Return of the Obra Dinn

Shortly after Lucas Pope’s successful Papers, Please in 2013, he started development on Return of the Obra Dinn, which launched in 2018. Though I didn’t closely follow the game at all, I heard enough positive word of mouth that I eventually bought the physical PS4 version through Limited Run. Waiting for the opportunity to play it this way was well worth it, as it’s easily one of the best puzzle games in years.

In 1807, the Obra Dinn, a merchant ship that had gone missing for five years, has reappeared with none of its passengers aboard. As an insurance inspector for the East India Company, it is your job to determine the fates of all sixty passengers and crew to accurately appraise the ship.

The Obra Dinn was lost for years.

Since figuring the fates of sixty people acts as the main puzzle driving the player forward, it’s fortunate that the rules and mechanics are pretty simple. While exploring the Obra Dinn, you have a book that catalogs critical information, starting with a map of the ship’s planned route, a labelled map of the ship, the crew manifest, three sketches of life aboard the ship and a glossary of nautical terms. The rest of the pages are blank and are filled in as you explore memories with the Memento Mortem compass. When you use the compass over a corpse, indicated by flies, you view that person’s last moment frozen in time, after which the details are added to the book. While it’s possible you might figure out someone’s fate right away, determining identities is more challenging. Each person’s picture starts out blurry and clears up once the game recognizes that you have enough clues at your disposal to figure out who they are, plus each photo has a Deduction Rating (zero to three triangles) that determines the difficulty in identifying them.

Your own deductive skills will help determine each person's identity and fate.

Once you get the ball rolling, the game reveals its true depths as you work your way towards a completed book. Every single detail in each memory can hold valuable information, including the languages and accents people speak. You’ll often have only fragments of information to go on for each person but piecing them together feels cathartic. Because of how I played, I had times where I went at least an hour without figuring something out but then suddenly noticed a crucial piece of information, including relationships and proximities, that led to more effortless deductions of multiple people. It helps that even though you’ll likely do a lot of backtracking, you don’t even need every detail to get the right answers, since each memory can have multiple layers of information that different players will pick up on each time. This is handled so well, in fact, that I rarely got confused as the game naturally ramped up its difficulty and only sought guidance for one specific fate towards the end of the game.

Some memories are more straightforward than others.

What really helps with narrowing answers down, however, is that although you can go back and revise the logbook as needed, fates are validated in threes. Basically, every time you get three identities and fates correct, they are typeset into the book. Seeing which fates are validated can help clue you in on validating another fate or give you an idea of where you went wrong on other fates. It’s worth noting, however, that fates aren’t always deaths and some of the fates you can select are red herrings to throw you off. Also, you can solve a few fates through educated guesswork or brute forcing certain combinations like I did.

As you determine the fates of everyone on the ship, you’ll slowly piece together what happened during the short journey. Without spoiling anything, going through the story in non-chronological order helps fill in certain gaps and can lead to surprising discoveries. Though the story itself may not be 100% original, it’s still well-written and has a powerful conclusion, both in the chronological ending and in the final chapter you can actually access.

What also helps the game stand out its unique graphical style, intentionally emulating early Macintosh games by featuring a 1-bit monochromatic color output. Even with only one bit of color depth, however, the game conveys a lot of detail and still looks impressive, sometimes even beautiful in its own right. Players can also select multiple color options based on the style of old-school monitor they prefer.

There's a surprising amount of detail despite the 1-bit color depth.

Great effort also went into the voice acting and subtitles, purposefully done minimally for maximum effect when determining identities and fates by voice alone. It helps that there are subtitles for each of the characters’ native languages, which can help when figuring out each language. I also liked the music and how each chapter had its own unique theme that more or less fit each plot thread. When each theme runs out, it still plays an ambient tune that enhances the investigative atmosphere and fits the subject of exploring moments of death.

Even if you haven’t played Papers, Please, Return of the Obra Dinn is a puzzle game well worth playing. Its unique presentation combined with fine-tuned gameplay and a good story make it thoroughly enjoyable no matter what platform you’re on.