Game Review: Return of the Obra Dinn




Apologies for the lack of updates for the past few months. A combination of acclimating to a new workplace and Fire Emblem: Three Houses has caused me to neglect my blog for a bit.

Since it's Halloween, I thought I'd review a game that fits this holiday. I haven't played any horror games recently, but I do have a game that tells an interesting ghost story: Return of the Obra Dinn, a mystery game developed by Lucas Pope.

In Return of the Obra Dinn, you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Company's London office.  The merchant ship Obra Dinn has reappeared months after it was declared lost at sea. The ship itself has no living crew on it, but that's no problem for you; you have a tool called the Memento Mortem, a pocket watch that lets you reexperience a person's last moments and creates an image of their death. With this pocket watch, you will need to find out what happened on the Obra Dinn.



This game has a very engrossing story. The story of the Obra Dinn is not told in a linear fashion, which does a good job drawing you into the story and making you eager to find the next story reveal. The game does make you work to solve mysteries though; while some answers are easy to figure out, you're going to have to work your brain a bit when the game does not give you many clues. You may even have to do some guesswork, though thankfully the game does not punish you for guessing and you are free to change any wrong answers without penalty.



The aesthetics of the game is also very interesting; it seeks to emulate the graphics of older home computers like the Macintosh. It really adds to the atmosphere of the game and makes the images of deaths something to behold. Walking around someone's image of death is a real treat, especially if you discover something hidden a little out of the way.



If there are a few things to criticize about this game, it's that the game can feel a little slow at times. Sometimes you find yourself having to experience multiple death images sequentially, and the time it takes to move to the next body can feel time-consuming. The death images themselves can last a bit, though this one is a little understandable since the developer probably wants to give you time to explore the scene and find details that might not be as in-your-face.



Overall, if you enjoy ghost stories and mysteries, this is a game I highly recommend. It has a great story, a beautiful aesthetic, and a very interesting premise. The mystery can feel daunting at times, but it just makes the act of solving the mystery all the better.

On a final note, this is one of the only games I've ever played with characters that speak Taiwanese. It was a very pleasant surprise for me to hear, and for that I thank Lucas Pope for including it in the game.

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