Category: Player Number

Limbus Company

Limbus Company is very weird, and just a bit nuts.

Authors Note: I’ve played more Limbus Company since this writeup, and I’ve realized a few things I said were incorrect. You can read those corrections here. I’m leaving this writeup as is though, in order to preserve my initial understanding and perspective.

It would make sense that after 10 hours of Limbus Company, I would have a strong feeling on whether or not to recommend it. Thing is, I really don’t.

Limbus Company is fascinating. It’s unlike any other RPG I’ve played, and it’s tonally different than any other F2P game I’ve played. But its F2P mechanics, poor tutorials, and awful information display make it a very tough sell.

Side Note: I saw someone mention that you need to be a rocket scientist to understand this game. I asked my friend who worked at NASA to try it, and they completely bounced off it.

Limbus Company is a game from Project Moon, a Korean indie game studio. Project Moon’s other games include Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina.

All three games share the same world and story. I mention this because I will be talking about Limbus Company’s story, and that means general spoilers for the other two games. Sort of.

It’s a bit hard to explain. Much like the rest of Limbus Company!

Story and Art

Limbus Company has a strong visual style. I’ve always really liked 2D images in 3D environments as a design choice, and it’s done very well here. The story is unusual, and tonally a bit wonky.

The 13 incredibly poorly adjusted and mildly sympathetic whackjobs the player has to lead.

For reference, the game opens with the player character cutting off their own head and replacing it with a clock. The individual story arcs run the gamut from “Haha, weird,” to “What the ever loving fuck.”

Notable moments in the first category include a casino run by people in Mariachi outfits who fight with maracas.

Notable moments in the second category include a sympathetic NPC being gutted and worn like a flesh-suit. By a giant apple.

Anyway, game mechanics. Let’s talk about game mechanics.

How Limbus Company Works (I Think)

I want to know who plays this shit on a phone.

I’m going to try to explain how Limbus Company works. If you don’t care, you skip this bit. The extra knowledge is useful for deciding if you’d like the game, but not necessary for me to explain my problems with the game, which I’ll get to in a bit.

Limbus Company is a combat game. The player controls a group of characters (sinners) in fights against enemies and abnormalities. On a given turn, the player chooses from two available cards and builds a chain of cards across the characters they control.

Cards have: Power, Coins, Damage, Attacks, Damage Type, Sin Type, and Count. Power determines who wins Clashes, but only after Clashes are resolved by flipping the Coins. There’s a secondary value that determines the increase to power based on the number of coin flips that land heads during a clash or one-sided attack phase.

Damage is the amount of damage inflicted. I think. Honestly not sure. Attacks are the number of attacks to be inflicted on the use of a card, or that will be used for resolution of Clash during a Clash. However, it’s important to note that Sanity has an impact on Coin flip resolution, increasing or decreasing the rate at which you flip heads. This makes the Coin Flip not actually a coin flip.

Damage Type is the type of damage inflicted. There are three types, which are modified by enemy resistance, but also change if the enemy is staggered or panic based on their sanity. Abnormalities though, don’t have sanity, and cannot be panicked.

Sin type determines resonance and absolute resonance. In addition, resolving an attack of a given sin type grants Sin that can be used to activate Ego.

Count determines how many copies of a card are in a sinners deck.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, good. Because I’ve played 10 hours of this game, and I don’t get it.

Anyway, combat! Combat is against either abnormalities or everyone else. In fights against abnormalities, individual abnormalities and body parts of the abnormality can be targeted, but in general fights, characters pick targets on their own.

Game Modes

Limbus Company has multiple game modes. I’ve only unlocked a few of them, but most are just “do combat, get different resources.” However, there is one mode that’s very different, and that’s the game’s mirror dungeons.

Yes, it’s a simulation run. I’m not wasting energy to get a screenshot.

Mirror Dungeons are semi-randomly generated path of various encounters, similar to a “run” in Slay the Spire or Inscryption. The characters are reset to start at level 10, and after winning a fight, there’s a reward of either a random item in the vein of Slay the Spires artifacts, or the ability to level one of the current party members up.

