I guess Return of the Obra Dinn is a detective game? It’s certainly got investigation and deduction. It’s also doing both of those parts in ways that are really interesting, though maybe not applicable anywhere outside of this particular game.
First the investigation part. In Obra Dinn you’re navigating through a sequence of 3d scenes, each one frozen in place at the time of someone’s death. Your goal is to figure out who died and how. There is very rarely (never?) enough information in just that one scene though, so you’ll need to scour a bunch of related (or perhaps unrelated!) scenes for further information.
The important part is this: there are no game mechanics involved with the investigation. You are doing nothing except looking at the scenes and trying to read it. There are no pre-defined points of interest to act on. There is no indicator that you’ve found something, let along found everything. It really is just you as a player looking at stuff and deciding what’s important. Or once you’re late into the game, looking for some very particular bit of evidence on a specific character that you’ve decided could work as the cornerstone of your next deduction step.
It’s just ludicrous how much more satisfying this open ended investigation is than going through the motions of gathering predefined facts in the more typical game.
Now, there is a downside to having the investigation part be so free-form. How do you prove to the game that you’ve understood the case, when the game doesn’t know what facts you have. The multiple choice systems like in Frogwares games would immediately leak information. The Consulting Detective style “write your answer down, then read the real answer, then decide whether you got it right” system only provides feedback at the end of the game and doesn’t give the player the option to refine the answer. And free text parsers are too hard.
The solution in Obra Dinn is kind of brilliant, kind of broken. What they do is only allow entering one form of deduction: what’s this character’s name and who died. There are 60 characters whose names you know from the crew manifest. You need to map their faces to their names. And there are probably 30 possible causes of death, with some additionally requiring you to name the killer.
Given this structured form of data entry, Obra Dinn requires you to correctly answer the same question 60 time for different characters. This almost entirely removes the issue with the questions themselves leaking information. It’s a standardized question with a ton of fixed options.
Since getting 60 answers right would be unreasonable, any time you get three answers right they’ll lock in. This is the kind of broken part: It’s a bit too forgiving, since unfortunately getting feedback for the correct answers implicitly gives feedback on the incorrect ones too. Even if you’re not explicitly brute-forcing the game, any time you get a set of three locked in it’s safe to go and change the answers you have for all the other characters a bit on whatever dimension you’re uncertain about.
I’ve complained in a bunch of posts in this thread about games only letting me deduce stuff at certain points in the story. It’s really frustrating to figure out something ahead of schedule, but getting no credit from the game since the question won’t be asked until the answer is totally obvious. Obra Dinn kind of does this: the game will inform you about whether you have enough information to determine their identity and the current difficulty of making that determination. But that’s just a guideline, and you can just ignore the warnings and enter your guesses (sorry; your iron-clad deductions).
Anyway, this system probably can’t be adapted to any other game. There’s not a lot of scenarios where triaging through 60 corpses makes sense.
As for the non-detective parts of Obra Dinn? The visuals are really striking once you move around in a scene, in a way that screenshots didn’t prepare me for. There’s a couple of really annoying UI issues (e.g. the way your first viewing of a scene is timed). And while piecing together the story is great, the final bit was a bit of a letdown.
Overall definitely worth playing.