Return of the Obra Dinn deserves a thread, matey!

It’s 1807 and the good ship Obra Dinn has been lost at sea for five years. When it returns, there is no one aboard. What happened to its 60 crew and passengers? As the insurance investigator for the East India Company, it’s your job to find out, using a trusty time-traveling timepiece.

This game is a huge logic puzzle taking place on a starkly rendered (in two beautiful colors!) sailing ship. To solve it, you seek out the remains of a crew member, then transport yourself back to the moment of their death, frozen in time (while you can freely walk around it).

Using clues found in all these death scenes, you reconstruct what exactly happened to each and every member of the crew. All this information is recorded in your log book, alongside helpful documents like a crew manifest and plans of the ships various decks. In the process of filling it out, you discover some very dramatic–and tragic–events.

The game will tax your logic and observational skills, but it has a good solution to the potential problem of frustrated players falling back on spamming guesses until they get something right: You have to discover the fates of three characters at a time. Once you correctly identify a third person and how they died, those are confirmed and set in stone. Then you must figure out three more.

The game was made by Lucas Pope, whose last game was Papers, Please. He did all the art, code, design, and audio (the last of which is excellent). Quite an accomplishment.

By the fact that it has made me wax rhapsodic, like an over-enthusiastic PR representative, you might guess that this is a definite Game of the Year contender for me. I highly recommend it if you want a game that oozes originality from every porthole.

So here’s a thread for talking about how great it is, or how it is frustrating the hell out of you, or asking more about how it plays if you’re not sure it’s for you!

Eurogamer called it essential as well:

And word of mouth has been great. I’m really looking forward to playing this one.

Because of the Marie of the game, I’m avoiding all lets play videos. But what you guys say about playing it makes it sound as good as I hope it is.

Happy to see a thread for this. It’s a really cool game and I hope more people pick it up.

Never heard of it until this thread but sounds totally up my alley. Definitely have to check it out at some point.

From the creator of Papers, Please? Sheeeeet, that’s all you had to say.

this is tough, I solved the introductiory mystery, but then it opens up and I have like 15 new personas to identify … and I think I found 3 of them and now I am stuck.

not sure how to procede. There are like 2-3 guys that are now possible to identify by name (the picture is clear), but I don’t know how. That one guy, I have 7 memories of him, but I can’t put a finger on him

will try later…

anyone solved the game?

I finished it! I think I remember the point that you’re at, and feeling similarly. You spend awhile where you get access to more and more deaths without solving a whole lot of them. I kinda wish the game had paced it out just a little bit better.

So, first, there are some guys who you see a lot, starting early on, who were not able to really be identified until well into the game. So don’t get hung up on them.

You may have gotten this, but just in case: The number of triangles over a character’s portrait tells you how easily you should be able to identify them. So look through everyone and find the ones with one or two triangles and focus on them. Ignore three-trianglers.

You do have to make some leaps to solve things. A couple non-specific examples:

  • Stewards are often seen in proximity to their bosses.

  • Location on the ship during certain incidents sometimes indicates a person’s job.

  • Facial features and skin tone can be clues to someone’s nationality.

Maybe all of those are things you already figured out, but hopefully they help without doing any of the work for you. If you would like more direct hints, or have a particular mystery you’re stuck on, we might be able to help.

thanks, I didn’t know that about the triangles … was it mentioned somewhere in the game?

I watched part of the Giant Bomb quick look on this. While the screenshots look like early mono computer screens as screenshots, in movement, navigating through a 3D world, the effect is incredible. Never seen anything like it before.

and what about this three personas rule? how does that work? I have three or four characters identified, but they are not confirmed …

I’ve also finished this and it’s among the most interesting games I’ve played in a while. In a sense, it’s like an expanded adaptation of the old logic grid puzzle games to first person video game form. It’s also among the few games where the experience felt like I was doing detective work - I assume with similar headaches to that where you try to mentally try to keep track of so much information yet struggle to see that critical piece of information.

The unique art style is similarly headache inducing yet brilliant, especially for a game that is intimately tied to the visual depiction of violence.

The three person rule requires you to correctly identify both the cause of death -including the perpetrator’s name- and name. I assume you missed or misidentified one of those.

I’ve finished as well as I mentioned in the indie games thread:

One of the best games I’ve played all year.

There are tutorial messages that pop up through that first chunk in the captain’s quarters. But one thing I had a problem with was accidentally dismissing them right as they popped up. Could be that or another bug kept them from showing up.

If you have filled out the name and fate of three (or more) characters and it hasn’t triggered a sequence where they get typeset into the book, then one or more of them is wrong.

Obra Dinn, Obra Dah, life goes on, la!
La la la la life goes on.

Purser got a shattered spar dropped on his neck,
Third mate skinned his knee and got gangrene.
Asiatic princess got swept off the deck
When a tsunami came and claimed her for the sea.*

Obra Dinn, Obra Dah…

*None of these are real spoilers, just to be clear.

okay, I have solved six fates now, but in one instance I guessed a name correctly, it triggered the success sequence.

I guessed

There was this guy who took revenge for his dead brother, and there were only one pair of brothers on the ship. I just wanted to see what happens, and entered one of the brothers and it was the right one. I felt I was gaming the system a bit, is there another way to find out which brother was which?

There might have been a way to more strictly determine who was who in that case, but not necessarily. I think that’s meant to be a legitimate way to solve things. I agree, I felt a little like I didn’t earn some of my right guesses, but I think it’s intended to work that way. You knew a key piece of information that narrowed it down enough for you to find the answer. There was at least one point where I went around to find specifically two answers I was pretty sure of so that I could then juggle through one last one (might have been the guys from India) until I triggered a success sequence. Cheesy, maybe.

Not a review per se, but a love letter to this game. Make me want to grab it.

If there’s one downside to Obra Dinn, it’s the fact that I know the game will end. I find myself going slow, stopping now and then and doing something else. I don’t want to rush through this one, I want to savor each and every one of the skeletal remains scattered across the ship’s decks.

Here’s another:

Easily one of my games of the year. It’s stuck in my mind long after finishing it.