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A few hours into my investigation of the cursed ship called the Obra DinnI went through a gruesome scene of charred bodies and slaughtered Eldritch monsters and went under the bridges.
Where the crew slept, I saw a sick man coughing for the last time, washed away by a marine-born disease. As I turned to leave, a tattoo on a sleeping crew member caught my eye. I could not see her face, but I knew her bedding assignment and checked her against the manifest to find out her name. This scene was a memory, and if I ran through more grotesque memories of death and destruction by studying the forearms of the crew, I might just find the face that bears the tattoo. I would then go one step further to solve the mystery of the Obra Dinnand one more step to disembark from this cursed ship.
That moment struck me about two hours after playing Return of the dinn obra, a new game from Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers please. The game takes place in 1807 and a missing ship drifted to the English coast. You play as an investigator in insurance to find out what happened to the crew: the employees of the Dutch East India Company. It's a simple setup, but Pope does not play simple games. Return of the dinn obra is a fantastic police game, like playing a complex and detailed version of the investigative segments of The witcher 3 or Batman: Arkham City.
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Return of the dinn obra is a first person adventure game. The player has no weapons and interacts with the ship only by opening doors. To conduct your investigation, you have a mori memento in the form of a pocket watch that allows you to see the last moments of the dead and a book. The book contains several drawings of the crew, a manifesto of all the people on board and a very crude explanation of the horrors that took place on the ship, with indications for some of the bodies. It's up to you to fill the rest.
The game loop begins simply: you board the ship and find signs of carnage – a piece of bloody cloth, a skull, a cow's skull – and use the pocket watch to enter a memory. When you determine the nature of death, you put it in your book. You need the names of the dead, what happened to them, and who (or what) did that to them.
Return of the dinn obra ask the player's attention. Lines that look like disposable dialogs, the language or accent used by a character, and even the sound effects, provide you with essential information that will help you solve the mystery.
Towards the end of the investigation, I found a scene in which a man had been hit to death by a baton while three sailors were trying to board a lifeboat. The perpetrator described the victim as Danes, accused him of murdering his brother, and then carried the club on his head. The spectator shouted that his brother's death had been an accident: he had witnessed it.
So, I knew that the dead man was a Dane. The crew manifest followed the country of origin of the crew and there was only one man from Denmark. I had the identity of the man and the method of his death, but I did not know who had killed him. I remembered a scene I had already witnessed, where a man was crushed by a cargo in an accident. I retraced my steps and, of course, there was the Dane and the third man looking in horror at the cargo crushing the skull of the murderer's brother. I looked at the manifest and found the only two crew members with the same last name – I had identified the murderer and the man who died in the Cargo accident.
There are 60 souls on the Obra DinnManifesto, and it can be difficult to follow them all. Fortunately, the game allows you to mark your progress during the survey. Whenever you correctly identify the fate of three passengers, the game tells you that you are right and locks them in the notebook. It's a slow construction, but all three correctly guessed fates bring you closer to solving the mystery.
Like the previous game of Pope, Return of the dinn obra I'm filled with a vague sense of unease and responsibility. In Papers please, you are leading a checkpoint in a fictional country in the Eastern Bloc. You have more work than you can handle, more paperwork than you need and you need to take shortcuts and use judgment. Return of the dinn obra likewise, allows the player to make difficult choices.
Warning: Spoilers to come
From the beginning, the game gives you an exit. With a paltry sum of the mystery solved, you can call it quit. You will finish the story and win an end, but you will never know what happened on the Obra Dinn. During a party, I chose this option.
A book from the Dutch East India Company was thanked for my services and attributed a monetary value to each fallen soldier. If they were killers, their family was nothing. If they died in the service of the company, widows have a little something. All those lives of which I was responsible, reduced to a notation on a business spreadsheet.
After that, another shot came to the door. It was a letter from one of the survivors of Obra Dinnand this allows you to know all the consequences of a bad implementation of your work (which, I assure you, is overwhelming).
At the end of the day, I did not really know what hurt me most: seeing the monetary value attributed to the dead or knowing that I could not give a survivor the answers she needed. In the end, I had done enough for my employer, but I owed more to the dead.
I've loaded an old backup and promised to do better no matter how long it takes.
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