Return of the Obra Dinn
This post does not contain any spoilers for Return of the Obra Dinn, but it does allure to certain ways of looking at the game and the investigation within that may be more fun to discover yourself.
Return of the Obra Dinn is quite a difficult game to describe. It's usually very easy to employ the old "It's like this, but with this" technique for every game out there, but with this one, I'm honestly not sure.
It's a detective game I guess? An olde timey ship, The Obra Dinn, has showed up at an English port after it disappeared. Aside from a handful of skeletons and some cargo, the ship is completely empty. You are given a book of records and an extremely cool looking pocket watch that lets you go back in time to observe events, so long as it's pointed at a corpse. You can probably see where this is going - there are 60 souls that were lost at sea and your job is to find out what happened to each and every one of them. Not that anybody cares, but this was pretty much the exact premise that I ran for a D&D one shot a year before the game released. Where is my money Lucas?!
The genius of Obra Dinn is how naturally it coaxes you into piecing these events together. The problem that detective games (I guess that's the comparison we're going with here) struggle with is making your thoughts about what happened translate into some kind of input into the big magical machine. As much as I loved Ace Attorney, there were times where you have a cool theory about what happened with some pretty compelling evidence to boot, but you've not presented it at the right time yet or, even worse, you have to nod along with everything while the characters catch up.
To determine a person's fate you only need two things - who they are and what (or who) killed them. You can solve fates in whatever order you like. There is total freedom here in how you approach things and there's no ambiguity either. The game has no rules. You can make a guess on who someone is based on where they're standing in a drawing. Is someone seen frequently standing next to an officer in many scenes? It's perfectly acceptable to assume that they're probably that officer's steward. This type of behaviour is encouraged. It beautifully straddles the line between making you feel very smart for making natural connections, but not being ridiculously complicated. I can't ever recall a time where I made a deduction that I thought was too tenuous.
I think, and we're about to get very pretentious here, its lack of structure almost acknowledges and accommodates malicious player's (not naming any names) attempts at cheating the system. You are required to solve fates in triplets. If you get three fates correct, then the game will confirm it. So if you're not sure if it was this guy or this guy who fell from the rigging, then maybe solve two fates that you are certain of and then play a bit of a guessing game on the last one. This worked for me on two occasions! Instead of feeling smart that I solved the case, I felt smart that I took advantage of the game's systems and in my opinion, that's basically the same thing.
And the game accommodates all of this! You can play it as straight-faced as you like, combing every inch of every scene until you have all the evidence you need. Or you can get all psychological and make deductions based on relationships or what the characters are doing. Or you can just make complete guesses as to which Topman is which because their names are hardly mentioned in any of the scenes at all, and I don't fancy putting my heart and sole (sic) into figuring it out. I think a healthy mix of all three (or at least the first two) is the way to go.
The game commits extremely hard to the 1-bit aesthetic.
The direction of the game should be praised as well. All elements of Obra Dinn fit together in a clockwork fashion. The creaks of the boat and the pitter-patter of the rain alongside the moody 1-bit aesthetic; the satisfying chime of solving a fate accompanied with the silent film style intertitle text is just amazing. It really shows how far good direction can take a video game.
Interestingly enough, Return of the Obra Dinn is much like the clockwork watch - small in size, but very intricate, with each piece working in tandem to produce something that's truly special. I'm struggling to find anything negative to say about it, which is very concerning considering what website you're on right now. It's stylish without feeling overblown; complicated without feeling confusing and is the most natural feeling game that I have ever played. It didn't really feel like a video game at all. Probably why I liked it so much. Anyway, that's the post. See ya.