Saturday Morning Gaming: Unravelling A Mystery On The Obra Dinn

From the description of The Return of the Obra Dinn:

In 1802, the merchant ship Obra Dinn set out from London for the Orient with over 200 tons of trade goods. Six months later it hadn’t met its rendezvous point at the Cape of Good Hope and was declared lost at sea.

Early this morning of October 14th, 1807, the Obra Dinn drifted into port at Falmouth with damaged sails and no visible crew. As insurance investigator for the East India Company’s London Office, dispatch immediately to Falmouth, find means to board the ship, and prepare an assessment of damages.

If you’ve been waiting for a game where you can *FINALLY* play an insurance investigator, your wait is over.

It’s your job to go aboard the Obra Dinn and figure out what the heck happened. Your tools are a map of the journey that was supposed to happen, a map of the ship itself, a manifest of the crew and passengers, and the “Memento Mortem”… a magical pocketwatch that shows what was going on in the moments of and before the death of any given corpse you happen to find aboard.

The first thing that you do is find the skeletal remains of *SOMEBODY* on the deck…

You have to use your MM and you hear a small cutscene where a couple of guys are trying to break into the Captain’s quarters. You hear the Captain shout at them and WHAMMO, you are transported to a freeze frame of the moment that this guy got shot.

In your book you have an entry for this guy where you have to enter his name, how he died (shot), and at whose agency (the captain’s). As the game goes on, you find more skeletal remains and use your tools to figure out exactly what the heck happened to the Obra Dinn.

There’s a lot of violence, I guess, but you’re a passive observer of it. Oh, the captain shot the first guy through the door and then got into a fight with the remaining guys who overcame him. Huh. They’re talking about wanting something from the captain. The captain says that they’re not going to get it. So what is it that they wanted? Who is in the bunk?

And as you investigate each corpse, you learn a little bit more about the doomed trip. Oh, this person died in a mutiny. That person died when the ship was attacked by a sea monster. Oh, this person froze to death. And you learn the fate of every person on the manifest.

You’re going to have to use deduction. You’re going to have to figure stuff out. It’s not an action game at all. It’s a post-action game. There’s horror going on, but you’re watching it passively. You’re just going to have to figure out what horrible things happened to the Obra Dinn.

It’s not like anything I’ve ever played before.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is a screen shot of the title page of the game. All screenshots taken by the author.)