After the gem that was Papers, Please, Lucas Pope crafts another puzzle adventure with unusual setting and premise, delivering an original, engrossing experience.
You play as an insurance investigator exploring the ghost ship Obra Dinn, whose crew and passengers are either dead or missing. Your task is to discover what happened, thanks to a peculiar device which allows you to relive the last moments of each body you find. Experiencing those memories and comparing them to the informations you gather or deduct, you need to identify every character and find out his fate (who was murdered, how and by whom, who died of natural causes...), unraveling the tragic mystery of the Obra Dinn.
The retro graphics may be off-putting to some players but they have an elegant simplicity and, like in Papers, Please, feel perfectly functional to the story. Overall, the experience was so compelling that never once I was bothered by the fact that this looks like a game I could have played on my old Commodore 64. Voice acting and sound design are excellent.
The result is a multiple murder mystery with a supernatural twist, Master & Commander meets Agatha Christie via the X-Files. If you have seen the Ridley Scott-produced series The Terror, that's the kind of atmosphere Return of the Obra Dinn goes for.
You play as an insurance investigator exploring the ghost ship Obra Dinn, whose crew and passengers are either dead or missing. Your task is to discover what happened, thanks to a peculiar device which allows you to relive the last moments of each body you find. Experiencing those memories and comparing them to the informations you gather or deduct, you need to identify every character and find out his fate (who was murdered, how and by whom, who died of natural causes...), unraveling the tragic mystery of the Obra Dinn.
The retro graphics may be off-putting to some players but they have an elegant simplicity and, like in Papers, Please, feel perfectly functional to the story. Overall, the experience was so compelling that never once I was bothered by the fact that this looks like a game I could have played on my old Commodore 64. Voice acting and sound design are excellent.
The result is a multiple murder mystery with a supernatural twist, Master & Commander meets Agatha Christie via the X-Files. If you have seen the Ridley Scott-produced series The Terror, that's the kind of atmosphere Return of the Obra Dinn goes for.