The Knife is in the Details - Let's Play RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN - ep9

Channel:

Lowbrow Gaming

Subscribers:

634

Published on January 9, 2019 8:00:02 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2verpxAYmvw

Game:

Return of the Obra Dinn (2018)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 17:44

41 views

3

Picking out the smaller parts is a bit tricky, but I promise we're getting there.
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Return of the Obra Dinn is a puzzle video game by Lucas Pope, released in October 2018 for Microsoft Windows and macOS. It is Pope's second commercial game following 2013's Papers, Please.

The game is set aboard a fictional East India Company ghost ship whose crew and passengers have all mysteriously died or disappeared, with the game's objective being to discover how.

The game, played from the first-person view, uses a 1-bit monochromatic graphical style inspired by games on early Macintosh systems.

The player takes the role of an insurance adjuster for the London office East India Company in 1807. The Obra Dinn, insured by the East India Company, had previously gone missing in 1802 as it was to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, but since washed up in port with none of its sixty-man crew alive.

The player is tasked to determine the fate of all of the crew members, including their names, where and how they met their fate, and if they were killed, and who their killer was.

The game is played out from a first-person view, allowing the player to explore the Obra Dinn, using a monochromatic dithering style that mimics approaches that games on early home computers like the Macintosh had used to simulate shading and color.

To help complete the task, the player is given a log book that includes a drawing of all the crew members, the crew roster, and layouts of the ship. They are also given the "Memento Mortem", a pocket watch-like device that activates when the player encounters one of the corpses on the ship.

The Memento Mortem plays back the audio of the moments before the person's death, and then gives the player a few moments to explore the area around the frozen moment of death to identify who was present and other visual details.

Once players have seen each moment, the log book automatically fills in some of the details of that event (such as the location, the visual identity of the crew members present at the event, and the dialog heard in the moments before death), allowing the player to cross reference this information with other information already learned.

In some cases, the Memento Mortem will react following this process to reveal another related death, guiding the player to where that corpse lays before repeating the investigation process.

Certain sections of the ship are not available until the player has observed all the death moments in a certain area. The player can review these memories at any time to observe any new clues they might have missed following later investigation.

Ultimately, Return of the Obra Dinn is a large logic puzzle requiring the player to use deductive reasoning to determine the fate of each crew member.

The game does not provide explicit clues for how each crew member died or towards their identity, requiring the player to make guesses.

The player can refine their guesses as they gain more information; the game is only over once the player has correctly identified the names and fates. When a player has properly established the names and reasons for death for any three, the game affirms this information to the player, locking those changes and effectively reducing the complexity of the puzzle.

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