Return of the Obra Dinn
Main game
4.38 average rating based on 1212 ratings
- Developers
- Lucas Pope
- Publishers
- 3909
- Platforms
- Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 4, Xbox One
- Genres
- Adventure, Indie, Puzzle
- Themes
- Fantasy, Historical, Mystery
- Steam
- View on Steam
Release Dates
User Stats
How Long Is Return of the Obra Dinn?
Good game overall, tedious near the end
The art, sound and general concept of this game is great ... for the first 3/4 hours. Then you have to revisit the same scenes multiple times if you really want the end and that was just not fun for me.
This game is making me fear things I never knew I would fear.
+Amazing atmosphere
+Distinct visual style which is really appealing
+Satisfying progression via the in game book completion
+Ingenious hints to unravel the crew's fate
-It can become pretty difficult to deduce some of the member's fates, especially towards the end
-Sometimes the visual style gets in its own way and clutters certain scenes with particle effects that make it hard to figure our what's happening
Maybe my excitement has surpassed how much it's sucked me in. I enjoy pieces of it and am not bothered by graphics, but the clunkiness of navigating the menus and systesm on a switch is preventing me from being consumed by it. I still haven't seen all the memories and am hoping once i'm in detective mode going through each memory pulling a thread it will be easier. Echoing other peoples frustrations with the ambiguity of verbs (was this person spiked or speared?).
I'm also frustrated by trying to find the next chapter once the ship is fairly cluttered with previous corpses.
Don't know if I'll write a formal review, but I just beat it. I believe if the developer makes another, similar game, it will be a homerun for me. I think this had a little too much awkwardness to make it super enjoyable, and a lot of my "solving" didn't feel authentic. Too may times I had to brute force my way through solving. And that might be intended? Maybe? But it felt anticlimactic. I enjoyed the theme, but wish there was a little more information on the story. I do appreciate when a story isn't blatantly pushed in your face, but there are aspects I'd like to know more of, especially after piecing together so much of it over time.
Man, does this game really get in its own way. I understand that allowing people to just jump between memories via a menu could be immersion breaking (though, having a really tedious mechanic is more immersion breaking for me), but come on. Meet me halfway. If this is expecting me to take notes of where every memory is, and which are nested in what other memory, then maybe an in-game notes thing? I've solved 24 so far. My assumption is that each you solve makes the subsequent ones easier, because your pool of people narrows. So maybe the first chunk is the most tedious. I'm really liking the concept of this, just not the execution. Also, I think the 1-bit style is interesting, but this might not have been the game for it. I don't hate it, I just don't think it's adding to my experience, and might be detracting a tiny bit.
Not really getting into this. What am I supposed to do? I just walk from memory to memory, check every person I can find there, mark their cause of death but it all seems little connected and I do not advance anyhow. I know I am supposed to look for hints, but what are those? It's also very confusing that I supposedly have to collect informations about the sailors, but I cannot really distinguish one particular sailor from the other as they all look the same to me on the picture so singeling out one and gathering informations about them feels very tedious.
Somebody got some clue to help me here?
Just started this last night and had to force myself to turn it off after a few hours otherwise I would have just played through the whole thing in one night. I feel like I still have no idea what happened on this ship because every time I discover a new scene it's just an entirely new tragedy or horror - I love it!
Got my physical copy today. As soon as I am done playing The Messenger, this is the next Switch game I am going to play. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I've found a fourth game that feels like home.
Physical edition on sale over at Limited Run, for those interested. Just ordered mine.
I just binge played this game through two 6-hour sessions. #noragrets