This article is part of our new experimental series, Backlog Club, where we (Nintendo Life!) pick a game that's likely to be on our list of "games we should get around to playing", and then we (NL + you!) spend the next month playing that game. This is the halfway point, the Part One of two, where we stop for a minute to check in with the game, and how much we're enjoying it.
For June 2022, the vote decided on Return of the Obra Dinn, and god, it's good, isn't it?
I never did homework as a kid. Not because I didn't like to learn, mind you — I'm a big fan of books and that — but because it all felt a bit pointless sometimes. Since the homework grades didn't count towards your end-of-year grade (which was the only thing that actually mattered), then it seemed like a waste of my very limited free time. I got good grades, why did I need to do extra work, too?
But one thing I did love was logic puzzles. I would get these gigantic magazines full of them for birthdays and Christmas, with plenty of picrosses to solve and those grids where you have to decide which person ordered the salmon on a Tuesday. I would happily, voluntarily do this homework-like activity, because it challenged me, and it provided me with that tasty, tasty dopamine from a job well done.
Return of the Obra Dinn, Lucas Pope's tangly, piratical work of logic puzzlery, gives me that same hit of dopamine — but much, much larger. As much as I loved those puzzle omnibuses, they didn't have music. They didn't have visuals. I didn't get to see Andrew eating salmon on a Tuesday, or Susan being speared through the heart on a Thursday. And, as it turns out, everything is more fun when it's pirate-themed.
ROTOD begins on a boat. Not the boat, mind you. Not the Obra Dinn. You begin on a rowboat, but you don't know that immediately — you're greeted by a screen the colour of seasick and the voice of a grumpy man, tasked with escorting you to the Obra Dinn. When you reach the Obra Dinn, and clamber up its sides, you come face to face with death almost immediately: There's a corpse, festering away, right there on the deck.
Murder! Mystery! Maggots, probably! Your mind reels with the possibilities. You're excited to find out more.
As the player, you don't know what to do. You don't know who you are, or why you're here. Your avatar in this world is naught but a pair of hands and the occasional voice line, with the instruction to investigate the Obra Dinn. But oooh, isn't a corpse an exciting thing to find? It carries so much potential: Murder! Mystery! Maggots, probably! Your mind reels with the possibilities. You're excited to find out more.
That's when your ferryman calls out: "Oiiii! It's too 'eavy!" Returning to him, you take the cargo that you brought with you: A book, and a watch. The book is empty. The watch is magic.
Like the logic puzzles of my childhood, Obra Dinn expects me to make simple deductions. How did the crew of the Obra Dinn perish? But it's not as simple as that, not really — they all died in different ways, killed by different people, perils, and plot twists, and it's through watching each of their final minutes of life that you'll have to find out these facts, as well as their identities. Some are clear — they'll say their names, or have some identifying factor on their person — others will take hours, and some clever deductive work, to solve.
So far, I've guessed at one person's identity based on the fact that she's wearing a wedding ring, and there were only two women on board that I hadn't identified, and one was a "Miss Jane Bird". Another I have identified by the fact that he was carrying a lot of guns, which surely means that he is some kind of important gunsman. And it's only getting harder from there. It turns out that most people, in their final moments of life, aren't going around yelling their full names, which is understandable, but makes my job a lot harder.
I can't say I mind too much, though, because the atmosphere is so incredibly delicious. The aesthetics — which are perhaps the most noticeable thing about the game, so it's weird that I'm mentioning them so far down — have very little to do with the game, and they're a bit divisive, but I don't mind. The entire game is done in low-fidelity one-bit graphics, emulating really early PC games. It's crisp and yet fuzzy at the same time, since everything in-between dark and bright has that "ditherpunk" texture, reminiscent of old computers.
And why did Lucas Pope settle on this look? The answer, from his PlayStation blog, is basically "because why not", which is extremely admirable:
The original motivation for Obra Dinn was simple: I wanted to make a modern 3D game that looked like the old 1-bit games I played on my family’s Macintosh Plus while growing up.
Obviously, that meant quite a bit of tinkering, adding outlines to everything and making sure that the dithering didn't just make everything look like a sludgy mess. The almost-illegible one-bit graphics also add to the mechanics of the game: You need to identify people, but their faces are blurry, it's hard to see how they died, you're not sure who is who. It would be much easier if it was just a regular 3D game. I'm glad it's not.
The music is a shanty-esque, bombastic soundtrack that combines staccato strings and ominous tolling bells... it makes me feel like I'm on a pirate ship.
The music, also by Lucas Pope, is a shanty-esque, bombastic soundtrack that combines staccato strings and ominous tolling bells, and even though I've never been on a pirate ship, it makes me feel like I'm on a pirate ship. It has the same wonderfully evocative titles as the table of contents in your book: Soldiers of the Sea, Unholy Captives, and The Calling give you an idea of what you might encounter, yet no idea at all.
