Return of the Obra Dinn Review

By Tom Marks

Almost nothing moves on the Obra Dinn, but it’s still one of the most lively video game boats I’ve been on. Its crew may be long gone, but that doesn’t stop them from having interesting voices and complex stories to tell — most of which involve horrific deaths. I’ve never played a game quite like Return of the Obra Dinn, but now that I have, all I want is more.

This investigative story skillfully straddles the line between an adventure game, a puzzle game, and a gruesome, supernatural, Moby Dick-themed version of Guess Who. At its core, it’s a detective game, but you’re not out on a mission for justice or vengeance. You’re just an insurance evaluator whose job it is to assess the long-since-done damage of a merchant ship called the Obra Dinn, which has mysteriously reappeared after four years lost at sea.

Thankfully, that job is made a lot easier by a pocket watch that lets you view the exact moment somebody died, frozen in time. When you find a corpse aboard the ship, you can enter its memory and hear what that person heard for a few seconds before their death. Then there’s usually a bang or a crunch (or just one final exhale) and the grizzly moment of their doom snaps into view for you to explore and — ideally — piece together exactly what happened.

This is Return of the Obra Dinn’s main hook, and it’s one of the coolest mechanics I’ve seen in a long time. It doesn’t feel like the forced, fake investigation of games like The Witcher 3 or Marvel’s Spider-Man, instead empowering you to hunt for clues and answers that aren’t so obvious. You won’t find highlighted items or hints here, which makes Return of the Obra Dinn as challenging to take on as it is satisfying to complete.

Your overall goal is to fill out a book with the identities and ultimate fates of all of the Obra Dinn’s 60 passengers. Your book comes with a map of the ship, a manifest of names, and a sketch of everyone onboard, but you don’t start with any clue as to which name goes to which picture — a daunting, but also extremely rewarding task. You can only figure out who is who by thinking critically and piecing together bits of information as you explore more death memories.

For example, you may hear one character refer to another by name, but it’s rarely that simple. Over the course of the roughly eight hours it took me to fill out my book, I used what accent people had, what type of hat or clothes they were wearing, where they died, the way others addressed them, the tasks they were doing, the people they were friends with, the bed they slept in, how their pictures were drawn, and a billion other little things to make the necessary connections.

Return of the Obra Dinn doesn’t teach you to use or look for any of that information, but it does do a great job of easing you into its tools and getting you motivated to hunt for the truth. Collecting nuggets of new info reminded me of a point-and-click adventure game, but instead of picking up various items that will inevitably be used in specific situations down the line, I was gathering tidbits about different characters that would hopefully help me solve more fates.

As I unlocked more memories I started recognizing characters all over, giving me a clearer picture of who they were and how they might fit into the larger plot. I was stunned when I unlocked the final memory because I had only correctly identified 15 of the 60 fates by that point. But despite being given no new information, I was able to complete the last 45 just by revisiting memories and looking at events in a new, much more informed light.

I loved hunting for all the stuff I had missed, and I was shocked at just how much there was. Return of the Obra Dinn is so open-ended that it can be hard to understand what exactly you’re looking for at first, but I appreciate that it never felt like it was trying to trick me. That means if you see someone acting like the captain, they are probably the captain, not some seaman there just to throw you off. Honestly, it’s hard enough to fill out the book without any red herrings, which makes correctly putting the pieces together feel fair and well earned.

As those individual fates come together, the strange and enchanting story of what happened to the Obra Dinn comes into light. While there are 10 chapters to the book, you actually start by doing the final one and then jump around as you move backwards from there, and many of them are filled with delightful surprises. You often see the end of an individual scene first, then fill in gaps as you find more bodies — and I enjoyed that there’s plenty that’s never explicitly explained or linked at all.

Return of the Obra Dinn is susceptible to a bit of brute force guessing here and there, but doing so always felt more tedious than just looking for clues like I was supposed to. Your guesses are only verified when you’ve put three correct fates in at once, preventing you from just trying every combination on a single name until you get it right without leaving you floundering in the dark hoping everything is going okay. It’s just the right amount of feedback.

Some of the wording for the fates you choose from can be a little confusing, though. Parsing the difference between someone getting “speared” and “spiked” took just trying one to sort out, and at first I didn’t realize that “drowned” and “fell overboard” were two different things. But I really like that there are a wide variety of fates to pick from (many that aren’t used at all), even if that can complicate the very specific answers Return of the Obra Dinn is often looking for.

Confusion is also undoubtedly caused by the art style, which developer Lucas Pope describes as “1-bit.” There are only two colors on screen at any time and you can switch between a variety of pallets based on different classic computers. I really like the distinct and expressive nature of its low detail, “dithered” art style, but it does make everything harder to see. That can frustrate at times in a game about hunting for subtle clues, but I also love the flavor that comes along with it — it’s not like a magical memory of a death from four years prior would be entirely clear.

That art is also coupled with some fantastic music and sound effects that make the Obra Dinn feel alive and full of character itself. The voice acting, of which there is a surprising amount, is also exceptional. It better be too, because I relied on the intonation, expression, and tone of different characters’ voices to help determine who they were way more than I was expecting. Something as blunt as an accent or as subtle as addressing another character as “sir” could help tell me whose fate I was exploring.

I do wish Return of the Obra Dinn had made it just a little quicker to revisit previous memories, however. Your character moves fairly slow with no option to sprint, and you can only leave each memory by finding and exiting through a magic door, which can get a bit tedious. There’s also a ton of information to remember and sort through here, much of it qualitative and hard to categorize. But given the scope, your book does a remarkably good job of making all of that info digestible.

There are also a couple of tiny technical issues worth mentioning, but they’re far from deal breakers. Return of the Obra Dinn’s native resolution seems to be much smaller than 1080p, and while that doesn’t negatively impact its stylized visuals at all, it did cause my mouse sensitivity to skyrocket. You also can’t use ‘alt-tab’ to switch windows while it’s running, which made researching 19th-century naval hats online between memories more difficult.