Personally though, I’ve found that Mirror Dungeons got stale fairly quickly. Because there’s no reward for experimenting, and Limbus Company is F2P, I usually just ran more or less the same team, and picked safe options.

Story mode has something similar. While 90% of the story is a set of single linear combat encounters, the mission of each story chapter is a large non-randomized dungeon. These have been some of the more interesting parts of the game for me so far, and feel more like playing an actual video game than a free to play game with a gacha system.

The Collision of Money and Mechanics

There are two large pain points I have with Limbus Company. The first is that the game did not spend enough time and detail explaining the aforementioned combat systems, and doesn’t display in-game information in an easily accessible way. The tutorial is brief, and while not unhelpful, is overwhelming. I had another friend download and try the game to confirm that it wasn’t just me being stupid, and they had a similar level of drowning in information.

While bad onboarding and scaffolding can be a problem with games, it’s not one that necessarily turns me off. As perusing this blog for any length of time will make quite clear, I am willing to play games with janky or unexplained systems. I will play games that are horribly broken. I will play games that are in a language I can’t speak or read.

But learning a game’s systems by experiencing them requires me to actually be able to play the game. Limbus Company is F2P play, which means it has an energy point system. As with every energy point system ever, it boils down to the following core loop:

  1. Spend Energy to enter levels
  2. Get more Energy over time, or by spending real money.
  3. There is no three.

I mentioned in my Arknights writeup a while back how much I liked that the game had a parallel energy system that gave free tries at clearing levels without any rewards.

A system like that is exactly what I want in Limbus Company. Something that lets me play the game, experiment with builds and try to figure out the incredibly obtuse systems that make up combat without “wasting” my energy on fights I can’t clear.

Right now, I felt discouraged from actually experimenting with the game’s mechanics, unless I hit a wall and had no other way forward.

Conclusion

Limbus Company has a compelling, if occasionally frustrating, story and solid art. The mechanics are interesting, and I wish I understood them better, or that they were easier to learn by playing.

If you’re looking for a F2P game, you could certainly do worse then Limbus Company. But enjoying it requires a high level of patience and tolerance for what initially feels like esoteric bullshit.

Limbus Company can be played for free on Steam, and also on phones. I suggest you avoid playing it on your phone unless you have an electron tunneling microscope so that you can actually read the text.

Redfall

Redfall is the newest game from Arkane Studios, best known for Prey and Dishonored. It’s their attempt at making a horde shooter/looter shooter, and I have thoughts about it.

Lmao got em.

They are “This is terrible,” and, “Why does this exist?” If you told me Redfall came out 10 years ago, I would have believed you.

The first bad sign is the gunplay. It is not great. The aiming is tight, but the feedback from shooting and recoil is awful. Every enemy feels like a bullet sponge. Only two weapons feel right: the shotgun and sniper rifle. And both of those require headshots. While sloppy guns might be okay in other types of games, this is a horde shooter… it relies on its gunplay.

In addition, there’s apparently no party scaling. So regardless of if you want to play in “single player” where you can’t pause, or with an actual team, it’s the same experience. In fact, you can never pause the game, so I hope nothing ever happens while you’re playing that might interrupt you, or you’ll die.

The graphics are okay, and have a cartoony aesthetic, but the movement animations are all the same. Each special type of vampire feels pretty much the same.

For example there’s one called Angler. Much like L4D’s Smoker, they have a grapple to reel you in with. But as far as I can tell, you they don’t have an obvious tell or signal. The ability is on a 20 second cooldown, and you need to just dodge it based on the timing, and circle strafe.

Redfall could be redeemed by its story, but even after just seeing the opening, I have low hopes. The opening is incredibly stupid. The game opens with two vampires alive in front of the player character. The player has no guns or anything, and can only watch as the vampires turn another unlucky human into a buffet. Suddenly, one of the vampires notices you’re alive, and turns to deal with you.

