Obra Dinn is a unique spin on puzzling adventures, combining a throwback art style with a grim tale of tragedy aboard the high seas. Thanks to clumsy UI, vague and unnecessarily complicated clues, and a dearth of engaging character development, only the most committed to Obra Dinn's secrets will find this tedious process enjoyable.
The player is an inspector for the East India Company, investigating a missing ship with the power of a magical watch that can transport the user to the time of death of any corpse located. The player explores a nonlinearly told tale by jumping from corpse to corpse, finding corpses in flashbacks and detailing the who, what, and from whom for deaths. Without spoiling anything, the most exciting parts of Obra Dinn are in these moments. Players live out a tale of violence, misfortune, and peril by jumping from scene to scene and guessing a few clues along the way based on what people say, wear, and do.
As soon as the player has a chance to leave the boat, that is where the real challenge begins. And that is also where the game stops becoming enjoyable and becomes maddeningly frustrating. The player must re-travel through scene by scene repeatedly with the help of their trusty logbook, but maneuvering back to and exploring previous scenes is a major hassle. Many clues are vague and easily confused thanks to the unique artstyle, which seeks to represent B&W Macintosh games and looks gorgeous but has no good way of making important clues stand out. Eventually the player can maybe find pieces of scenes and at times have to brute force their way through guesses but the game's system at indicating three correct guesses at a time leaves a LOT of room for error.
The story is difficult to say without spoilers, but gets weirder and more intriguing as the player makes the initial run. The majority of the characters, however, are flat as a board. Nearly the entirety of the ship is barely involved outside of their deaths and rarely has much in the way of interesting characterization. This can make figuring out what happened to them frustrating but also results in dulling the main story and can lead to some surprising amounts of racial profiling. Most of the non-white characters are only recognizable from profiled faces as well as accents and what they wear, and rarely receive any notable part of the plot outside of their own demises. Some (the Formosans) luck out, but good luck getting personality out of the Chinese or Persians.
The biggest parts of the game that stand out are definitely the graphics and the music. The cross hatches and simple lines paint a nostalgic picture of adventure games gone by while retaining a historically accurate picture of the time, and music is short but infectiously sweet tunes unique to each chapter of the game. At times the mundanity is soothing and the perilous scenes thunder with brass.
It's a shame that my Obra Dinn experience was filled with tedium and frustration. Hearing the best out of this game I expected a complicated but rewarding logic puzzle where clues lead to each other and built a rich tapestry of a story. This was definitely not the case. At risk of not being worthy of the game's challenge, I ended up having a more rewarding experience out of a player-made hint guide than the game itself.
