Return of the Obra Dinn Review

Every once in a while a game comes along that has such strong design, and is built in a genre I love – so I just dive in. 

This happened to me last fall when I bought Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope for my Nintendo Switch (I believe it’s also available on PC).

Return of the Obra Dinn is a deduction based mystery game that takes place during the age of sail. In the game you take the place as an insurance adjuster, as the ill-fated Obra Dinn has mysteriously reappeared in harbor after being missing for several years. Your job is to identify everyone on the ship, and what has happened to each of them – their fates.

This takes place in a gorgeous one-bit art style.

Because of the nature of the game (mystery, deduction), I’ll avoid spoilers in this article. Instead I’ll discuss how well the game is designed, and then highly recommend the game if you are at all interested in mystery games.

Core Gameplay Loop

The core gameplay loop in the Return of the Obra Dinn is almost one of exploration. 

You start the game by viewing a scene. In the scene you learn information about a few crew members, and perhaps the fate of one or two. You also unlock access to the next scene.

The key to this core gameplay loop is that you’ll rarely find all information about a single crew member in a single scene. Because of this, you’ll need to explore multiple scenes, unlocking one after the other, and take note of multiple clues to find your answers over time.

It keeps you engaged, never wanting to put down the game as you want to get the clues to from the next scene – but if you move too fast you may miss something! It’s brilliant.

Multiple Avenues to Deduction

While the core gameplay loop is spectacular, the deduction in Return of the Obra Dinn is masterful.

The clues you find in the Return of the Obra Dinn aren’t obvious. It’s rare for this game to come out and say “here is the name of this crew member, and here is what happened to them.” Instead, you’ll need to piece together clues and use outside knowledge (often, but not always, supplied in the game) to determine how to use these clues.

I’ll drop a mild spoiler here, just because it’s so well done. The designer of the game, Lucas Pope, spent a lot of time (and I assume money) hiring local voice actors to give authentic dialects for the different characters in the game. The result of this is a series of clues you can collect, based on the accent or language of the character being spoken, to help you identify who that person is.

The game is littered with these types of clues – ship locations, crew jobs, clothing the crew wears, and so many others I don’t want to spoil! Because of the variety and volume of clues, there are multiple ways to figure out who each person is, and what their fate was.

This results in wonderfully fun gameplay where the player feels clever discovering the answers they need, in a path they determined for themselves. The game absolutely shines in this area.

Checking Your Answers

One of the challenges in any mystery game (as outlined in this video here) is how the game checks the player’s answers.

When I first started playing Return of the Obra Dinn, the game told me that after I’ve identified the correct identity and fate of three different people, it would alert me they are correct. I found this weird at first – why not tell me after one? I pretty quickly figured out the reason why.

Waiting until the player has three correct answers prevents the player from brute-forcing the answers in the game. There are way too many possible options between identity and possible fates to randomly guess your way to victory in this game, if you need three correct answers at once. It forces you to use skills like deduction to find the needed answers.

But – it still leaves room for guessing! There were a few times when I was playing that I was stuck. I was fairly certain I had two identities and fates correct, but I wasn’t sure about the third. So instead of getting frustrated or going online to find the answers, I did some guessing – and it worked.

It’s a very smart way to check answers, that is still flexible enough for players like me who needed a bit of extra help.

The Result

The result of all this – the core gameplay loop, multiple avenues to use deduction, and checking your answers – is an absolutely spectacular game in the Return of the Obra Dinn.

If you like mystery games, I can’t recommend this game enough. Don’t read spoilers or more information about the game, don’t watch videos – just go get the game. There are so many moments of surprise and wonder that blew me away – and so many of those extremely fun “aha” moments when the pieces fell into place and I solved the identity and fate of another person.

Check it out – you won’t regret it.

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