By Bruno Pasquinelli
Return of the Obra Dinn, released by Lucas Pope in 2018, took me by storm when I first experienced it. During spring of my freshman year, I had a weekend that was empty, and I decided to start it on a Friday night, unaware of what I was about to unleash upon myself. After playing for about 20 minutes, I was absolutely hooked, but had to go to sleep. The next day, I woke up, went directly to my computer, and played through the entirety of the game, stopping only to eat and use the bathroom. After singing its praises for months, I was recommended The Outer Wilds, which is the only game to date that has had a comparable hold on me. In hindsight, Return of the Obra Dinn is what set me down the path of studying and making games in my college career.
Beyond my personal engagement, Obra Dinn is an incredible example of developing and iterating upon a mechanic to keep the player on their toes. Whether it’s the introduction of death replays within death replays (within death replays within death replays,) or the death of a cow, or even the question of the fates of those that did not die onboard, Obra Dinn takes its central active mechanic, the Momento Mori, and fully explores it on the ship. In my own playthrough, the process of discovering another corpse and its subsequent replay was a wonderful ritual, with me excitedly following around the spirit trail thing around the ship, however, I know that others found this repeated sequence onerous and frustrating. Obra Dinn does little to explicitly guide the player at any point, and these animations, the difference between spearing spiking and stabbing, as well as the difficulty of traversing the ship to watch a specific sequence adds a lot of friction. I appreciated this friction, giving me time to think about what was occurring on the boat and retracing my steps (literally) often gave me inspiration for what I should do next. However, I contribute a lot of this to my playing of the game in one sitting. For others who may be playing across days in 2 hour chunks (I really, really recommend against this, play it in one day if you can!)
This added friction exacerbates the difficulty of playing it across an extended period of time. Essential details can be small and scattered across scenes, and having to walk across the boat, spending precious time could be really bothersome. However, in a time of vapid, vacuous open world games filled with endless slop. Having each and every item in a scene be important feels very rewarding as a player who enjoys taking the time to look at these details. For instance, in the sequence of the sailors playing cards, different characters can be identified by the number tag on their sleeping bag, which corresponds to their number on the crew list. All of this is to say that Obra Dinn is not a game for everyone, and not just from friction. There are no hints, and fates are only confirmed in batches of 3, which may feel like a boon early on, allowing you to guess and check, becomes brutal when you’re down to the last 10 or so fates. Additionally, with nearly the whole game taking place on a boat, the rocking and bobbing can cause intense motion sickness as well – there are minimal graphical options, and none that can really reduce this sensation.
Finally, my thoughts on the story – I found the characterizations very powerful, considering many characters only get a handful of lines and brief moments to memorialize them. The voice acting is fantastic, and there are many lines like “Enough! Captain cannot be trusted.” that have stuck with me for years since I first played this game. The time period on display is one that is really different from the one we live in now. You play as an insurance investigator, meaning your goal is not one of justice or knowledge, but rather one of appraisal and write-offs. Everyone must be accounted for, not because of a nation’s responsibility to its citizens, but instead for payout purposes.
However, this difference in time also poses some issues that don’t sit well with me, and illuminate comfort levels with various forms of profiling. The nationality of every character is listed, and this often plays a role in their identification. The one Irish character has a strong Irish accent, giving him an identifier, and something similar happens with the Bosun onboard. These were forms of identification that I felt comfortable with when playing, however, that comfort changed when the game indicated that I could identify Maba, the only New Guinean crewmate on board.
For those who haven’t played Obra Dinn, character’s faces become unblurred when they are potentially identifiable based on the replays you’ve seen, and the fates you’ve confirmed. Maba is torn apart by a kraken, and is immediately identifiable afterwards based upon his tattoos. His identification difficulty rating is 2/3, suggesting it is not too difficult. When I first played through Obra Dinn, I didn’t feel comfortable profiling Maba solely off of his tattoos, rather believing that I had missed some other aspect of information to identify who this poor soul was. While I appreciate the historical dynamics at play, Obra Dinn is expecting me to racially profile this man in a way that felt distinct from the other examples, based off my limited knowledge of New Guinea and other Pacific Islands. More specifically, “This man has pacific island-y tattoos, and there’s one guy from the pacific islands” as a train of thought is not one that I like to entertain in my life. There are some other small issues I have with the plot of the Formosan Royalty, but those aren’t as pointed or as coherent so I shall save them for another time.
Intermittent Mechanism 