Return of Obra Dinn Spiel

by Rian

The legendary developer of Papers, Please returned with another retro style game, or had returned in 2018. Yes, I am writing for a game 6 years too late, despite it not getting a major update since. For 6 years the game is left with what I would call a breathing room for improvement, while having an overflowing narrative based on dry world-building exercise.

The game begins with the player as an insurance investigator processing claims behind the unfortunately lost ship, Obra Dinn. Your job is onboard the drifted ship is unlike what I had assumed, say, less bureaucratic. The primary objective of the game is to fill out a mysterious book concerning final destinies of all passengers and crews. To aid your quest, you are given a magical pocket watch, a watch that shows you a diorama of the past. We can safely assume at this point that your job isn’t some filing paperworks for authoritarian regime in East Europe.

Inclusion of the pocket watch allows the expansion of the universe without stretching or overusing the same materials. Every time I click on a scene, though it is still set amongst the same 60 passengers and the same boat, it feels fresh and new. The game doesn’t rush you into solving mass-murder mystery on a time crunch. What watch inadvertently invites, however, is the frustration from the past point-and-click adventure games. Hiding facial features behind retro graphics is fine; 60 characters sharing similar voices is fine; invisible boundaries and still-cut diorama are still all part of deliberate compromises. It all worked until the game decides to bend the rule, and tells us broken and limited details were actually valid evidences. I believe we have established since the first Playstation that Lara Croft’s pointy boob is a gamer’s handshake for indulgence, not a new technique to scratch 90’s pointy boob kink.

What confuses me further is the lack of game’s replayability. Papers, Please was able to deliver an endless gameplay on top of a linear story line. NPCs that are passing through the checkpoint were cleverly designed to be randomly generated. It has its quirkiness, but with it comes the divergence away from what could have been a mundane stamping simulator. Obra Dinn does show the sign to make it endless. None of the passengers are uniquely identifiable, as most of them share the same building blocks (e.g. uniform, accent, circle of colleagues, and etc.) and it’s that combination that makes the difference. These smaller building blocks of NPCs seem to be interchangeable by design or accident, and had the developer gone through with making it truly random, the PS1 era graphics would have come off as a deliberate compromise between artistic license and game mechanic.

Story wise, as there is less replay value, some may even call it a walking sim styled murder mystery. The game incorporates the maritime folklore (think of Pirates of Caribbean but with sailors) atmosphere with the arsenal of unique characters. The small world of Obra Dinn is the crucible of different cultures and people. Though each characters hail from different backgrounds, they retain at least the minimum level of respect of others in the form of mysticism. However, the knowledge of literal seamen’s magic conveniently leaves the chat when there is a need to cause a conflict. The game is structured to have a cascading effect from one episode to another like Tower of Hanoi. One dead body often leads to the next; instead of ‘Colonel Mustard did it’, it usually ends with ‘and he was found dead in the library’. Once you have solved it all, it’s hard not to recall how it all went down.

Conclusions: Short and Strong, But at What Price

As much as I enjoyed the gameplay, I’m not entirely convinced by the price tag Return of the Obra Dinn is sitting at. Without any discounts, it’s being listed at $19.99, and I don’t think that’s the price point most players are comfortable with for an indie game. Had it not been from the developer of Papers, Please (i.e. unless the prospective buyer is already a fan), it’s hard to even initiate recommending the game. Regardless, if Obra Dinn is on sale again floating back to your coast line by chance, I highly recommend giving it a shot. It will be that game that won’t deliver the same ever again, but it is a worthwhile experience I can recommend to anyone who is up for sea shanty and a mystery puzzle.