I just played through the demo of Return of the Obra Dinn. I highly recommend you do too!

Its a strange and wonderful looking game, rendered in only two colours (colours which you can pick, depending on your preference of old computer display) its asking you to investigate the "fate" of the crew and passengers aboard a mysterious ship, aided helpfully by a handheld watch that enables you to view (and listen to) the final seconds of each dead persons life.

The demo is short and superbly effective at leaving you wanting more, I cant wait to see where this game goes beyond the 20 or so minutes I spent with the demo. As you listen to each of the nicely acted audio recordings and scan around the 3D recreations of each persons final moments you are looking for clues to identities and exploring the outer reaches of the areas to ascertain what happened. This demo keeps things fairly simple but it has lots of potential to confuse and shock I think in a full release.

The fates you resolve are just a few of the large collection of names in the journal the game hands you, so it appears there is a lot left to solve, and it could get devilishly tricky judging by the simple solutions on display so far. This looks like another game following in the footsteps of The Witness and Her Story where we are going to need to grab a notepad and do some detective work.

I tried to record my play-through but my little laptop couldn't handle the game and OBS running at the same time, but I managed to grab a few screenshots so I thought I would chuck them up here. This game looks very promising to me!

Is this much different than the previous demo? I didn't know he made the GDC demo public for everyone to check out, thanks for the heads up.

@assinass: I hadnt heard of it before I saw the link on Rockpapershotgun, so Im not sure Im afraid. Lucas Pope says specifically on the demo page though that not much has changed in the years he has worked on it since his first "vertical slice" - Changing to a new engine has taken up most of his time. I hope the rest of the game isnt too far off.

I didn't mention it above but this game is by the same guy, Lucas Pope, who made Papers Please. Thats why I clicked on the story and got the demo in the first place.

It's weird to see "in the footsteps of The Witness and Her Story" when in my mind this game has been around for longer than those two, haha. Still pretty excited for this to finally come out.

Checked out the game for the first time after I saw the news on RPS. I'm going to need a while to adjust to that graphical style. Its interesting and pretty cool but it's somewhat hard to focus on for a longer timespan. Does werid stuff to my brain.

Other than that colour me excited for more. I can see this being really good and Obra Dinn gets my automatic attention just because of how excellent Papers, Please was!

Cool, thanks for the info.

Looks cool but "free" "demo" still sounds weird to me.

@liquiddragon: Yeah I shouldn't have titled it that! Demo's are fairly rare these days though, I guess I was just surprised to be able to play one. Demo disks used to be huge for me, Growing up on the Atari and Amiga as I did.

@baal_sagoth: Did you fiddle with the settings to try the different colour schemes? I cant remember what monitor it was emulating but I like the blue one. It was all a little jarring for me at first, but by the time I entered the first "memory" I wasn't really noticing it anymore.

@williamr: I didn't. Good point, I will experiment with that. Good to know!