I started playing this game, and even if I recognize how original it is (the art style, perfectly punctured by classical music, the setting, the concept of the game itself, they way the story starts by the end until you reach the origin of everything), the game itself… dunno, it isn’t that fun or engaging to play.
The game feels dry, being one frozen moment of death after another where you have to fill out the blanks, without anything else in the middle that serves as a breather.
The gameplay freedom is limited, given you are guy sent to see what happened in the boat, I imagined I could open chests and drawers to search clues about what happened, maybe some maps or read letters left… but no, there is no interactivity like that except seeing the flashbacks. And I’m not fa fan of how the progression is scripted, I thought I would have a bit more of freedom in exploring the boat and seeing how everyone died.
Finally, the story itself, as the narration feel stilted, as is wholly dependent of the little death vignettes.
This is a fair point. There’s an interesting version of this game where the ship is one giant crime scene and you’re pulling together all the threads in whatever order you want. It also would be cool if the environment was more interactive.
I think to enjoy the game you have to get very invested in the process of picking a character to try to identify, and then going back to the stuff you’ve seen to find the key information that will reveal his identity, whether that’s dialogue, an environmental detail, or the identity of these four other people that gets you there by process of elimination.
I think the lack of any explicit game mechanics involved with the gameplay is exactly what makes the design brilliant. The interactivity of a typical videogame investigation is just busywork. Find all the objects in a scene you can interact with, and be rewarded with some “ooh who found a clue, who’s a good boy?” condescension. Fuck that. In Obra Dinn you decide what’s a clue and what’s important, and it’s just so much more satisfying.
I wrote about this at some more length in the Detective Games thread, just since that’s where I’m collecting all the different ways the problems of investigation / deduction are solved in games:
I’m about a about a third of the way through and I love this game, but my one complaint is that I wish you could just jump into a specific memory directly from the book instead of schlepping across the place to the body.
Yeah, that sucks a bit especially once you start hitting memories that can only be reached via other memories rather than via anything on the ship.
And also I dislike the way you have no control over the timing of pulled out of the memory the first time around. What I started doing was, when entering the memory for the first time, go and read some forums for a couple of minutes. And then return to the game, re-enter the same memory, and actually get to snoop around at my own pace.
Okay, I feel like I must be missing something here. On part 2 of A Bitter Cold, the person is marked with only one triangle, but I can’t find anything to distinguish him from at least two other people with higher difficulty ratings. I could cheese it with the rule of threes thing, but I want to find out sort of clue I’m overlooking…
Yes, the clues get more subtle over time. Don’t try to brute-force it, it’ll just lead to getting stuck worse later on. Just carry on investigating new memories, there’s no need to try to solve everything as soon as it’s one triangle.
I’ll move on from that one for a bit. I think I’ve unlocked everything relevant to to that person, but I’d rather know for sure than guess. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a couple I can wrap up by revisiting early memories.
What do the X’s and /‘s indicate for each chapter? Remains found? I’ve still got like three /’ s for The Doom but not sure what I might be missing there.
There’s an X for every person who dies in that chapter, / for every person who departs the story without dying.
Yes. I’m pretty sure you’re missing a general concept, not merely a piece of information on a specific character. Inside the following spoiler tag is a statement so generic that it applies to basically every game, not just Obra Dinn:
Reading through the help messages / tutorials again might be useful.
I don’t think it actually spoils anything. But I can see this being the kind of game where people would be particularly sensitive to spoilers :)
Yeah, this is one of the interface choices that I just don’t think was good or necessary. Maybe I’m missing something, but I would have had something like a book icon appearing in the corner of the screen to tell you to visit the book to see the page get written. I guess the game didn’t do any overlayed UI, did it?
It would be just another method to get possible clues. Like listening to their conversations or checking the passenger list, or searching for a weapon in the ground. It’s pretty arbitrary calling X busywork but not to Y and Z.
Hell, if we talk about busywork, sometimes it feels busywork in how bothersome can be checking between different timelines/deaths because bits of information are ‘distributed’ over them. I want a shortcut on the book.
Although in reality, I think the main problem of the game is the story. There isn’t a lot of story, that’s it. Maybe the game would be more enjoyable if it has a few flashback scenes here and there that would serve to establish the characters, their relations, etc, without having to be about the horrible death of someone. Which it would go against the lore of the game, I know, the time watch is supposed to only give the death moment of the victim.
Is there any chance using the book to view memories could be modded in? It’s so weird, in that the interface seems to be designed for that to work, but it doesn’t.
Not quite. There’s two parts to a detective game. The investigation (finding the facts) and the deduction (figuring out how the facts fit together).
The deduction part tends to be pretty forgiving: no matter how badly the screw up the mechanical implementation of actually expressing the results of the deductions, the player was probably actually doing the work ahead of the pace set by the game anyway. So all you need is a story that works.
The investigation part is much tougher. The only systems I’ve seen work so far are either based on text adventure style natural language parsers, or just having a bunch of text to read (or cheesy FMV to watch). The first one is unacceptable in the context of modern games, and the second is limited in the amount of detail they can pack into a single scene.
So I think what Obra Dinn does for the investigation part is interesting because it’s a third option that seems to work, but allows for a lot more detail since it’s the player’s job to decide where to concentrate.
The deduction system on the other hand is interesting only insofar that none of the normal ones would have worked here (can’t use any sort of combining of facts since there are no facts, can’t use the “choose where to investigate next” system since the game relies on the player seeing every scene, and can’t use the “answer some questions at the end” system since the game needed some sort of incremental feedback).
In Obra Dinn you’re looking for a weapon on the ground since you’re assuming there’s going to be a weapon on the ground. You’re looking at where people are, what their expressions are, who they’re talking to, where they are pointing, etc.
In a game with interaction points you’re running around the room not really looking at anything until you’ve interacted with everything, and then that’s your set of clues. We know it doesn’t work because it’s been done hundreds of times, and it’s never worked.
I’m at 45 fates solved, and feeling like I’m spinning my wheels a bit. The main sticking point seems to be with The Escape:
I feel like I’ve identified the four people who disappear, but I’m not sure how to ascertain their location. And it really seems like I should be right about the man who is shot, and the man stabbed, but I’m clearly off because neither has been triggered for a confirmation and I’ve had them pegged for a bit.
When another group of people are leaving on a boat, there’s dialogue along the lines of “sailing east to land on the canaries”. So that seems to be the way the currents flow, since they’re obviously not going to row for hundreds of miles. Look in the map for the location of the ship during the scene you’re interested in, trace a line east, and it’ll hit Africa.
