[22] whilst Andrew Webster writing for The Verge commented that both games were about creating clarity even in confusing situations. Webster went on to comment that there were many ways to enjoy the game, that a player could obsessively find the mysteries in the game, or simply enjoy the "grim, shocking story".[25]
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