Return of the Obra Dinn is a 2018 adventure and puzzle video game made by Lucas Pope and published by 3909 LLC. It was Pope’s second game for sale, after Papers, Please in 2013. The game first came out for macOS and Windows on October 18, 2018, and later was made available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The game was praised for its gameplay, art style, and story. It won awards, including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
Set in 1807, the game places the player in the role of an unnamed investigator for the East India Company. The Obra Dinn, a merchant ship that disappeared five years earlier, has reappeared near the coast of England with no survivors. The player must examine the ship, piece together what happened during the voyage, and determine what happened to the 60 people who were on board. This includes finding out the cause of death for those who died or where the living might be. The player uses a device called the "Memento Mortem," a pocket watch that shows the moment of death. The game is played from the player’s perspective and uses black-and-white graphics inspired by early Macintosh computer games.
Critics gave the game mostly positive reviews, praising its story, puzzles, and creativity. It was compared favorably to Her Story (2015). Many outlets named it one of the best video games of 2018, and later considered it one of the greatest games of all time.
Gameplay
The Obra Dinn, insured by the East India Company, disappeared in 1803 while sailing around the Cape of Good Hope. It later reappeared, but all sixty passengers and crew were either dead or missing. The player’s goal is to uncover the fate of everyone on board, including their names, how they died, who or what caused their deaths, and where they might be if they are still alive.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a complex logic puzzle presented as a first-person adventure game. Players explore the ship using a black and white pixel style that resembles early computer graphics. To track progress, players receive a logbook containing drawings of all crew members, a list of crew names, and a map of the ship. They also receive a pocket watch called the Memento Mortem, which can be used on a corpse to hear the events of the final moments before death. This allows players to examine the frozen moment of death, identify who was present, explore other areas of the ship, and note important details. These clues help connect crew members’ faces to their names and roles. During a moment of death, players can use the watch again to investigate the fates of other corpses visible in the scene.
As players discover deaths, the logbook automatically records basic information. The player’s task is to name the individuals present and accurately describe how they died. Names are determined through small clues, logical reasoning, and narrowing down possibilities as the game progresses. Causes of death are chosen from a list, and some deaths allow multiple solutions. Players can update their logbook as they learn more, but correct answers are only confirmed in groups of three, except for the final six deaths, which are confirmed in groups of two. Near the end of the game, players must correctly identify the names and causes of death for fifty-eight of the sixty people on board.
Plot
The Obra Dinn, a merchant ship commanded by Captain Robert Witterel, leaves Falmouth, Cornwall, in 1802 with 52 crew members and 8 passengers heading to the Orient. Among the passengers are Captain Witterel’s wife, Abigail; a musician named Nunzio Pasqua; a wealthy Englishwoman named Jane Bird; and two Formosan nobles along with their guards, who are transporting a valuable chest. The ship does not reach the Cape of Good Hope as planned and is considered lost. Five years later, the vessel is found near England, but all aboard are dead or missing. The East India Company sends a new chief inspector to investigate what happened. The inspector receives a copy of the ship’s logbook, drawings of the passengers and crew, and a magical pocket watch called the Memento Mortem from the ship’s surgeon, Henry Evans, who lives in Morocco. The Mortem allows the user to see the exact moment of a person’s death when used on a corpse or its remains.
Early in the voyage, a seaman and a stowaway are crushed by unsecured cargo, and two seamen die from pneumonia. As the ship passes the Canary Islands, Pasqua discovers the second mate, Edward Nichols, attempting to steal the Formosans’ chest. Nichols kills Pasqua and falsely accuses one of the Formosan guards. Witterel, following company rules, has the guard executed by a group of soldiers firing guns. Nichols and a group of defectors steal the chest, take the Formosan nobles, and escape in the ship’s two jollyboats. Three mermaids attack and kill most of the group. One noble uses a magical shell from the chest to stun the mermaids but dies in the process. Nichols, the only survivor, captures the mermaids and returns to the Obra Dinn with the chest. He is then fatally shot by the remaining Formosan guard. The mermaids, who carry their own shells, attack and kill several crew members before being locked in the lazarette. Witterel’s steward, Fillip Dahl, kills a seaman, claims the mermaids are cursed, and is locked in the lazarette with the mermaids and the chest.
Captain Witterel orders the ship to return to England. The mermaids summon a storm and giant spider crabs ridden by mermen to rescue them. The mermen and crabs are killed, but the crew suffers heavy losses. The mermaids then summon a kraken, which kills Abigail and many crew members and damages the ship. In the lazarette, Dahl takes a shell from the chest but is killed by a substance resembling quicksilver. Witterel enters the lazarette, kills two mermaids, and the third sends the kraken away. Later, the third mate, Martin Perrott, and others enter the lazarette to free the last mermaid. The mermaid stabs Perrott, who, as he dies, asks her to guide the Obra Dinn home in exchange for her freedom. The others return the shell to the mermaid before releasing her into the sea.
Evans decides to abandon the ship with three others, including Jane Bird, and heads to Africa. Before leaving, Evans ties a rope to his monkey’s wrist, sends it into the locked lazarette, shoots it dead, and uses the rope to retrieve its paw. Evans and his group escape in a jollyboat. A series of fights reduces the ship’s crew to four, including Witterel. The other three mutiny to find the shells but are killed by Witterel, who claims he has thrown them into the sea. Witterel is the last survivor and later commits suicide near his wife’s body.
