One More Go

The Obra Dinn is a damaged vessel, mysteriously returned to Falmouth in 1807 having been missing for several years. The ship is abandoned. Silent but for the creaking of the boards beneath your feet and the patter of rain upon the deck. You task is to learn the fate of every crew member – how they died, and identify anyone who may have been responsible. Your first clue, an eerie set of remains near the Captain’s Quarters. A click of your strange pocket watch transports you to the grizzly moment when this soul perished. First you hear it, shouts, cries, snippets of conversation. Then you see it, for the next minute you explore a scene frozen in time, trying to make sense of what’s happening. Then you’re snapped back to 1807 to archive what you’ve learned. The more deaths you observe, the more deaths you can access, cluttering the ship with moments that when assembled correctly reveal the truth of the voyage.

Your guide to life aboard the ship is a logbook detailing the crew, a map of the ship, and sketches produced by the ship’s resident artist. There’s also a handy glossary for those who don’t know their midshipmen from their stewards. It’s within these pages that you submit your conclusions on each of the crew members. For every three that you define correctly the game will confirm them, setting your pencil scrawl to ink.

In terms of mechanics, that’s your lot. The rest of the game comes down to your sleuthing skills. Listening carefully for names or accents that can narrow down identities, tracking characters as they pass fleetingly through memories aboard the ship, and then cross referencing your assumptions against the information and images within the logbook.

Some elements do conspire against you. The visual theming of Obra Dinn is entirely monochrome, echoing the graphical styles of early computer games (there’s even an option to switch the colors to emulate different models of computer). This makes the game look absolutely stunning, and it adds a murkiness to the fidelity that will make you second guess what you’re actually witnessing. Forcing you to revisit scenes with extra context to confirm what you think you saw.

Some of the solutions are fairly straight forward, so you’re able to answer those quickly and cross some names and faces off of your suspects list. Then there will be some that you don’t quite have enough information to solve, you’ll maybe be able to see who has died and how, but not know who has killed them. These you hope will be solvable by the time you’ve observed all of the other deaths aboard the ship. The last set are truly devilish, the truth buried so deeply that when you finally realize what’s happening the frustration of scouring for one face and voice dissipates, often leaving you with whole new avenues of investigation.

Obra Dinn is the essential detective game. When it’s firing on all cylinders, and the neurons in your brain are firing in rhythm, there’s no other game that comes close. Leafing through the pages of the in game book, backwards and forwards, comparing names, faces, nationalities, allies, and accomplices. Viewing snippets of footage and trying to piece everything together. It’s easy to get lost in the mystery.

That being said, I would love to play a game that was more focused on the characters of the world and their motivations rather than some of the more fantastical elements that come into play here. If the investigation was flipped from identifying the fate of each character towards something more conventional like eliminating suspects from the scene of a crime might be a fun way to revisit some of these mechanics.

Honestly though, I would settle for any game that recycles some of the DNA of Obra Dinn. This game released in 2018, and all these years later there’s nothing else that has made me feel as much of a detective. The closest I can think of would be Curse of The Golden Idol, and as enjoyable as that is as a mystery, the point and click style perspective acts as an additional barrier for me, removing me one step further away from the action. Because of the way the memories are presented to you in Obra Dinn, even though you’re technically investigating a cold case, the mystery feels alive and urgent, something that’s lost by the more clinical presentation of Golden Idol.

When you finally solve all of the fates in Obra Dinn, your completed logbook is placed back into a bookcase filled with other books. We can only hope that solo developer Lucas Pope will one day invite us back to this world, to explore the mysteries captured within those other pages.