But it's the musical stings that make the game tense and compelling. Every time you enter a murder-vignette, every time you use your magical watch, and every time your logic puzzle deductions are confirmed, a frantic little violin riff plays. It makes me feel like I'm in trouble, with a little frisson of nervousness, like the music that plays when your house gets robbed in The Sims. It's perfect.
I haven't completed Obra Dinn's book yet. The game takes its time leading you through the 60 deaths on board the doomed ship, luxuriating in the tension of telling the story from end to beginning, and I can't say that I mind. I feel like I'm watching a grungy movie about horrible things happening to dithery pirates, slowly pulling at the narrative thread even though I don't know what's on the other end. I see glimpses of it — I can log someone's death as "struck by hooves/leg/wing", despite the fact that there appear to be few animals on board, and I have seen the tentacles of some great sea-beast — but I cannot yet see the whole, and that's the best part of a story.
"All will make sense in time," reads the note that I have from the start. Presumably, Henry Evans — my mystery client — is right, but to be honest, I'm quite enjoying the part where nothing makes sense at all. Homework never felt this fun.
Oh, and one of the best things about Obra Dinn is the developer log that Lucas Pope made alongside the game. But it's REALLY spoilery. So: Don't watch it unless you've finished, okay? Promise? Okay.
How are you enjoying the game so far? Have you finished it yet? Tell me your thoughts in the comments!
Comments 13
There's a perfume advert with Keira Knightley in it which has music that reminds me of the Obra Dinn music and every time the advert comes on I look up and I'm disappointed it's not the Obra Dinn.
So does this resemble (in terms of gameplay) those old MacVenture games that saw NES ports (Shadowgate, Déjà Vu, Uninvited)? I've always wanted to play this one...
Just finished it earlier this week. Total runtime for me was about 13 hours, which means most people can probably finish it in 10 hours. Second half is easier to deduce than the first, by virtue of a smaller pool of possibilities. The story never slows down, though.
The amount of details Lucas Pope packed into this game — details that can facilitate your deduction — is marvelous, as is how he can evoke feelings for characters without any assistance from the intentionally-degraded visuals. Once you have a broad sense of the whole story, you feel bad for the tragedy that ensued because of the one true scoundrel on the ship.
If I ever meet Lucas, I would thank him for this game. I'd also ask him if he used this as the basis for one of the deaths (mild spoiler):
https://tabletopwanderers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Exploding-Kittens_shuffle_01_web.jpg
I really enjoyed this game (thanks for motivating me to play it Kate!), finished it last week.
I found the beginning quite challenging and overwhelming, but the further I progressed the easier it became. And the story was really engrossing and unexpected.
It captured my attention more than most games and I found myself thinking about it pretty much constantly while not playing, piecing together little bits of information and mulling over the identities of certain people.
I never knew I liked detective games so much, I really hope Lucas Pope makes more like this.
And I forgot about backlog club... so I guess I'm putting down Aggelos and picking this back up.
I absolutely loved it, was a great game that I loved to the end. Really glad I played it.
I did enjoy this game. At this point, hopefully people found out that they need to pay for more attention to details than you might expect a detective game to need. Very good. Currently working on Hollow Knight.
A masterpiece. I'm so glad I managed to get a physical copy of this game, before it becomes unaffordable.
Played this a few years ago, it’s a masterpiece of game design once again from Lucas Pope. Unique and never played a game that made me feel more like an actual detective, very little hand holding, it’s left up to you.
@I_Go_by_Many_Names I'm so happy they decided to leave out that stupid gamifying of games on this console. I know I can technically ignore achievements, but I always have to actively decide to not fall into that trap whenever I play games on my Vita or PS4.
This is a game that I enjoyed starting, but got distracted and fell off the bandwagon. I'm looking forward to finishing it now (not out of obligation, but because it really was just such a fun puzzle).
This is making me want to play the game, but I’m still halfway through Earthbound with a bunch of other games I have backlogged (and I also just acquired my first 3ds game in years - Ever Oasis - after making the decision not to take my switch in my upcoming family backpack around Italy)
In other Backlog Club news, just when I thought I was getting bored of Slay the Spire I finally beat Ascension level 5 with ironclad yesterday after several failed attempts and suddenly I can’t stop thinking about it again…
Am I missing something? As much of this game touches on many pirate fiction-associated tropes, it doesn't seem to involve any actual pirates (or piracy, for that matter). The Obra Dinn isn't a pirate ship, it's an East Indiaman. Why are these articles describing this as a pirate game?
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