Return of the Obra Dinn review

At first, Return of the Obra Dinn seems impossible. The latest game from Papers, Please Creator Lucas Pope is a Dinosaur, a shipwrecker, and a shipwrecker. What happened to all 60 of its crewmembers? You do not have much to go on: a list of the crew, a few maps and illustrations, and an empty ship to explore. Goal Obra Dinn is a masterpiece that reveals itself very slowly. You do not understand the true scale of the experience before you start uncovering clues, and before you know it, you've become obsessed with the fate of the ship.

The most important part of the experience is that you can go to the exact moment. When you first climb aboard the Obra Dinn, you'll see a skeleton in a uniform state, with flies buzzing around it. As soon as you get close, you'll be able to pull yourself away from the wallet.

Obra Dinn plays out like a 3D exploration game – think Gone Home gold Firewatch Where you view things from a first-person perspective and your options for interacting with the world are limited. You can walk around and open a few doors, but that's about it. This makes the stopwatch your main tool.

These stopwatch scenes all play out the same way. It starts out with a black screen and some sort of audio; you'll hear a snippets of a conversation, or maybe the last, dying breath (or shriek) of a crewmember. Then you have a few moments to explore the moment of death where time has stopped. You'll see blood splatter frozen by the old-time gun. Some of the scenes are downright gray, and there are a lot of them since the beginning of the night.

For each member of the crew, you're asked to uncover three things: their name, how they died, and if necessary, who killed them. Cause of death is usually pretty easy to determine; it does not take Sherlock Holmes to see when someone is crushed under a barrel. The trickier part is matching names to faces. Often, you'll need to scour and rewatch each scene for every possible clue.

Sometimes you get lucky; a killer might say the name of their victim, or vice versa, before a murder. Often, though, it's about piecing together smaller clues to paint a bigger picture. You might have somebody else's identity based on their rank or nationality. But most of the time, you're never totally certain – at least not right away. The game only confirms identities in groups of three, so you'll spend a lot of time guessing, unsure of your deductions until they're confirmed.

You also have contend with a disjointed narrative. The game takes place across 10 chapters, but you will not see them in order, adding to further wrinkles. It's only towards the end that you've got a full grasp of what actually happened. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that the Obra Dinn has been one of the unluckiest cargo ships in history.

One of the most interesting things Obra Dinn is that you do not actually have to solve anything. You can simply watch all of the death scenes, one by one, and you can not find yourself in the game. But you will not get a complete picture of what happened. (You'll also get a very brief, disappointing ending if you play that way.)

Figuring out all of those connections is what makes the game so engrossing. I actually kept a notebook and wrote it down, I wrote the game, writing down names and connections. It reminded me of my time with Her Story, an interactive crime drama where you have to pull out a series of often unreliable video interviews. Both games are about creating some sense of clarity in a confusing situation.

The fact that you can dig in as much as you do Obra Dinn so incredible. You can be obsessive like me, with a notebook that looks like it's ripped out of A Beautiful Mind, or you can simply enjoy the grim, shocking story as it unfolds in its strange, disjointed manner. (My first playthrough lasted just under six hours.)

The tale of the Obra Dinn and its crew is fascinating, and it will take a long time before the game Macintosh-inspired low-fi visuals burn their way into your brain. The task ahead of you is enormous, but, eventually, you'll realize it's not actually impossible after all.

Return of the Obra Dinn is available now on Mac and PC.