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.

Don’t Die, Collect Loot

Note: This writeup is about an EARLY ALPHA. The mechanics are great, but it’s still buggy, lacking content, and polish. And when I say alpha, I do mean alpha. Not “Steam Early Access.” But it’s also the best thing I’ve played this week.

Don’t Die, Collect Loot is a combination of Vampire Survivors, and Diablo. And it is absolute brain cocaine. If this was a chemical substance, the DEA would have already found the creator, kidnapped them, and brought them to some sort of black site.

Fortunately its perfectly legal to distribute on itch.io. I don’t know how much I’ve played, and I’m not sure I want to. But let’s talk about the mechanics first.

Don’t Die, Collect Loot is an ARPG and Roguelike. Prior to starting a run, you set up your equipment and skills. You then select a map to run (right now there’s only one), a difficulty, and head on out into the world.

The map scrolls, so at least at the start, just staying on the screen making is one of the obstacles to survival. As you kill enemies, you’ll level up for the run, and each time you level up, you’ll be presented with a set of three upgrades to choose from. These can be for various skills that you have, or just general purpose buffs to HP or resists.

Getting stuck behind a random tree you failed to notice is a depressingly common way for runs to end.

You go until you die, or until the game breaks somehow. Right now, it’s mostly the second one. Again, alpha build.

Right now, I’d consider the game to be fairly bare bones. There are only two classes, one map to run, a single boss with 2 mini-bosses, and a decent skill tree. That said, the game manages to capture what ARPG’s are all about: making builds where you click once and everything on the screen explodes.

And despite its bare bones state, and despite the fact that I’ve lost multiple 30+ minute runs without getting any items whatsoever to bugs, I cannot stop playing it. It’s almost hypnotic. It strips out almost every vestigial part of the ARPG gameplay loop. No fetch quests, no annoying story. Just murder everything in front of you, and acquire treasure. The game’s name is a perfect encapsulation of what you’re trying to do: Don’t Die, Collect Loot. That’s it. That’s all that really matters.

If you want to play the game, you can find the current Alpha here on itch.io, and you can find the Steam page here. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can max Inferno without making the game break.

Pedigree Tactics

I’ve been trying to write about Pedigree Tactics for a while. I wrote a few initial drafts, but they all sucked. Perhaps the difficulty is in the fact that I already wrote my review here on Steam. It was fairly critical, noted a variety of difficulties and bugs, and asked the dev to reach out to me.

And then they did! We had a good chat, I repo’d a variety of bugs in a one hour video I made, and now I’m here. Trying to write a honest and fair review about a single-person passion project.

Pedigree Tactics is single player tactics game in the vein of Disgaea. It’s fairly short, and the main reason to play it is to engage with the unique monster fusion mechanic.

The standard start of a battle.

The game consists of levels with 3v3 monster battles, and the goal is to knock out all opposing monsters. There are 23 levels, and beating the whole game took me about 3 hours each time I played through it.

Let’s just get the rough bits out of the way. The art is jarring; it mostly suffers from dissonance between the crayon-drawn monsters, video game maps, and attack effects. The sound effects and music exist. I’ve seen more tonally consistent sexy calendars than this game’s story.

The family tree of the glorious hustling Melonator.

That said, it does have an interesting core mechanic in its monster fusion system. Briefly into the game, you unlock the ability to fuse any two monsters together. This mutates them into a new monster, and gives the resulting monster access to the move pools of both the result, and the “parents.”

It’s interesting to try to puzzle out some of the monster combos. But the fun mostly comes in making incredibly busted monsters. My personal favorite trick was to have one monster spam stacking self buffs. Then I’d have another monster use its action to give the first monster extra turns. And after that, I’d have the first monster spam map clearing AOEs.

This fusion system and the fun you can have with it, giving abilities to units that really shouldn’t have them, is the heart of the game’s fun for me. It is somewhat unfortunate though that the rest of the game isn’t as appealing.

If you’re curious about Pedigree Tactics, you can find it on Steam here. I don’t exactly recommend it, but it’s weird and unique. And that made it worth experiencing for me.

Editor’s note: I don’t know what this cursed drawing is doing here, but I enjoy it.

PAX East 2023 – Day 4

The final day of PAX is always a bit slower. After three full days of running around and playing games non-stop for 14 hours straight, I am a bit tired. So I’m more than happy for a day with less crowds, and a more leisurely tone.

I started by wandering over to the Top Hat Studios booth. I tried a game called Elementallis. From what I saw it was sort of a simple dungeon crawler in the vein of the Zelda games. I ended up putting it down fairly quickly.

Then I moved to another game at the booth, Athenian Rhapsody. Specifically, Athenian Rhapsody: Thunder Goober’s Personality Dungeon. It’s not a demo of the full game. Instead, it’s a sort of standalone mini-section of what the full game will be.

Athenian Rhapsody might be my sleeper hit of the show. It’s unabashedly following in the vein of Earthbound and Undertale. It’s weird, with a distinctive style and unusual tone. It also uses a amped up version of Undertale’s bullet hell/real time movement dodge mechanics within an RPG.

