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Return of the Obra Dinn (next game from Lucas Pope, the creator of "Papers, Please") - PS4/XB1/Switch release announced for this autumn


Commissar SFLUFAN

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The game is set in 1807, when the ghost ship washes up in port five years after it had gone missing. The player must unravel the fates of every crew member on board. In terms of gameplay, it appears to be a narrative puzzle, with the player employing flashback sequences to progress through locked doors and areas aboard the ship.

 

 

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  • 5 weeks later...

Eurogamer - "Essential"

It is a joy to poke around as the game slowly opens up new spaces. It is a pleasure - and a very harmonious pleasure - to come to an understanding of how different parts of the ship slot together, where people sleep, where they work, where they gather for a game of cards. That powdery white line that draws this bleak world is surprisingly adept at giving a sense of the material reality of the ship - razor sharp on the rarely-used stairs you use to climb aboard, breaking into radar-like speckles when ghosting an outline of waves into life. As your clues mount up and the images in the book become less and less fuzzy, so the world comes into focus. You are not just exploring a place, you are slowly getting a sense for it. What an astonishing game. What an incredible piece of work.

 

The grisly mystery of Return of the Obra Dinn will make you obsessed (The Verge)

The tale of the Obra Dinn and its crew is fascinating either way, and it won’t take long before the game’s Macintosh-inspired low-fi visuals burn their way into your brain. The task ahead of you is enormous, but, eventually, you’ll realize it’s not actually impossible after all.

 

Return of the Obra Dinn: The Kotaku Review

Obra Dinn is not easy. Its puzzles are never mean or particularly tricky, but it gives you a lot of information to sift through and doesn’t hold your hand. The book is a valuable resource, since it keeps track of the people you’ve seen and tells you what memories they can be found in. There was only one time when I had to take an IRL note on a piece of paper because I had key information that the book didn’t track for me. But even with the book as your companion, you will have to think hard to solve the puzzles.

 

I’m such a puzzle nerd that the idea of solving Obra Dinn, with its clues hidden everywhere and a story joining it all together, was something I’d been looking forward to for a long time. The experience was as captivating and memorable as I’d hoped. I was glued to it until I was done. My only wish is that I could erase my brain and play it again.

 

Return of the Obra Dinn review: A phenomenal detective story invoking old Macintosh adventures (PC World)

A unique art style and a fantastic puzzle hook make Return of the Obra Dinn a detective story worth experiencing, especially if you can do it all in one go.

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Destructoid - 95%

This is a game I can not stop thinking about. I think about it at work -- either remembering crazy moments I didn't see coming, or reflecting on recently discovered information and its implications. This is absolutely a "thinking man's game," and it's one that I hope other developers (or Mr. Pope himself) decide to ape and expand on. Despite the fact that this isn't a detective game, I've never felt more like a dick.

 

Game Informer - 87.5%

My only frustration with the Obra Dinn is the overarching story. The plot is ultimately fine, with more than enough emotional beats coming together for an engaging mystery. However, the ultimate payoff fails to complement the thoughtful gameplay giving players who solve every fate the narrative short shrift. Luckily, the individual stories you learn about the crew during your investigations – their betrayals, ambitions, loves – are enticing enough on their own to make up for the deficit. This mixed quality of storytelling doesn’t stop the experience from highlighting its other strengths; Return Of Obra Dinn is a surprisingly hardcore detective title with a surreal bite, and one that shouldn’t be missed by anyone who loves a great challenge.

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PC Gamer - 90%

Return of the Obra Dinn is a stunningly clever thing and one of the best puzzle games on PC. It not only presents you with a vast, complex, and interconnected mystery to solve, but trusts in your intelligence enough to let you do it yourself with almost no hints, markers, or guides interfering in the process. Few games have this much confidence in the player, and it’s a deeply satisfying experience as a result, even if I did occasionally feel like I’d hit a dead end.

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Played about an hour. The mechanics are in essence similar to Paper, Please.  Instead of identifying the living, you are identifying the dead. The basic gameplay loop so far is that  you listen to a scene play out then use your  to record and identify Clue-style, who died, how and by what. Based on what you know; you may only be able to answer some of the questions. You will have to use later/earlier scenes to help fill out the rest. Once you have completed a group of mysteries, the journal will verify that you were correct in your assumptions. 