Then the most predictable thing to happen in the history the earth, happens. The thing that happens every day, and will happen every day for 7 million years after I die occurs: the sun the comes up.

Which makes the vampires run away. Not die or anything. Just… run away. Because I guess they didn’t have sunscreen on. On the boat that we’re on. Because the game starts on a boat.

Once you get off the boat, and go out to face your first enemy, things don’t get better. I chose to go full sneaky commando, because I selected the hardest difficultly I have available. I was prepped to deal with these bloodsuckin motherfuckin vampires, but the first enemy I ran into was actually a cultist.

Here’s the thing though: apparently the children of the children of the night are deaf, because they can’t tell if someone straight ass sprints at them at full speed from behind. For some reason the game doesn’t have an assassination animation or anything; you just thwack them in the back of the head and they fall down dead.

There are some signs that this was made by Arkane, of course. There are a bunch of interactable objects, common in the immersive sim genre, but unlike actual immersive sims (and any game from last 10 years) you can’t actually do interesting things with them. For example, there are more oil spills in the environments than the gulf of Mexico, but you can’t throw gas canisters at enemies, you can only shoot the canisters when enemies walk by.

Some other things that suck:
1. The quippy dialogue. It made me want to root for the vampires.
2. The enemy AI. Maybe it got copied from Fallout 76, and then made worse, somehow. A non-zero portion of the time enemies don’t do anything, and just stand still. The rest of the time enemies wander toward you like geriatric hobos.
3.The questing loop. There seem to be 2-3 options for each mission: i.e. go in guns blazing, sneak in, or sneak in with lockpicks or electric lockpicks via hacking. These are your only options.
4. An open world made out of absolutely nothing between the points of interest. Every other mile has one to two enemies. Apparently everyone thinks you’re a Mormon missionary, because no one will come within six miles of you.

Why make an open world game if it’s all empty? Just give us a mission select. It was good enough for Doom, it can be good enough for you.

Maybe the game would get better if I played another 7 hours. Here’s the thing: I played 7 hours. That’s enough time to watch the entire Lord Rings Trilogy. There are other games that are better, sooner. I’m not continuing to smack myself in the nuts for another full workday to see if it gets fun.

If you want a better horde shooter, go play Back 4 Blood. And I’ll see you on the servers, because I’m the only other person that likes it. But I can’t stomach another minute of Redfall.

If, for some reason, you want to play Redfall, you could buy it with money. Or you could get a game pass subscription, so that after you uninstall, you can go play something good instead.

Catch the Fox

Disclosure: I received a key for free on Lurkit.

Let it never be said that I’m a hack reviewers. Developers, if you give me a key to your game, rest assured I will play the entire thing before I review it. Even if that means I spend 93 minutes of my life on a generic repeatable task in an Unreal 5 demo map.

Don’t conflate that with me saying nice things about your game though. Instead, I’ve decided to title this review “Constructive Criticism.”

For the people reading this review who aren’t the developers of Catch the Fox, here’s a brief overview of the game. The player is placed into a large level populated by shrubberies, foxes, and powerups. The goal is to get close enough to touch the foxes. After touching enough foxes, the next level is unlocked. When you touch a fox, its fur gets redder, and then it moves faster.

Movement

The core of Catch the Fox’s gameplay is movement. It’s really the only thing you can do. Getting airborne gives you a speed boost on returning to the ground. This allows the player to skate merrily along. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t for a few issues.

The foxes you need to touch have a hitbox for collisions that’s only slightly smaller then the hitbox for “touching” them. And when you collide with them, you instantly lose all momentum. This absolutely kills any sense of pacing or chaining together multiple tags.

It’s like if every time I stomped a goomba, I had to fill out a death certificate, and inform their next of kin before moving on. In addition, the player’s jump is miserable, capable of clearing a small subset of environmental obstacles and absolutely nothing else. It’s not high enough to jump over foxes, or up to any interesting areas.

