Return of the Obra Dinn

[NANO]

Return of the Obra Dinn is developed and published by 3909 LLC, a Japan-based studio led by American designer Lucas Pope. It was Pope's second commercial game following 2013's Papers, Please, and was released on October 18, 2018.

Return of the Obra Dinn is set aboard a fictional East India Company ghost ship in the early 1800s whose crew and passengers have all mysteriously died or disappeared, with the game's objective being to discover how. The player, as an agent of the shipping company assessing what happened, uses a combination of deductive reasoning and the use of a Memento Mortem stopwatch to return to the moment of a crew member's death to determine the identity of each of the sixty crew members, how and where they died and, if killed by human hands, the name of their killer. The game, played from the first-person view, uses a 1-bit monochrome graphical style inspired by games on early Macintosh systems.

Return of the Obra Dinn has been praised for its gameplay design, art style, and narrative, and has been named as one of the top video games of 2018 by several publications. It has been nominated for several awards.

In Return of the Obra Dinn, the player takes the role of an insurance adjuster for the London office East India Company in 1807. The Obra Dinn, insured by the East India Company, had previously gone missing in 1803 as it was to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, but since washed up in port with all of its sixty-man crew dead or missing.The player is tasked to determine the fate of all of the crew members, including their names, where and how they met their fate, if they were killed, who their killer was, and their location should they be alive.

The game is played out from a first-person view, allowing the player to explore the Obra Dinn, using a monochromatic dithering style that mimics approaches that games on early home computers like the Macintosh had used to simulate shading and color.To help complete the task, the player is given a log book that includes a drawing of all the crew members, the crew roster, and layouts of the ship. They are also given the "Memento Mortem", a pocket watch-like device that activates when the player encounters one of the corpses on the ship. The Memento Mortem plays back the audio of the moments before the person's death, and then gives the player a few moments to explore the area around the frozen moment of death to identify who was present and other visual details. Once players have seen each moment, the log book automatically fills in some of the details of that event , allowing the player to cross reference this information with other information already learned. In some cases, the Memento Mortem will react following this process to reveal another related death, guiding the player to where that corpse lays before repeating the investigation process. Certain sections of the ship are not available until the player has observed all the death moments in a certain area.The player can review these memories at any time to observe any new clues they might have missed following later investigation.

Ultimately, Return of the Obra Dinn is a large logic puzzle requiring the player to use deductive reasoning to determine the fate of each crew member; fates are selected from a predefined list of verbs - because some of the deaths are visually ambiguous, the game allows for some leeway and accepts more than one solution. The game does not provide explicit clues for how each crew member died or towards their identity, requiring the player to narrow possibilities down by exclusion. The player can refine their guesses as they gain more information; the game is only over once the player has correctly identified the names and fates. When a player has properly established the names and reasons for death for any three, the game affirms this information to the player, locking those changes and effectively reducing the complexity of the puzzle.