 

The story will play a big factor in whether I ultimately enjoy the game. I will say I am into it so far. 

 

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IGN - 92%

Return of the Obra Dinn stands as something wholly unique. An investigative puzzle game with clear goals but completely open ended paths to completing them, it’s a challenging exercise in piecing together a mystery without being spoon fed what to pay attention to. It’s got some small quality of life issues here and there, but the “moment of death” clue-hunting mechanic at its core is an absolute triumph. Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the best detective games I’ve ever played, and now I want so much more of it.

 

Gamespot - 90%

Your magical pocket watch and its time-traveling, corpse-identifying mechanic offers far more than just an exceptionally clever puzzle game--as if that wasn't already enough. It also delivers a wonderfully evocative method of storytelling as you gain glimpses into the lives of each person on board at vital moments along the Obra Dinn's journey and piece together who they were, what they had to deal, what motivated them, and how they responded when tragedy struck. You may only see them in scratchy monochrome stills and hear them in brief snatches of urgent conversation, if at all, but if you're paying attention then you should feel like you know (almost) every one of these sixty people intimately by the end of the game.

 

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - "Bestest Bests"

I was trying to find a pithy crime fiction analogy to wrap this up, but what Pope’s done here actually transcends gags a bit. Before playing I’d grown bored of the plodding progress of traditional whodunits, recently switching to locked room mysteries and Japanese crime fiction, where the ingenuity of the crime is celebrated. It’s more like unpicking a magic trick (I’m happy to suggest some to anyone who is willing to listen). There’s no theatrical villainy in Obra Dinn – although vanishing a crew of 60 has that ring to it – and it has reignited my interest in the old ways with its tales of social tension, human tragedies and crimes of passion.

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Return of the Obra Dinn's Mysteries Are So Deep That You Need an Actual Pen and Paper to Solve Them (US Gamer)

As a direct result, Return of the Obra Dinn is probably the first game to make me feel like I'm actually solving a mystery. As in me, not the highlighted objects in a triple-A game's detective vision. I'm the one piecing together all the clues, I'm the one having epiphanies. I'm the one solving the fates of everyone who lived for a time upon this mysterious, creepy-ass ship. Return of the Obra Dinn never holds your hand, nor does it let you walk off the plank either. You're just urged to soak in the morbid details of these people, and it's up to you to find out where it all went very, very wrong. The journey is quite an enthralling one, and I definitely have enough ink in my pen and pages in my notebook to help me get to the end. 

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I picked this up as well and played about an hour. I'd still be playing it if I didn't have a friggin' Destiny 2 raid at 6. Game seems extremely interesting so far, and I like that it has solid puzzle solving mechanics so that you're not just staring and wondering. It makes it clear how to get information, that information won't always be decisive, and what happens when you get enough information to do this or that. Its systems work together in clever ways so that you always feel like you've got all your tools at your disposal, like being able to focus on someone and seeing their photo/sketch in your book, and then hitting the book button to go directly to that page.


I foresee many hours spent on this game. But first, this damned raid.

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I played this for about 2-3 hours. I did enjoy it. I agree with the sentiment that that guy on Giant Bomb mentioned last week it is very much like sudoku with people. While it is deserving of high praise I do think you need to go in with maybe tempered expectations because it's very much a puzzle game (at least the part I'm at). I'd say it's very "the witness"-ish as well. But for $20 you can't go wrong.

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I have solved 27 deaths so far. I still enjoy the game, but the death flashbacks are wearing thin. I wish there was a feature to play a chapter in order or start a memory from the book. Hunting down the body so you can play a flashback only to realize that you need another one, but you can’t access it until you leave this one, slowly walk to another body, and start it.  It’s a bit tiresome. 

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  • 9 months later...

One of the best games I've played in a while, but a recommendation is still dependent on whether you like games where you actually have to think, apply logic, and search the environment thoroughly. It's a super interesting game that does so much with what is essentially a set of static scenes and some killer music and sound design. I love Obra Dinn.

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  • 4 weeks later...

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