Environments and Level Design

Speaking of environmental obstacles, let’s talk about the levels. I have two problems with them. The levels themselves are not laid out in such as a way as to actually encourage use of the movement mechanics. One level, Fractal, while quite pretty, has literally no capacity to gain speed or momentum, and might as well be flat once you reach the bottom layer.

Visually appealing? Yes. Mechanically appealing? Absolutely not.

Secondly, the other levels have been populated with a frankly ridiculous amount of what I’d politely call “environmental chaff.” The game is about touching foxes, not trying to touch foxes and slamming my wooden head into a tree every five inches.

The strongest level had none of these at all. It’s a great big ocean of sand-dunes that form curving pits. This layout actually lets you leap around and gain speed. This level isn’t the most visually diverse, but that doesn’t matter, because this is a video game. It’s about the game mechanics, not the visuals.

Performance and Bugs

The game was actually fairly bug free, though I did once encounter invisible foxes that couldn’t be tagged. It was on the spooky level, so maybe it’s supposed to be like that? Still frustrating and annoying though.

Performance is frankly terrible. I’m running on a 1080, on low graphics, windowed, and I got like 30 FPS. Maybe it’s my setup, but given how much my frame rate goes up when I’m looking at the ground, or not looking at trees, I don’t think that’s the case here. For a fast paced game based around movement, that’s not acceptable.

The strongest level in the game. Is it because it’s not cluttered with trash? Quite possibly!

And while we’re on the subject of graphics: motion blur sucks. No one likes motion blur. Maybe smearing makes things look neat, but in a game, I want to actually be able to see stuff.

Conclusion – For the Devs

You’ve made a movement based game where every aspect of the gameplay plays counter to that. Your level design doesn’t play with the surf and speed gain systems you’ve developed. All clutter and environmental garbage appears to tank the frame rate. Your primary mechanic of tagging plays counter to that movement.

I liked the music, and there is a bit of zen feel to the game on levels like Ocean Outpost when I could get a flow going.

Conclusion – For Everyone Else

Catch the Fox is not currently worth buying. The most interesting thing I got out of playing it was doing this writeup, and reflecting on the interplay between level design and traversal mechanics. It’s actually something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit since the terrible game I made for Ludum Dare 53.

If for some reason you read all of this, and still want to buy it, Catch the Fox is $3 on Steam.

PS: All the screenshots in this review are from the Steam page. I’m not hugely interested in playing more of this game in its current state just for image captures.

Pit People

Lets start this review by doing something fun. I’ll try to summarize my thoughts on Pit People while following the same general tone of Pit People’s writing.

“Ah, Pit People, like a great big… garbage, yes, hmm, a great big garbage pile of trash and waste, all ready to get picked up by the garbage man, and driven in his garbage truck to the garbage dump, because that’s where all the garbage goes.”

If it’s not obvious, I don’t like the game much.

Pit People Splash Image

Pit People is a turn based strategy game from The Behemoth. I think it’s worth noting that the Behemoth’s better known games, Castle Crashers and Battleblock Theater, were both action games. Castle Crashers was a side-scrolling brawler, and Battleblock Theater was a time attack platformer. They’re pretty good games! Which is why it surprises me that Pit People sucks as much as it does.

Anyway, Pit People. Its major twist on the turn based strategy genre is that instead of moving your units, and choosing who they attack, you only get to move them, and the units randomly decide who to hit. While this sounds annoying, it’s actually not something about the game that frustrated me. Battles take place on a hex grid, and you build a team of up to six units.

I say up to six because some of the more expensive and powerful units take up multiple slots. So instead of having 6 units, you might have 5, or 4, or even just 3. Units can have different equipment, and level up.

Pit People Team Building Screen
All these swords are the same, which is to say: worthless.

Leveling Up: Mostly Pointless!

