What is Return of the Obra Dinn? A spoiler-free summary
Return of the Obra Dinn is a detective game developed by Lucas Pope and released in 2018. In it, you take on the role of an insurance adjuster who is tasked with investigating the ghost ship Obra Dinn after she drifts to port four years after being declared lost at sea in 1803 (it now being 1807). Why are you an insurance adjuster? Because that ship was under the employ of the Honourable East India Company, and it wants to get a payout. If any of its employees committed crimes, such as mutiny or murder, during the voyage, then it needs to know so it can deal with their estates accordingly. However, there is not much in the way of evidence on board. Only a few corpses are to be found, and there is no written record to flip through. Instead, the inspector must make use of a mysterious pocket watch, known as the Memento Mortem, on the corpses to travel back in time to the exact moment that they died. While visiting these “memories", they can find other corpses that were disposed of later, bringing their “ghosts" back onto the ship to use the Memento Mortem on. By finding every memory and carefully examining all of the clues therein, be they obvious or subtle, the inspector can fill their book with the fates of all sixty people onboard. All except two, that is. If they get every other fate correct, they can be sent the materials needed to solve the last two in the so-called Bargain chapter and finally bring the mystery to a close.
The first thing that stands out to any player of the game is undoubtedly its art style. It is a 3D, first person game boldly rendered in a one-bit style; the game only ever displays two colors at once and makes extensive use of dithering. There are different color options available to choose from, labeled as “Monitor" in the settings menu and modeled after the colors used by old-school computers. Some find this to be a bit hard on the eyes but I love the (seeming) simplicity of it. It adds a layer of haze, a veil, to everything the player experiences, in a way, just as all of the things we know about the passengers are only accessible through brief glimpses of the past. If you are someone who suffers with eye strain and wants to play the game, there is a mod on Nexus Mods that allows you to customize the game's colors to anything you want. I recommend checking it out to see if it can alleviate some of your issues. This shrine is modeled after the IBM 8503 setting, as I find it the most aesthetically pleasing (though I often play with LCD, which is pure black and white).
I think it is not outrageous for me to say that the gameplay of Return of the Obra Dinn has revolutionized the detective genre. It is not the first ever detective game, of course, but it put forward many mechanics that I would argue opened the flood gates for many other indie developers to follow suit and further refine the formula. You can easily see the exponential rise of games that put themselves in the detective genre a few years after the game's release, and many of them specifically cite Obra Dinn as an inspiration (see for example the Golden Idol series, The Roottrees Are Dead, and Type Help). Most notably, the game utilizes a “three fates correct" system, where a player's guesses are not confirmed to be right or wrong until they've entered three correct ones. This does not completely eliminate the ability to brute force answers, but it does make it much harder and more time-consuming, especially if you are not already working with two fates that you are very confident with. It also takes a fairly hands-off approach to solving things. There is some light tutorial-y explanations of how to use the book and what to look for in terms of clues, but after that your only feedback is the fate lock-in system. It's just you, your brain, and the clues the game gives you.
Here be krakens (spoilers)
If the things that I have described above have made you interested in the game and you have not played it yet, I highly encourage you to do so! Due to the game's detective-y nature, it is hard to talk about the plot or characters in detail without ruining the actual gameplay experience for a first-time player. You can of course continue on without having played the game, I'm not your boss, but just be warned that you are depriving yourself of that magical first-time experience if you do so. Oh, and a tip if you are going to be playing for the first time: There are clues for everything, even if they are miniscule. You are not forced to make a complete stab in the dark for anything. Take things slow, look closely, and reassess your assumptions. Now, let's get into the interesting stuff.
My Relationship with Obra Dinn
How I got into the game, what it means to me, also lists for favorite/least favorite characters and memories.
