Twist on 26/10/2018 at 19:12
Since I'm confident many of you will love this game when you eventually play it, I'm giving (
https://store.steampowered.com/app/653530/Return_of_the_Obra_Dinn/) Return of the Obra Dinn its own thread.
Obra Dinn is one of those special games that will be talked about for years, become a significant influence among game developers, and likely (or hopefully) spawn numerous imitators in the indie space. The thoughtful detail in this game is astonishing; I can't believe a single person made it. Every little nuance, every seemingly trivial prop carries a clue that could lead to a series of cascading epiphanies.
So what is it? I think a lazy but useful description would be to consider it a blend of Clue, Sudoku, and Her Story. On Twitter, I've seen game journalists and game developers take up the phrase "3D Murder Sudoku" to describe it. And I've seen a few reviews use Her Story as a reference point.
Superficially, when you look at screenshots and trailers, you might compare it to Gone Home, Firewatch, or Ethan Carter. But it really is its own animal, and at its heart is a complex non-linear logic puzzle. More than any of those games, it really is a challenging, non-linear investigative puzzler.
Since I'm trying not to write too much (but failing, I know), I'll lean on a couple of quotes here:
Like Gone Home, you freely explore a single complete and encapsulated environment rich with meaningful detail. But unlike Gone Home, there's no voice over or similar device to pull you through a narrative thread.
The game's core mechanic is different than you might expect: You have a timepiece that allows you to visit the moment of death for a passenger or crew member of the Obra Dinn, an 18th century merchant vessel. These scenes begin with a black screen and an audio clip of the last seconds of a person's life --
and the sound design and voice acting is both fantastic and critical to the gameplay. After the sound clip ends, it cuts to a tableau you can explore. The scene is entirely static and you don't
play it, you just explore the limited space and observe and note as many details as you can.
I say it's different than you might expect because you don't view most of these death scenes in any particular order, and long after you've revealed and visited every moment of death, the game will go on. I've read reviews where the reviewer had only solved 15 of the 60 fates by the time he'd visited the last moment of death. I think I had about 30 left at that point. It's not the means to drip-feed the narrative to you; rather, it's just the information gathering phase of a full-blown investigation.
You will revisit many of these wonderful little tableaus over and over again as you cross reference different details to unravel the story and fates of the Obra Dinn. Sometimes you'll revisit them just so you can listen to a character's accent or how he addresses another character -- it's thrilling how much these little details matter!
The moments of death also reveal surprising little...
directly. For example, you might encounter a person's last breath, but this moment came after he escaped his attacker and moved to a completely different part of the ship. And even after that moment of death, you still might not even know this victim's identity. So you might leave a scene not knowing who died, how he died, where he was attacked (or even
if he was "attacked"), or who inflicted the killing blow.
BUT... that scene may contain dozens of tiny, subtle clues to OTHER fates.
Like a couple of reviews have said, I really hope other developers imitate and iterate on this gameplay. I even hope it directly influences the next games by Fullbright (Gone Home and Tacoma) and Campo Santo (Firewatch).
For me, Obra Dinn fulfills something I've been craving. I love games like Gone Home and Firewatch, but after playing them I also wished I could play something like them that gave me more freedom in how I revealed the story and -- more importantly -- gave me some kind of real, tangible investigative challenge beyond a slow narrative reveal.
Obra Dinn is exactly that game.
Starker on 26/10/2018 at 19:36
Thank you for saving me the trouble of making the thread. I finished the game last weekend and I was also completely blown away by it. The way the individual details of the story start gradually falling into place is amazing, as is the feeling when you get confirmation that you've been on the right track. I think the dev describes it as "an insurance adventure with minimal colour", but it really is his best game so far (though, of course quite different from Papers, Please). Everything, from the voice acting to the story to the art style to the actual "puzzles" is so well made.
The only criticism I would have about the game is its structure and pacing. It kind of pushes you towards uncovering more and more new scenes, but I found the game most enjoyable when I resisted that and tried to fill out as much as possible about what I saw. It definitely pays to look at everything in detail and make full use of the book, from cover to cover.
Now I'm searching for let's play videos to watch how other people solved it and it's quite shocking how much I missed, even as I thought I was being reasonably thorough. It felt like there was just enough to solve the game, but now I'm seeing how other people went about some things completely differently and still reached the same conclusions. Also, it has been quite fun to see some of the reactions to the events of the game.
For example, here's a playthrough I found where the guy has some amazing deduction skills: (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G4ab-roIU0&index=1&list=PLOx2-nvzE_ZIM2HnNmCTufsx4fFFW-Td_)
Speaking of which, if anyone knows a good playthrough (in English, German, Russian, or Japanese), I'd be interested in that.
Twist on 26/10/2018 at 20:17
Quote Posted by Starker
Thank you for saving me the trouble of making the thread.
That's funny: I finished it earlier in the week, and since then I've been glancing at TTLG thinking, "Holy crap, how is TTLG
not talking about this yet?!" Today I figured, "Maybe someone just has to get the ball rolling..." (Although it'll probably just get lost in the hype around RDR 2...)
Quote Posted by Starker
The only criticism I would have about the game is its structure and pacing. It kind of pushes you towards uncovering more and more new scenes, but I found the game most enjoyable when I resisted that and tried to fill out as much as possible about what I saw. It definitely pays to look at everything in detail and make full use of the book, from cover to cover.
Part of that I agree with -- specifically, I wasn't crazy about the way it linked you to newly discovered corpses within a death scene. I found it a bit of a nuisance, but I'm not sure how to better handle that issue. The game developer needs to make sure you know there are other bodies to find in those scenes or you could get hopelessly lost in this game, but I didn't like the way the game tugged me through those series of scenes.