You probably thought I was going to follow that up with saying something like “And equipment has different stats, and leveling up increases a units stats” but as far as I can tell: No. It actually doesn’t do that. Leveling up changes absolutely nothing about a unit as far as I can tell, except that if you level up in battle, you get full health. How helpful is this? Well, there’s no consumable items or anything, or any way to heal in combat outside of built-in passives, or including the dedicated healer unit. So it’s very helpful. And it would be nice if it wasn’t completely random.

Pit People Battle Screen
I stole this image from the steam page. I’m not playing any more of this game than I have to.

This lack of meaningful power curve or reason to get any equipment means that there’s also no reason to fight random encounters. If they don’t progress the main story quest, and equipment is worthless, why do them? Of course, you can fight them if you want to capture an enemy unit. Pit People has a recruitment mechanic where if any enemy is the last unit left, and you have a cage with you, you can capture them, bring them home, and turn them into a fighter for you.

And while this might seem similar to Pokémon for an instant, it’s only like Pokémon if there were only 17 Pokémon, and every single Pikachu was mechanically identical. Also, if you could only bring 8 Pokeballs with you every time you left town and went out into the overworld.

The Overworld

Pit People’s Overworld is one of the most vestigial things I’ve encountered in a game. There are three things you can encounter in it. Quest start markers, random encounters, and visual gags. There are two types of terrain. Tiles you can walk over, and tiles you can’t. And because you can’t move and have your map open at the same time, and the map doesn’t actually show things in very much detail, it’s frustrating to traverse. Not challenging, just “Oh, I guess that path is a dead end, wish I knew before walking down it.”

Pit People Overworld Map
Hey, would you like to get treasure, or capture units? You can’t do both. Why? Because we said so, that’s why.

Anyway, back to item slots for a moment. You can carry 10 items. This includes the cages you need to capture units, and also any loot you might pick up. Except your inventory gets filled after doing a single quest. So every time you finish everything, you have to go back to the city, crossing the stupid frustrating map, and avoiding random encounters so you can drop off your loot.

Which as we’ve already talk about, doesn’t really have stats. It might have elemental alignments, but you never get “better” equipment. Everything is just a side grade, or has some small other ability, but every sword is just a visual reskin of another sword. Which means everything is effectively a cosmetic.

Pit People could redeem itself here with interesting combat. It doesn’t. The whole “you don’t get to pick which unit you attack” is an interesting idea, but doesn’t lead to interesting decisions. I saw a steam review noting that the game’s strategy never changes. Put tanks in front, put range in the back, and heal your guys. Repeat until you beat the game.

Or get bored, because battles take forever, and units feel incredibly bullet spongy. There’s also not option to speed up the game, so I hope you enjoy the incredibly long walking and attack animations. There is an auto-battler, but it’s got the brains of one of those small yappy dogs that think they can take on a mountain lion. So turning that on will lead to your units getting pulped as the AI prances them into melee range of the entire enemy team, and keeps them sitting under airstrikes.

The Plot: Doing Its Best

There’s one last place the game has to salvage its dismal reputation, and that’s the story. Unfortunately, it flubs it pretty hard here as well, and I have a guess as to why. Pit People was an early access game. I know because I bought in early access seven or so years ago, played like 15 hours, went “This is great, I’ll play more later.”

Then I came back last weekend, played through the whole game’s campaign in 8 hours, and went “This is trash. How did I ever willingly play more than 3 hours of this?” Anyway, the story. I suspect the story was added piecemeal over the game’s time in early access. The story is janky and disconnected. It randomly and unsatisfyingly opens and closes plot threads, and is also only 8 missions long. Some of these missions try to be interesting or have some unique gimmick, but many are just standard battles.

Also, quite a few do that thing I hate where the game goes “Oh, you beat the enemies? Well, now I’m going to spawn in an extra pack!” Tactics games are about use and allocation of resources to deal with a given problem. Going “Surprise, extra problem” after I’ve cleaned out all the enemies, and I’m struggling to catch my breath is aggravating normally, and it’s double frustrating here.