The inspector records the fates of 58 of the 60 people on the ship and leaves before a storm sinks the Obra Dinn. The inspector writes an insurance report, compensating or fining the estates of lost crew members and passengers based on their actions, and sends the logbook back to Evans. A year later, Jane Bird, one of the four survivors in Morocco, sends the logbook and the monkey’s paw back to the inspector along with a letter explaining that Evans, now dead from illness, wanted the inspector to complete the book as a thank-you. The inspector uses the Mortem on the monkey’s paw to determine what happened in the lazarette and record the final two fates, completing the story of the Obra Dinn.
Jane Bird reports Evans’s death in every ending, but she only sends the book and the monkey’s paw if the inspector determined 58 fates. If the inspector sent the book with fewer than 30 fates determined, Bird says Evans regretted trusting the inspector. If 30–57 fates were determined, Bird says Evans appreciated the inspector’s effort.
Development
Over the course of his career, American video game designer Lucas Pope developed an appreciation for "1-bit" graphics used in many early Macintosh games. After creating his earlier game Papers, Please, Pope wanted to use the 1-bit style in a new experimental game. This led him to build a game engine that allowed players to move in a three-dimensional space, displayed in a vintage style. Pope wanted the game to be visually clear from most angles, which presented challenges in how the game was rendered. He noticed that while 1-bit graphics worked well in on-screen windows, they caused motion sickness when displayed at full screen resolution. To fix this, he adjusted the rendering routines to create an effect similar to motion blur. At one point, Pope considered using a cathode ray tube render effect, but he decided against it.
With the visual style complete, Pope worked backward to decide what game to create. His initial idea was for the player character to repeatedly die, with the player viewing the death from the character’s body and then returning one minute earlier to change events to recreate the death. However, this idea proved technically difficult, so Pope shifted to using freeze-frame flashbacks that showed moments of death to tell the story.
Developing the game’s story took the longest time. Pope teased Return of the Obra Dinn in 2014 while finishing Papers, Please, expecting it to release the next year. Instead, it took four more years. In 2016, Pope released a limited demo for the Game Developers Conference, which included only six fates for the player to solve. Positive feedback led him to expand the story more than he had planned. Internally, Pope used spreadsheets to connect characters and their fates, ensuring players could logically follow the chain of deaths. This process eventually led him to write dialog for some scenes and hire local voice actors who could mimic accents from the time period.
With a more complete story, Pope created a new demo for PAX Australia in November 2016, adding thirteen new characters to the original demo. However, unlike the first demo, the deaths were shown out of order, confusing players about how to progress. Pope realized this confusion would grow with the full cast of characters. He solved this by using ten key events in the story as triggers for deaths, breaking the narrative into sections and making the plot easier to follow. Dividing the game into "chapters" led to the creation of a logbook, which acted as the game’s timeline and cataloged the ship’s crew in the same way the real East India Company did.
Pope stated he was not worried about the game’s financial success because he still earned income from Papers, Please. He considered Obra Dinn a passion project and did not set strict deadlines or focus on marketing. Return of the Obra Dinn was released for macOS and Windows on October 17, 2018, published by the Japanese studio 3909. Versions for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, adapted by Warp Digital, were released on October 18, 2019. Physical editions for the PS4 and Nintendo Switch were released in 2020 by Limited Run Games.
In an interview with YouTuber Cressup, Lucas Pope said the game was originally intended to be part of a series. The ending scene of Obra Dinn would have provided a clue about future adventures if the player completed 100% of the game. However, the time it took to create the game led Pope to move on to other projects instead of continuing the series.
Reception
"Return of the Obra Dinn" received mostly positive reviews, according to Metacritic, a website that collects game reviews. Polygon's Colin Campbell praised the game, saying it uses mystery game traditions in creative ways to create complex and colorful stories that are both confusing and enjoyable. He called it not just a good game, but the work of a very smart and imaginative creator. Patrick Hancock from Destructoid said the game's creator, ZA/UM, did an excellent job following up on their earlier game, "Papers, Please," and that the game stayed with him even after he finished playing. Javy Gwaltney from Game Informer called the game's visual style "visually striking" and praised how well the game was planned and designed. However, he noted the ending did not match the quality of the rest of the game.
Reviewers highlighted the game's unique qualities. Andreas Inderwildi from Rock Paper Shotgun said the game was not only about solving puzzles but also about understanding how people behave in emergencies. Christian Donlan from Eurogamer said the game's visual style made it feel unlike any other game, comparing it to the puzzle game Sudoku. Katherine Cross from Gamasutra praised the game's simple design and said the characters felt real. Tom Marks from IGN said the game brought life to its story even though it used still images to tell it. David Wildgoose from GameSpot called the game's book-like interface a "masterpiece" that lets players solve puzzles on their own.
Some reviewers compared "Return of the Obra Dinn" to "Her Story," another mystery game where players piece together events from video clips. Colin Campbell said both games made him want to write down notes, while Andrew Webster from The Verge said both games helped players find clarity in confusing situations. He added that players could either focus on solving every mystery or simply enjoy the game's dark and shocking story.
In a review for Black Gate, Joshua Dinges said the game was well-made but had limited replay value. However, he said the low price made it worth playing once. Many video game publications, including Edge, Polygon, USGamer, GameSpot, The Nerdist, The Daily Telegraph, The New Yorker, and The Escapist, named "Return of the Obra Dinn" among the best games of 2018. A 2023 poll by GQ listed the game as one of the greatest games of all time.