Maybe not a spoiler, but I'll tag it just in case:
But compared to what you describe, I think if I were to play it again with zero knowledge, I might hurry through the scenes solving even fewer fates, and then begin the investigation proper. Although I'll agree the fates that require intuitive leaps without perfect information were the most fun, and you can kind of create more of those by trying to solve as much as possible before you find all the scenes.Quote Posted by Starker
Now I'm searching for let's play videos to watch how other people solved it and it's quite shocking how much I missed, even as I thought I was being reasonably thorough. It felt like there was just enough to solve the game, but now I'm seeing how other people went about some things completely differently and still reached the same conclusions.
I experienced something similar and it made me appreciate the game even more. Not only is it unlikely any two people will solve all the fates in the same order, but it appears unlikely people would use the same information to solve a good number of the fates.
Starker on 26/10/2018 at 20:38
Well, one advantage of being more thorough from the beginning is that you have time to take notes and formulate theories, which can come very handy later on. But I also thought that the story worked better and I found myself more invested in the characters when there were more pieces falling in place in each scene.
For sure, you could rush through the scenes without making as many connections and just fill them in later, but I think it's a much more haphazard process when you're chasing them all over the ship.
Twist on 26/10/2018 at 21:04
That makes sense: the more you've figured out, the more narrative pieces fall into place when you visit each death scene.
Maybe my problem was my note-taking techniques. I switched my methods multiple times until I had a bit of a mess, and then I kind of started over in re-organizing my notes once I'd visited all the scenes.
I think we both liked the same kind of things the best, but we experienced those moments at different points in the game because of our different approaches.
And wow... isn't the sound design incredible? This commenter on the RPS review does a good job summarizing all the ways sound is cleverly implemented into the design:
Quote:
The way each and every line of instruction is displayed rhythmically, dancing along to a sea shanty during the intro. The way hearing the specific plunk of a “Well done” has your heart leaping into your throat each and every time. The way the game tracks your Fate progress in a spooky echo of the Countdown clock with its own wee fanfare… Even the swift click of a closing pocket watch as you move from a corpse. All this combined with the detail of the audio snippets and it’s the most effective use of sound I’ve seen (heard?) from a game in years. And that’s not even mentioning the music. I revisited a few dioramas just to hear the tune that accompanied it.
- Taffy
I'll add that I loved the ambient sounds while walking around the ship... all the creaking, shifting old wet wood and the way the ambient sounds change when you descend below the water's surface within the ship...
Starker on 26/10/2018 at 21:13
Not to mention the voice acting -- the way you're able to place a character just based on their accent was really neat. And really helpful with multiple people speaking in some scenes.
Twist on 26/10/2018 at 23:04
Yes, I loved how being able to distinguish different accents and their origins was a meaningful part of the game. Even identifying the origin of non-English languages becomes a part of the game. Most of them are pretty obvious, but I have to admit: I didn't recognize the Hindi phrase. But as soon as I looked it up I had a revelation on a couple of fates.
It surprised me that he just collected voice actors from locals, friends and aquaintances (as I understand it). It's all so well done, and it involves more important nuances and variables (like the importance of different accents) than many games.
I guess the importance of accents and language origins ties into how there's always a clue to what you need to determine. It may not seem like it at times, but the clues are there somewhere.
Starker on 27/10/2018 at 05:21
Yeah, it makes it just a little bit easier for people who are more versed in other cultures. There's also some stuff like being able to identify the guy from New Guinea based on his tattoos. On the other hand, it can be an obstacle as well. I've been watching a playthrough where someone who is not a westerner is not able to tell apart female and male names, for example. On the other hand, a few other things were made a bit more obvious to them by having some ambiguity removed in translation.
Twist on 27/10/2018 at 21:21
Quote Posted by Starker
On the other hand, it can be an obstacle as well. I've been watching a playthrough where someone who is not a westerner is not able to tell apart female and male names, for example. On the other hand, a few other things were made a bit more obvious to them by having some ambiguity removed in translation.
I need to watch some playthroughs. I'm really curious to see these different perspectives and approaches.
Regarding the potential confusion and ambiguity of different cultures or languages approaching this game's problem-solving methods, over in the Steam discussion area the developer wrote this interesting post regarding these challenges. Given your experience with languages, I imagine this area is of particular interest to you:
Quote Posted by Lucas Pope
Many of the correct fate variations are down to issues with localization. Something obvious or specific in English can be more or less broad in other languages.
For a good example of this, in English we have the nice verb "knifed" which covers any usage of a knife including cut or stabbed. Unfortunately there's no such handy verb for being killed with a sword ("sworded?") so the fate entry has to appear as "Killed (Sword)."
Imagine that issue projected across 9 languages.
Starker on 27/10/2018 at 21:59
You couldn't do much worse than the one I mentioned above: (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G4ab-roIU0&index=1&list=PLOx2-nvzE_ZIM2HnNmCTufsx4fFFW-Td_) I really wish I had played more like that guy. A word of warning, though. Youtube compression is not kind to this game, to put it mildly, so it's best to watch the videos at as high a resolution as possible.
Regarding localisation, I haven't noticed many differences in the German playthrough so far (about third of the way in), but in the Japanese playthrough I watched, there were a lot. For example, where in the English it said "they" in the chapter Soldiers of the Sea, in the Japanese, it said
"monsters", which kind of makes things obvious when you have to choose between
"killed by enemy" and "killed by monster".
I've also thought a lot about the structure/pacing issues I had with the game and I wonder if the game should have let you jump between memories more easily and perhaps gated the content a bit more to balance it. Also, a lot of the let's plays I've tried to watch seem to devolve into random guessing and running around the ship with no clear plan or methodology. Perhaps locking things down three fates at a time was a bit too lenient.