Some final complaints, and a conclusion

Rapid fire mode for complaints. What’s the point of the weapon “triangle” that’s just “helmets vs non-helmets?” Why can’t I see what debuffs are on a unit in game? Why can’t I see armor type or other special info? Why are a non-zero number of the campaign quest maps literally designed in such a way that I cannot use my super unit on it, but I’m still allowed to bring it into the fight? Why are there daily quests?

Pit People isn’t fun. It’s a joyless slog whose best selling point is an occasionally amusing story, albeit one with an incredibly inconsistent tone that concludes with a complete asspull. If you want a better tactics game, play literally any other tactics game on this blog. At least Pedigree Tactics is interesting.

Return of the Obra Dinn

Return of the Obra Dinn is a clever, unique idea, executed with distinct visual style and theming. But those three factors clash with each other, and while they do create a unique experience, for me it was primarily one of frustration and exhaustion.

Return of the Obra Dinn came out in 2018. It’s a mystery game combined with a logic puzzle. It got a lot of good press at the time. So I decided to finally play it this weekend. And I’m… frankly, I’m a bit underwhelmed.

I don’t give out scores on this website. Usually I just say if I think a game is worth playing. But I’d give Return of the Obra Dinn a grudging 8/10. It’s not a bad game, but it isn’t excellent. This is weird because Return of the Obra Dinn ticks all the boxes to be excellent, but is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

The premise of the game is simple. The player is an insurance claims agent sent to investigate the titular Obra Dinn. It’s a ship that was lost at sea and has just now returned to the shores of England with no passengers or crew. Your job is to determine the fate of everyone aboard. However, you are not empty handed. In addition to your own wits, a crew manifest, and some sketches, you also have a magical watch. Using the watch on a corpse transports you to a still moment in time/memory of when that person died.

Within the memory you can walk around, hear a snippet of audio, and also get some information about who else was present. Using this, you need to reconstruct the full series of events and determine the cause of deaths of everyone who started aboard the Obra Dinn.

Just a word of warning before you read any further. I will be spoiling the “experience” of playing Return of the Obra Dinn in the rest of this review.
I won’t be spoiling specific gameplay.

There’s one thing I’m going to rant about regarding one single death, but outside of that, reading this review won’t make you any better at playing the game. But it will probably impact your experience of the game. So, last chance to stop now, and read about a mystery game I like more: Lucifer Within Us.

Okay, so I called Return of the Obra Dinn a grudging 8/10. That’s because it does everything in such a way that it should be excellent. It has a fantastic presentation and theme and a unique visual style. It has a decent story. And it has a unique game mechanic that I haven’t seen before or since. That means that this game is five years old, and no one ripped it off.

Tick tick tick.

But all of these things feel like they somewhat play against each other. Let’s start with the story. The story of Return of the Obra Dinn can be summarized as: a trading ship brought passengers aboard with a magical artifact. At one point, members of the crew tried to kidnap these passengers and escape on lifeboats, and steal the artifact. The artifact attracted mermaids, the mermaids killed some people, but then were knocked out. The mermaids were imprisoned back on the ship, more mermaids came to try to free them, but were killed. Then a Kraken was summoned to tear the ship down.

Which is fine EXCEPT, this feels kind of like paint-by-numbers Lovecraft. It plays counter to my level of interest in rest of the mystery. What’s the magical artifact? Why are the mermaids attacking it? How did the passengers get it? I didn’t get answers to these questions.

Instead I just got to figure out which crew member was killed by getting a spear through the head, and which one was killed by being strangled. That’s not actually as exciting as a mystical artifact.

It felt like attending a dinner party where someone is served their mother’s head, and then being asked to determine which table settings had the wrong fork.

Secondly, the story is experienced in reverse. Which means you get the big finale/setpiece of the Kraken attack first. Then everything else is a slower
boil. There was no building tension past a certain point, because you see how things end up pretty quickly. The ending/beginning serves to refocus the story, which continues to remind me of a Lovecraft paint-by-numbers.

