How Return of the Obra Dinn Turns You Into a Detective

Every year, I like to close things off by talking about the most interesting game I played in the last 12 months. It might be not the best game, but it’s definitely the most innovative, the most daring, and the game that’s most unlike anything I’ve played before. For 2018 I could have picked titles like Into the Breach, Florence, and Minit - but who am I kidding? I had to go with Lucas Pope’s incredible detective game, Return of the Obra Dinn.

So here’s how the game works. You’re an insurance agent in 1807 and you’re on a merchant ship where all 60 of its crew members have died or disappeared. Your job is to figure out their fates. To do this, you have a magic pocket watch - and if you open it when standing next to a corpse... this happens. You get a bit of dialogue... UNKNOWN VOICE: “Captain! Open the door…” And then you get a static scene from the very moment that person died.

The game then asks you two questions. Who is this person? And how did they die? How this chap died is pretty obvious. He got shot. And I think we can safely assume that he was shot by the captain. In Return of the Obra Dinn, figuring out how people died is rarely a huge challenge. The tricky part is figuring out who they are. And right now, we just don’t know. So we move on, and find another skeleton. This time, it’s the captain’s.

And before blowing his brains out, he says... CAPTAIN: “Abigail. Your brother. I shot him dead." Well, that’s more like it! We’ve got something to go on now. So, what do we know about Abigail? Well, she was the captain’s wife - hence the surname. But she also kept her maiden name, which she would share with her brother… who must be William Hoscut! And so if the Captain shot Abigail’s brother, this must be William Hoscut.

Okay that’s about as much I want to spoil the game. If you haven’t played Obra Dinn yet and you think it looks cool - please shut this video off and go grab the game. Otherwise, let’s move on. So this is Return of the Obra Dinn in a nutshell. The game has about 50 of these death vignettes, and the game is essentially about cross-referencing information, as one person’s identity can often only be found by looking for clues in another person’s vignette - turning these scenes into a massive matrix of data.

But it’s not as easy as that, of course. The information you find is merely a clue and you must perform some clever deductive reasoning on it to find the real answer. Take the three midshipsmen, for example. In this vignette, an unknown man says… UNKOWN VOICE: “Tell Pete’s mother, I... I tried my best… to pull him back... to save him." In a previous vignette, this same man is seen holding the rope when another bloke is blown up.

So that unlucky sod is probably the only Pete on the crew - Peter Milroy. In another vignette, a man says UNKNOWN VOICE: “Never been on a farm, Charlie?" UNKNOWN VOICE: “Mind your shoes now" referring to this chap, who’s currently puking on his shoes. There are two Charles on the crew - but this one’s wearing the same midshipsman’s uniform as Peter, making him most likely to be Charles Hershtik. And so with Peter and Charles named, through the process of elimination we can name the third and final midshipsman, Thomas Lanke.

As you can see, we used a number of different factors to deduce their identities - dialogue, uniforms, the timeline of events, and process of elimination. But Lucas uses pretty much every possible method of concealing information. Including accents, their location on the map, relationships, names, these numbers on these hammocks, and props - like Omid Gul’s sword or Emily Jackson’s wedding ring. When you think you have sorted out someone’s identity and fate, Obra Dinn is very clever about how it asks you for your answer.

In my video about detective games, I talked about how these titles often give away the solution by giving the player a question and some answers to pick from. In a lot of these games, the question and answers can prompt the player, or put them onto a line of thinking they weren’t previously on, or just let the player guess the answer. Obra Dinn does have multiple choices, but sidesteps these issues in three smart ways.

One, is that there’s only ever two questions. And they’re the same for everyone on board. Who are they, and what is their fate? You never have to explain your reasoning or answer follow-up questions. Two, is that you have a huge number of answers to pick from. Who are they has 60 possible answers. And how did they die has a huge list - like shot, stabbed, electrocuted, exploded, and so on. Sometimes with additional info like who shot them, or what crushed them.

That’s way too many to guess, and too many to prompt you with a possible answer. And three, is that the game won’t immediately tell you if you were right or wrong. It will only do so when you get three answers right. This does takes away from that immediate satisfaction of getting a correct answer, but it’s there to make it very difficult to brute force your way through the game by just guessing fates until you get it right.

If you are struggling, Lucas also thought carefully about how much the game should help you with figuring things out. So, the crew’s faces are blurred out until the game knows you have enough information to figure things out. These triangles tell you the difficulty level of any particular fate. There are no road blocks - you can just keep playing without identifying anyone. And even finish the game with unfinished answers.

Plus, the game accepts multiple answers in certain ambiguous situations, and sometimes has multiple sources for a person’s identity or fate. So we have a game where 60 people disappeared in unique and interesting ways. And they gave cryptic clues about each other’s identities at the exact moment of their death. And now you have to use a fantasy pocket watch to go back to the moment each person died. To fill in a book that magically knows when you get three answers right.

I don’t think you would be off the mark if you described this whole system as contrived. Which actually reminds me of another game I highlighted in my end of year wrap-up: the search engine detective game, Her Story. So in this game, a detective has apparently cut up a woman’s testimony into about 800 unlabelled video clips. They’ve removed the actual questions that the detectives asked her. And when you search for clips, you can only see the first five results.

This is a bad computer system. Whoever made this should be fired. It’s silly, and like Obra Dinn: it’s contrived. But here’s the thing. Many detective games try to capture reality. Or at least, a fictional version of that reality. Games like LA Noire and the Sherlock games aim for realism, and try to make game mechanics out of actual crime fighting processes like talking to witnesses and making deductions. But this must always come with limitations.

For example, you can’t have a system where you can ask a witness any question you like. Artificial intelligence isn’t quite there yet. So the game picks a few questions for you. And it picks who you can talk to. And where you can go. And what items you can pick up. And it turns complex logical reasoning into a simple multiple choice question. In these games, real world processes naturally get automated and made abstract - but in ways that take power away from the player, often leading to that feeling, I’ve described, of being more like Watson than Sherlock.

On the contrary, the worlds of Obra Dinn and Her Story are not trying to be realistic. Instead, they have stories, gameplay systems, and means of interaction that exist purely for the purposes of allowing for deductive reasoning - without taking power from the player’s hands. So neither game has to worry about letting the player ask questions of a witness because either the testimony has already been recorded years ago, or everyone’s already dead.

And you can’t travel anywhere you like when you’re stuck in front of a computer, or trapped on a boat Plus, your interaction with the games is limited to typing in search commands or picking identities from a drop-down. And the narratives of the two games are not novels or movie scripts that have been turned into games, but ones purely designed to fit the systems of the game. Which wasn’t always easy, with Obra Dinn designer Lucas Pope telling RPS “people have to be dying left and right, and you need a reason for people to be dying constantly.

And that's sort of unusual, people don't generally die all the time. Getting that working with the story in a way that the player can understand took a long time". But it worked. Obra Dinn is an incredible experience. It’s the sort of game that you’ll play with a pad full of notes, making timelines and jotting down details, looking for clues and hints - until something clicks and you enter your answer. Over and over again it offers those sorts of eureka moments that detective games promise - but so often fail to deliver.

Making it the best detective game ever made, and - despite what I said at the start of the show - it is the best game of 2018.