I figured it was time for something a little more contemporary for this feature, so here we are in 1807 trying to figure out what happened to the doomed crew of the Obra Dinn of the East India Trading Company. If you aren't familiar with how Return of the Obra Dinn works, the goal is to use a compass-like device called a Momento Mortum - "remember death" - to witness the moment of a person's demise via their corpse, or the residual memory of their death if that corpse has long since been claimed by the sea. Through this process, the player is eventually able to determine the identities, positions, and eventual fates of the entire crew of the Obra Dinn and those of its passengers. A lot of this is contingent on a form of logic grids; something a younger version of myself would use to short circuit my brain years before pharmacological alternatives became available. (I don't actually take hallucinogens, I'm just trying to sound cool. Did it work?)

Not content to create a whole new puzzle/adventure game framework that I'm sure will see more imitations any day now, Lucas Pope - he of the oppressively bleak Papers, Please - also wanted the game to have a distinct visual style as well. In particular, Pope aimed to recreate the "1-bit" graphics of computer systems like the early Macintoshes, IBMs, the Commodore 64, etc. of the early 80s. However, it's less a game created in those graphical systems than it is a first-person 3D environment that is being passed through a visual filter. The effect is both surreal and striking, sort of like that ASCII Doom mod, and lends itself well to the vintage feel of the game's setting as well as perhaps mercifully alleviating the grisly nature of the more violent death scenes.

I'm going to close a loop of sorts when I talked about Prey a few months ago, likening my favorite part of that game - the way you can pull up the Talos I crew on nearby terminals and use their tracker chips to find out what happened to them, if only to slake your own curiosity - to what I imagined Return of the Obra Dinn's entire gameplay model would be like. That did indeed turn out to be the case: Return of the Obra Dinn is exclusively the investigation at its core, moving around the ship and piecing together events in your head from a series of static images each containing a few preceding lines of dialogue. The game finds a perfect balance between being too revealing and too cagey, only telling you if your hypothesis about a crewmember's identity and death is correct if you score a hat trick. This makes it far harder to brute force your guesses - if you know the victim is one of the ship's "topmen", those who spend most of their time in the rigging, you might be tempted to try each of their names for the cadaver you just found - but not impossible to take a chance on a hunch. Theoretically, you should be able to deduce the identity of everyone with irrefutable logic, if not by mentions of their name then by accents or appearance or just process of elimination, but I found myself switching to abductive reasoning and finding success a number of times by opting for the most likely explanation. I suppose it all comes down to how you play: if this was a real logic square, or its numerical variant sudoku, you wouldn't risk it and might even balk at the idea of occasionally going with your gut, but Obra Dinn's thankfully a little more generous with how you want to approach its enigmas.

I also can't say enough good things about the game's tone and atmosphere, which it accomplishes almost in spite of its unusual aesthetic. The musical stings when you pull out the Momento Mortum, the way each chapter has its own background music when you're strolling around the elaborate die-oramas, how the sound design renders the terrifying otherworldliness of the supernatural perils facing the Obra Dinn, the overall emphasis on sounds and voices as hints and clues, and the clever way that the game tells the story of the Obra Dinn backwards, starting with the final few traumatized crewmembers hacking each apart, and then moving back to a few days earlier with a massive kraken attack that killed a major portion of the crew, and then going even further back to even weirder calamities. Pope has proven to be an excellent storyteller with this game, able to rely a little more on text here than subtext in comparison to imagining everything going on outside your little booth in Papers Please, but still giving his audience plenty of blanks to fill in: there's more than a handful of crewmembers who you don't actually see die with the Momento Mortum (several chapers have a post-script area for "disappearances"), but can surmise how they went by carefully observing the last scenes they appeared in.

While I fell head over keels for Obra Dinn, I did have a few nitpicks. There's a certain amount of... I guess I'd call it padding, where you follow spectral trails to the next body even though you know exactly where this body is - you can't actually make the spectral trail appear without first examining the body in question in a different flashback. Something about the game's mouse controls were really squirrelly too: I had some serious trouble turning around on occasion, even with the mouse sensitivity turned up a few extra notches. It could be that my laptop was having trouble with the filters - I imagine making a 3D environment look that old can be taxing on older systems, sort of like how Cuphead is using state of the art graphics to recreate 1930s animation - but it did seem to make everything drag a smidge. As did being unable to revisit death memories without hiking across the ship to find the trigger corpse again, unless I missed a way to shortcut that process. At any rate, these are minor annoyances and not something that will bring down the overall experience too much, but hopefully something that will get addressed if this game ever sees a sequel (which I hope it does).

Rating: 5 out of 5.

I had never heard of it before GB's GOTY deliberations and decided I needed to look into it. Thank God I did, it's been one of the best game experiences I've had this year.

It's just so utterly engrossing. Everything about it. The importance and quality of the actors' performances cannot be overstated and the hunt for all sorts of little clues that make your brain cells kick into gear is really fulfilling. The soundtrack is always on point with enhancing the mood and the sound effects are typical Lucas Pope goodness.

The only downside for was that a handful of fates were pure guess work but that doesn't really tarnish the overall experience.

Everyone should play this.

This is a game that I wish I could play but never will. Everything about it seems really cool, but that art style gives me a bad migraine after about 10 or 15 minutes. I couldn't even make it through the quicklook the crew did.

Same thing used to happen to me in computer class in school when we had to use the old black and white monitors. Something about that black and white vector stuff just does a number on the eye strain front. I wish there were some option to swap it to color, or a more solid version, or something, because I'd really love to play it.

It was my GOTY; I just love detail oriented exploration/investigation kinds of things, and even if the logic puzzle started to give way to me making wild-ass guesses eventually, I thoroughly enjoyed everything about it.