Yes, this is very pretty. Yes, it is probably technically interesting. But it also makes details hard to make out unless you’re staring right at them.

The game has a excellent theme and rendering, being done entirely in only two colors, with minimal detail. However, this hindered my ability to actually “play” the game. Viewing a death memory requires you to interact with a corpse of someone who died at that point in time. While the scenes themselves are fairly straightforward in how they’re laid out, you usually experience them in reverse order.

This is frustrating, and it’s doubly frustrating when you want to view a scene in chronological order. On top of that, scenes also can take a bit to load. They play the audio clip once each time you enter the scene, but don’t let you replay it, so you have to load it again if you want a replay. It’s frustrating and difficult to navigate.

Side note: the game also doesn’t have a resolution setting. So I had to use Unity launch flags to play it on my Ultrawide, because of course I did. Small gripe, yes, but this is from 2018, not 2012. I should not have to do this.

You’ll notice I used the word “Frustration” a lot in the previous paragraph. For me, a thread of frustration carried throughout the gameplay. The game has a “Fate” system, where you enter how a given individual died and their name, and then once you have 3 correct, the game validates it, and permanently enters it into the record. As a result, in order to progress you need to solve the deaths of 3 crew members correctly.

In theory this is a cool system that prevents you from making random guesses. And it sort of does that, but the structure of Return of the Obra Dinn meant that in the later 75% of the game I found myself doing a bunch of guess and check, just throwing things at the wall to see what stuck. I might not know which Chinese topman was struck by lightning, but I know it has to be one of them, so I might as well just slam different names into the journal until one works.

The most frustrating thing for me was trying to figure out what was, and what wasn’t a clue. For example, one of the biggest hints you get at the start of the game is a set of drawings of the voyage of the ship at various points.

These drawings include everyone on the ship, and for some of them, there are clues in where they’re standing, and what they’re wearing. For example, crew members of certain nationalities are bunched together, or wearing similar outfits, or only certain ranks wear some specific attire.

I don’t understand why, in a game about identifying people and situations based on location and appearance, the developers decided to so stingily ration pixels. It’s not actually possible to identify who people are without right clicking them, and seeing their photo.

It also doesn’t help that some clues require you to look out of game. Maybe the game is made for people who are smarter then me, but I don’t what Formosa is. While I might know what an Italian accent sounds like, I don’t speak Danish, or know anything about Papua New Guinea. So perhaps if you’re European, and did well in social studies, the game is more straightforward.

The general feeling I had with Return of the Obra Dinn was frustration. Solving deaths in the later half of the game never had a “pieces falling into place” moment, where everything just clicked and made sense. Instead it was a perpetual slog of getting three more deaths, then trying to brute force my way via guess and check into my next set of deaths.

I also do want to direct some specific enmity at one particular death, and the only one I ended up looking up. This individual was attacked with a projectile spike, crawled away, pulled the spike out of their body and is seen leaning against a wall prior to their death. In other cases, these spikes have been quite lethal. So how did this person die? Well, according to the game, they were shot through a wall. Which I was supposed to figure out by looking at their corpse, back tracking 5 scenes, and then seeing who could have fired the bullet.

Have I mentioned that the game has an art style that makes it hard to see things? Things like small details, and exact outfits?

Looking back at it now, maybe what I’m supposed to realize is that the watch can only transport you to the moment of death, and as such, I’m supposed to be looking for the exact cause of death at that point in time. I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough for the game. But what I do know is that after 12 hours, I’m mostly just frustrated.

I didn’t have fun. The game doesn’t give answers for many of its open-ended lore questions. When I beat it, there was less catharsis than a “Well, at least I have something to write about this week.”

No, we shall not be.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a clever, unique idea, executed with distinct visual style and theming. But those three factors clash with each other, and while they do create a unique experience, for me it was primarily one of frustration and exhaustion. If you think you’re smarter than me, you can buy it on Steam here.