Warning: Mild venting
Oh boy where do I even begin with this haha. I first played Return of the Obra Dinn sometime in the latter half of 2020, when I was freshly out of high school and trying to not only adjust to college classes, but college classes in the middle of a pandemic. At the time I was still almost exclusively a console player - I didn't even have a Steam account at the time - so I played the game on my Switch. I'm not even sure if I can put a finger on what initially sparked my intense interest in the game, maybe it was that latent craving to solve mysteries finally being fed, but I was quickly obsessed. I remember at one point I was splayed out on my bed, Switch in hand, playing until around 4 in the morning so I could solve everyone's fates. It's hard for me to remember most of the exact thoughts I was having as I was playing, but I definitely remember the feeling of being so invested in solving the mystery. It's safe to say that my brain chemistry was altered by the time I finished the Bargain chapter.
I found that my thoughts lingered on this game for a long time, especially on the characters and their stories. The player is only given the tinest slices of their lives before they either die or disappear off of the Obra Dinn forever. But even then, I could feel that there was so much more to them that we weren't seeing. They felt real. I became particularly invested in the stories of the midshipmen, the three young men, teenagers really, who were receiving training for their future careers as officers. There was obviously some form of strong relationship to them beyond just being fellow crew mates, and they suffered so much during and leading up to their deaths (I still think all three of them suffered some of the worst fates on the ship). I made a lot of fan art, and eventually, fan fiction for the game, especially for the midshipmen. This was kind of my first time putting myself out there in a fandom capacity, at least onto the wider internet and not some sort of closed-off space. It was really nerve-wracking, but the Obra Dinn fandom was so small that everyone seemed to appreciate what I made anyway.
I made quite a few friends with this fandom, and we could talk about theories and headcanons together, share fanart and fanfiction, and just chat about whatever else we wanted. One of these friends, Robert, became a very good friend of mine (and for a time, we even dated). We met up in person in 2022, and it was my first solo trip ANYWHERE, and it was across the god damn Atlantic Ocean lmao (I'm in the US, he's in the UK). We often like to joke about how much impact Lucas Pope has had on our lives without him even knowing it. We're still very good friends to this day and we chat frequently.
My “full-time" Obra Dinn obsession stayed throughout 2021 and had mostly faded by early 2022, with my (for now) newest fanfic for it being released in February of that year. The fade was always going to be inevitable, that's just how life and interests work, but it may have been sped up by my relationships with a few friends I made through the fandom going sour. Idk. Doesn't really matter and I don't really want to go into detail about it lol. But I continued to think about the game and the characters a lot, and to this day I am still very confident in saying it is my favorite game of all time. I'm not sure if it's emotionally(?) possible for anything to dethrone it. I played the game at what I think was in retrospect a very unwell time in my life; my heart was no longer in the career I had wanted to pursue (veterinary medicine), I was isolated because of the pandemic and my friends going to different colleges, and at the time I had not yet gotten my driver's license so I was still very dependent on my parents despite being a legal adult. I also ended up dropping out from college in 2021. Finding the game and being a prominent member of its fandom gave me something I could look forward to every day. I had skills I could hone with continuous practice (with my art and writing), and I had friends who were almost always available and were just as enthusiastic about something that I was.
So, yeah. All of that to say this game is very important to me. I'm very happy to have it as part of my life.
Favorite characters:
- Thomas Lanke
- Peter Milroy
- John Davies
- Charles Hershtik
- Nathan Peters
Least favorite character: Olus Wiater >:(
Favorite memories:
- Escape Part 6 (Thomas Lanke's death)
- Soldiers of the Sea Part 7 (Zungi Sathi's death)
- Soldiers of the Sea Part 1 (Huang Li's death)
- The Doom Part 6 (Peter Milroy's death)
- The Calling Part 4 (Bun-Lan Lim's death)
Least favorite memory: The Doom Part 2 (Edward Spratt's death)
Character Analysis, Headcanons, etc.
This section is a big work in progress! Pages with a strikethrough are not uploaded yet.
These pages contain the following sections:
- Story Summary: An objective (as possible) explanation of the character's story in the game.
- Interpretation: My thoughts on what the actions and words from and about the character tell us about their canonical personality, relationships, and/or backstory.
- Headcanons: More details on the aforementioned character attributes, but ones that are less based in fact and are more just what I personally think would be fitting or interesting for the character. For some characters this section is excluded because I don't have many strong thoughts on them.
My Fanworks
I've made a lot of fanworks for this game over the years, you can check some of them out here.
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