For this week’s critical play, I played Return of the Obra Dinn, a mystery game by famed game designer Lucas Pope who also produced Papers Please. You play as an investigator on Obra Dinn, a ship that went missing for 4 years then returned with all 60 souls onboard killed or missing. The key gameplay mechanic is Memento Mortem, a magical wristwatch that, when used on a corpse or traces thereof, allows the player to see and explore the moment of death of the victim. Using this wristwatch, you need to connect the faces of the crew to their identity and fate, eventually figuring out the story of Obra Dinn during its mysterious expedition.
Protagonist holding Memento Mortem in front of a corpse
Return of the Obra Dinn, like most detective stories and games, uses embedded narratives. The plot is the audience’s experience as the detective gradually gathering information about the crime, and the story is the original incident, eventually laid out like a completed puzzle pieced together from individual clues. However, the game puts its own unique spin on this genre. In most detective stories and games, the audience, along with the detective protagonist, have information about the background and aftermath of the incident, potential suspects and their motives, where the ultimate goal is to figure out what happened at the moment of crime and who was the perpetrator. Yet in Return of the Obra Dinn, the mystery and the clues are flipped: through Memento Mortem, we can investigate the scene of death however we want, but it is the context that we need to uncover through exploration, as in the beginning of the game we don’t even have knowledge of who is who. It is an extremely immersive way of experiencing and uncovering the story that I have not seen before.
Logbook keeps track of the crew members and scenes where they are present
The game encourages players to make assumptions and deductions on the story via the logbook, where all clues are compiled in one place. Every death scene is summarized in the logbook with its location, dialogue, and victim. The player can then attempt to assign identity and cause of death to the victim, and after 3 correct assignments the game will confirm them to inform the player. The logbook implements mechanics that help the player with deduction without overwhelming them, which I find very interesting. Firstly, the logbook contains photos of all crew members of the ship, but when you hover on an individual, a zoom-in picture will pop up, which will either be clear or blurry depending on whether the player has found enough clues to deduce their identity. There are also “deduction levels” telling players how hard it will be to try deducing a person’s identity with insufficient information. In the profile of each crew member, there’s also a map showing where all clues relevant to the person is compiled, effectively creating a moment map of the person. For a game where the player needs to uncover the fate of 60 people, these mechanics make the task much more manageable.
Top deck, starting point of the game
When it comes to architecture in Return of the Obra Dinn, the game is an excellent example of environmental storytelling. The flow of the plot is controlled by the player’s movement through the scene, which is constrained by the architecture: the player arrives firstly on the top deck, then gradually descent down to the cargo hold, investigating corpses along the way. In this way, the designer can enforce a certain sequence in which the player uncovers the clues. However, the architecture itself also hides clues to the story, such as blood trails on the ground that lead players to corpses, and doorhandles with either a cross or a line telling the player if the room is accessible or not. One instance that I really liked is a scene where the crew were sleeping in hammocks, and the hammocks were numbered which directly corresponds to the numbers on the crew manifest, thus giving the identities of several people at once. These tiny details are what I find especially fun.
The number 54 on the hammock identifies the patient as crew No. 54 on the manifest
The multimodal-ness of clues in the game doesn’t stop there. The crew members on the ship comes from a variety of backgrounds, which is reflected in the voice-acting of the narration. For example, in of the voiced narrations, the victim cursed “Verdammt”, which immediately points to the fact that he was one of the Austrian crews, while another conversion in Hindi identifies some crew as Indian seamen. Some narrations also have distinct Scottish or Irish accents. All these elements come together to make the game a one-of-a-kind experience.
Verdammt!
Nonetheless, I think some mechanic improvements can be made. The game has a heavy focus on linking different clues and scenes together to uncover an NPC’s identity, however, given that we have no prior knowledge of the NPCs’ names, it can be hard to cross-reference between scenes. For example, a scene may depict NPC A killing NPC B, which will be stored on NPC B’s profile, but without knowing NPC A’s name there is no way of noting down who is the killer since the cause of death can only be recorded as “Victim is [killed in a certain way] by [the murderer’s name]”. If cross-reference via face is possible along with names, deduction could be made much simpler.
For the ethics problem, while the game does feature certain accessibility features, such as subtitles and voiced narrations, players did report a number of accessibility issues. The most common one is motion sickness, which is made more severe by the game’s 1-bit art style. (Example: Any visual accessibility mods out there? : r/ObraDinn Graphics Causing Dizziness :: Return of the Obra Dinn General Discussions ) While it is meant to evoke a retro appearance, the sharp contrast between dark and bright pixels and the overall pixelated rendering also makes it harder to process the depth of the scene in my experience. The game offers several color presets, which partially addresses this issue, as some color combinations may be less visually offending. Another disability that significantly affected gameplay experience is prosopagnosia, or face blindness, as reported by this player: Is this game playable for me? : r/ObraDinn. Given that matching faces to identity is such a crucial part of deduction in this game, an alternative way of noting down/referencing people’s faces could help improve the accessibility of the game a lot. This shows that adding accessibility features goes beyond typical mechanics such as subtitles, voiced narration, and high contrast/alternative color modes. One also need to think about how gameplay mechanics themselves can be more accessible to players with disabilities
