Return of the Obra Dinn.

"Memento Mortum" flashes across my screen - Remember Death. An interesting interjection, I mutter to myself, shifting my position to better situate myself in front of my PC screen. Since opening the game, I have successfully stumbled around the top deck of The Obra Dinn, adjusting to the dithered style rendered around the 3D pirate ship. After gathering my things, climbing aboard, and bidding farewell to the dinghy, I am taken aback by the sprawling vessel that is laid out before me. The intricacies of the scene distinctly contrasted the lack of prompting I had been given thus far. After messing with my controller, I realize the mechanics were as simple as investigating and interacting. No prompts popped up on the screen, the only successful button was either to toggle through the in-game notebook, of which was also solely controlled by the left and right trigger, or to simply zoom-in on the location I was observing. It took me a good 20 minutes to fully recognize the “simplicity” of this game, I kept expecting more guidance to be given to me. I moved again, puzzled, now fully sitting up as I opened my desk drawer to pull out a pad of paper and a pen. I realized then, that this would not be a casual game. After cracking my knuckles I went to work, meticulously combing my way through the ship and it's secrets. "Memento Mortum" was not just an interjection, it was how to play the game.

Return of the Obra Dinn is described as an adventure and puzzle video game designed by American game developer Lucas Pope. You play as an insurance investigator for the East India Company's London Office, and you have been dispatched to the port-city Falmouth to investigate the re-emergence of merchant vessel The Obra Dinn. Your task is to determine the status of all 60 passengers, and you do so through a pocket watch that seems to bring you back to certain instances in time. As you progress throughout the story, however, you begin to notice irregularities in the historical nature of the story itself. The watch fixates on the deaths of each individual, and you can only hear - not see - the few seconds prior to their death. You must use surrounding context clues, be it auditory or visual, to deduce the fates of all the members aboard. This, in essence, is the game. There aren't any additional narrative clues given to you, no prompts from the game itself to extensively draw out character relations. So why then, does it feel like so much more?

The mechanics, or rather lack of explicit prompting, within Obra Dinn are what truly place emphasis upon player autonomy. The game itself rarely tells you how to proceed, instead simply deciding to let you interpret the scenery around you. Audio clues are only coupled with on-screen text, but lacking the actual fluidity of the scene at hand. Using what minimal information you are given, and the still-frame scene painted around you, you must piece together an elaborate and ever-changing puzzle. This sense of freedom is what opens up the narrative aspect of the game. The notable lack of mechanics compliments the complicated nature of the players task, as it truly emphasizes how intuition is the integral mechanic of the game.

Within games, mechanics are defined as “the rules or ludemes that govern and guide the player’s actions, as well as the game’s response to them.” So, how does a player’s intuition fit within this idea of a mechanic? Well, as Obra Dinn continues, it asks you to continuously question the circumstances of each crew death, be it the order of which they died, the sequence of events leading to their death, or the intent (or lack thereof) behind their death. In other investigative games, oftentimes clues are pointed out to you through a puzzle mini-game, multiple sheets of notes written by victims, or a detailed manuscript essentially outlining the nature of the story. The rule within Return of the Obra Dinn is that the player’s intuition is essential, and it is then shaped to guide the story forward. The entire nature of the game revolves around what you can analyze and take away, often having to complete many aspects of the game based on what you feel happened. Sure, Obra Dinn might present the nature of a character’s death to you, but the circumstances surrounding their death are up to the player’s intuition given the clues they had been provided. The game, then responds to the players actions, deciding to affirm their guesses or subtly reject what they have proposed. It never will tell you directly what is wrong, nor will it prevent you from outright guessing the potential solution. It trusts the player to have enough intuition to make natural assumptions given the minimal information provided, and then trust Pope’s development of the game, not assuming they have enough information to deduce a character fate and override the system.

Overall, Return of the Obra Dinn is an intuitive masterpiece, merging unconventional graphics, narrative, and mechanics to deliver a rewarding experience for players. The level of difficulty allows for multiple styles of play, all of which will be molded depending on which avenue players would prefer to tackle the narrative from. Some may collect all potential clues before deducing crew fates, whereas others may trust the information they have gathered and override the system, choosing to rely on what they believe rather than what the game subtly suggests. In conclusion, download Return of the Obra Dinn, prepare a notepad, and Memento Mortum.