Return of the Obra Dinn Analysis

Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery game based around a ship called the Obra Dinn that magically showed up to port one day after going missing, with nearly all of the crew unaccounted for. You have to climb aboard and figure out what happened to them all.

To start with, this is one of those games where you should really go in with as little information as possible. The brief synopsis I can give of the gameplay loop is that you're essentially going around to various corpses, and utilizing a magic watch you can go back to the very moment that person died. With this, you need to piece together the names and causes of death of each of the crew members.

That's the least spoilery way I can put it so from here on out I'm going to assume that you've played. I dunno how many spoilery things I'll mention afterwards.

Return of the Obra Dinn is fucking great. I don't know why I haven't played it until now. It's really a story that could've only been told within its medium.

I should probably mention some dumb video essayist first, because originally I was gonna write about that. There was someone who came up with the idea of 'Shandificaition' in games, basically that a videogame can explore not just how A becomes B, but also how C, D, E, F, and G connect into that even if they're tiny and irrelevant.

It's an interesting idea that was entirely wasted on exploring that Fallout: New Vegas has farms that make food for people. Important for world building, incredibly boring because New Vegas doesn't bother taking the idea that much farther. It feels like an entire essay built around complaining that Bethesda didn't make realistic settlements in Fallout 3.

But if there is a game that really takes this idea and runs with it, it's Return of the Obra Dinn. It's a game that does its best to ask how every single point corresponding to every single letter of the alphabet connects to eachother and how that creates the story.

The Obra Dinn has around 60 crew members on it, and had a similar number of corpses strewn about it. In a medium with a narrative more linear, it'd be near impossible to keep track of so many characters without getting lost, but Return of the Obra Dinn not only manages to do this but makes tracking these stories an important part of the game as a whole.

Finding an Indian man dying of disease leads you to seeing a series of Russians gambling. A certain character executing another comes back for different stories as you progress. One character's untimely death leads to another's murder.

It's a story that's so directly personal because these characters can be seen in so many different ways. You can see how they work, how they fight, how they die, and you're rewarded for paying as close attention as possible to all of the scenes.

And to top this off, it does it in a way that doesn't feel like you're simply given all the answers. RotOD carefully places its corpses and tells their stories in such a way that each death is belivable within the narrative. It never feels like you're given a corpse for the sole reason that this is a videogame and you need to figure out the information, which goes a long way in keeping up the satisfaction of solving the mystery.

Also, yes, they do answer the question of "what do they eat" with the butcher, before your dumb ass asks. More than that, it becomes part of the story too.

Sometimes you need to see what other people are doing within one man's corpse. Other times you need to carefully consider what might've happened between a time gap. For a lot of crew members, you need to rely on conjecture and assumptions.

I will say that the rule of 3s around solving crew member deaths sometimes led me to brute forcing identities. Maybe this is the idea, but it feels a little cheap. You'll just have a few vague hints to go on but you won't be sure which name attaches to which face exactly near the end.

For example, the brothers. Which ones which? Who knows until you get a rule of 3 on one of them. The Chinese midshipmen have a similar problem, and a few other crew members who largely aren't given much more information.

It'd be a duller game without gradual fact solidification, much more difficult in a way that isn't fun. One mistake would require you to go over the entire crewlist again. And, in this way, it does free up room for the player to actually make the conjectures the game asks.

Oh yeah this game has really cool visuals by the way. The developers probably knew they couldn't make something that was terribly realistic without it taking up too much time, so they leaned heavily on an artstyle in order to create the game's scenery.

Because of this, and since it's so interactive, the fact that everything is so low poly doesn't really matter so much. It's a clever way to do a lot with a little, and fits in with the general aesthetic more than you might think since it's similar to the ship drawings you'll be relying on.

Return of the Obra Dinn is great. It's a game that'll probably come up in my head if anyone ever asks about great narrative games. It's told in an amazing way, but the story underneath is so simple and human, and it manages to do all of this while not being ashamed of the fact that it's a video game and still has difficulty incorporated within to make uncovering everything feel rewarding.

Best of all, it really is something you couldn't adapt to another medium without losing something important along the way. Maybe the same could be said for a lot of games, but here Obra Dinn feels as much tied to the medium of gaming as the Mona Lisa is to the medium of paint.

is good. You should've already played it if you read this far down but if you haven't then play it. Or don't. Or do. Or don't. Or do. Or don't. Or do. Or don't. I'm not your mom. Yes I am. Play it.