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Caravel Forum : Other Boards : Electronic Games : Return of the Obra Dinn (An insurance adventure with minimal color.)
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ErikH2000
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icon Return of the Obra Dinn (+1)  
https://obradinn.com/
Windows, Mac, XBox1, PS4, Switch

I remember reading C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader when I was eight or nine, and being fascinated with the illustration of a ship that was found inside the novel. It had labels indicating different parts of the boat. And it was drawn with black ink cross-hatches as though stamped to the page from a woodcut, rather than a 1970's offset press. Here's what it looked like:

https://narnia.fandom.com/wiki/Dawn_Treader?file=The_dawn_treader_1k.jpg

The style of Obra Dinn is similar - deliberately antique, dark brown and white, dithered to show shading. It seems a shame to deconstruct it as shader code on a video card. Much like the 8-year-old me, I'd rather imagine I'm being granted vision into a murky past.

The visuals don't so much impress as charm. They are thematically perfect and oh-so-carefully constructed to convey information. The game also has an excellent soundtrack that relies on orchestral instruments and variations on leitmotifs. There's not a shred of camp in the music - it's a proper, high-drama soundtrack. I was happy to find it on Spotify.

The gameplay itself is solely deduction. You'll spend your time in one of three modes - walking through an ocean ship empty of all inhabitants (unless you count corpses), viewing frozen-in-time memories, and flipping through the pages of a lengthy book that tracks your Rumsfeldian knowns and unknowns. There are clues in all of these places.

The real accomplishment in the gameplay is that it works both as a story and a deductive puzzle, with the two intermeshed seamlessly. If you hear a voice in a recording that has a Scottish accent, you can scan through the crew manifest and maybe find one unguessed identity of someone from Scotland.

If you've played the Everett Kaser games or the classic boardgame Clue, you understand the basic format of a deductive reasoning game: Use clues to narrow down possibilities until you've guessed the solution state. A guess is made along multiple dimensions, e.g. for Clue the location, weapon, and murderer. In Obra Dinn, you are guessing for each person on the boat, their identity and fate. But you aren't told the kind of intermediate guesses you'll need to make. E.g. If you see a man washing dishes, is he the chef's steward? (fake example to avoid spoilers) Nearly anything you'd use for a guess in real life is appropriate to use in Obra Dinn. And unlike real life, the game is designed to reward "probably true" guesses. E.g. a captain would probably not wash dishes and wear an apron, so you can safely rule him out as the identity of the dishwasher.

The game doesn't reset randomly to a new solution after you solve it. It's the same story and everyone has the same locked-in fate. That's sad because replaying it while you remember the correct guesses will spoil the fun. But the single solution gave the author, Lucas Pope, an ability to create a satisfying story that unfolds as you play.

-Erik

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10-13-2021 at 04:57 AM
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xpym
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icon Re: Return of the Obra Dinn (+1)  
This is one of the games I'm most confused about. It seems like exactly the sort of thing I should've absolutely loved, an universally acclaimed puzzle-y game from an established visionary creator, and yet I completely bounced off of it.

I was completely unable to suspend my disbelief about having unique time-wizard-detective abilities, and the primary gameplay loop was totally unappealing to me. Stumbling from one randomly placed clue to another and waiting a pointlessly long cutscene after interacting with each of them became unbearably tedious on about the third iteration.

The concept of piecing ambiguous evidence together sounds interesting enough, but I just couldn't bring myself to suffer through everything else to get to it, which is my loss, I suppose.
10-13-2021 at 11:16 AM
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ErikH2000
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icon Re: Return of the Obra Dinn (0)  
xpym wrote:
I was completely unable to suspend my disbelief about having unique time-wizard-detective abilities,
That did immediately knock the story down from "historical" to "fantasy" for me. But I understand it as an explanation for a necessary mechanic to access past memories.
Stumbling from one randomly placed clue to another and waiting a pointlessly long cutscene after interacting with each of them became unbearably tedious on about the third iteration.
Not trying to sell you on the game, but you can just click past the cutscene. The audio then continues playing as you explore the area to which it corresponds. There were times when I wanted to concentrate on the audio without being distracted by the scene visuals, and I found the black cutscene helpful.

I admit that I also got a bit tired of finding the right corpse (or chain of corpses) to access a memory. But towards the mid-game, I got pretty efficient at it. I think I would have preferred that after discovering a corpse-memory, you could just launch it directly from the book.

Hmm... but then again, there's something about the repetition of traveling through the same spaces that gives me a feeling like I really know the boat. And towards the end, I was making theories about when the people would put away the hammocks or imagining how it would be pretty gross to eat your lunch next to the one place on the boat designated for pooping. The ship's layout is so carefully designed it feels worth getting to know it by walking through it.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)
10-13-2021 at 05:59 PM
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xpym
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icon Re: Return of the Obra Dinn (0)  
ErikH2000 wrote:
you can just click past the cutscene.

I could've sworn I tried to do that, maybe it got patched later? The part of it which annoyed me the most was the black screen transition with the dramatic jingle preceeding the actual cutscene which took like 10 seconds every time, was it really necessary?
10-14-2021 at 05:11 AM
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