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!