I am cautious. Undertale is an incredibly strong game on every axis. Music, writing, and perhaps most importantly, gameplay. But it’s a strong game because all of how well all of those three work together. I have no idea if Athenian Rhapsody will be as good. But I’d like to believe that it will be. It certainly has the potential.

Anyway, moving along I found Treachery in Beatdown City. It’s part side scrolling beat-em-up, and part JRPG. Characters are moved around with the control sticks, but there’s a energy and FP menu for actually using some attacks on enemies. The game didn’t click for me, but it’s a very cool combination I’ve never seen done before.

Another cool project that I haven’t tried out yet was Project Dark, a video game with no video. Instead, it’s an audio based game where you swipe left or right to make decisions. I grabbed a code for one of the modules and I’m hoping to try it at some point this week.

Then a lunch break!

Post-Lunch

In entirely unrelated and weird experience, I ran into the booth for Artix Entertainment. There’s a longer story here. Short version is that I met someone who was basically a personal hero from my childhood, and made a bunch of the games I played in highschool and middle school. So that was cool. They’re working on a port of Adventure Quest Worlds to Unity, with the name Adventure Quest Worlds Infinity. So if I can ever figure out how to get my old character back, I might play that again.

Then it was back to wandering, and I wandered over to Righteous Mojo. I didn’t like Righteous Mojo very much. The game felt and played like a combo of Friday Night Funkin and a 2006 flash game. It also looks like 2006 flash game. Graphics aren’t everything, and gameplay isn’t everything, but you gotta have at least one of them.

Anyway, I wandered a bit more and found myself at the Raw Fury booth. I’ve written about one of their published games, Dome Keeper before. Raw Fury has a bunch of games I’m curious about, including Cassette Beasts and Superfuse. But I sat down and played Friends VS Friends, the deckbuildy-cardshooty 1v1 and 2v2 shooter. It had a bunch of cards I hadn’t seen before in some of the other public demos they’ve run, and was quite fun.

Strolling around, I stopped into play ODR Hockey Heroes. Sports games aren’t really my thing, but it was pretty fun. It’s apparently inspired by the SNES era of couch co-op and versus hockey games. I’ve never played any of those, so I’m not sure if it succeeds.

Then I played something a bit more in my wheelhouse: Robobeat. It’s a roguelike arena-shooter, where you get rewarded for shooting to the beat. It was pretty fun! Side note: This is a genre that demos well at game conventions, but I’ve burned by before as well. So I’m always a little hesitant when see these sorts of games.

Crossing to the other side of the hall, I found Toy Tactics, a neat little RTS with primary gimmick being the ability to draw your own battle formations. It reminded a bit of Battalion Wars 2. Yes, I am comparing this to a Wii game from 2007. No, I won’t elaborate.

Because PAX East closes at 6:00 on Sundays, I didn’t get in as many board games. I did however get to demo Potion Slingers, a very cool semi-deckbuilder. Its main difference from a traditional deckbuilder is that cards are placed face up onto your deck as you buy them, and many are single use. So instead of being a hard engine builder, it’s more about spotting combos and combining various factors. It was quite interesting, and ended being the only board game I played at the show today.

However, it wasn’t my last game of the day. That honor goes to the somewhat unfortunately named Pandemic Train. It’s a roguelike about managing survivors in a train, and getting out to loot the places you stop at, all while trying to cure a deadly disease. The game was interesting, but felt a bit rough around the edges. Right now it has a release date of next quarter, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets pushed back a bit.

And finally, as the hall closed, I waved goodbye and-no wait, I didn’t do that. Instead, I helped some friends break down their booth, lug everything out to the car, and then made my way home, where I’m now typing this.

From an attendee standpoint, this was a pretty good PAX. Attendance did feel a bit lighter then usual, but I don’t know how that worked out for folks at booths. I saw a bunch of cool stuff, learned about some interesting looking upcoming games, and chatted with cool folks.

PAX East 2023 – Day 3

Read day 1 here. Read day 2 here.

Day 3 of PAX East 2023 has rolled around. AKA Saturday. AKA the busiest day. But I was a bit tired, so I just laid in bed, and headed over to the convention center at about 12:00.

I started by heading over to the NIS America booth. They’re the publisher and developer for Disgaea, a series I absolutely adore. There was some promotional material for Disgaea 7, but no demo. So instead I played the five games that they had available. The two that stuck out to me as interesting were Grim Grimoire OnceMore and Trails to Azure. Grim Grimoire is a remake of a PS2 RTS style game. Trails to Azure is a JRPG.

After that, I wandered a bit and checked out Bish Bash Bots, a multiplayer tower defense game. The mechanic setting it apart is a light physics system. Players whack towers to upgrade them. They can also whack incoming enemies to push them back. What I saw was a bit simplistic, but fun.

I swung by Serenity Forge. The demos I was interested in had fairly long lines, so I kept going.

Then I found Galactic Getaway. Players play Mario Party style mini-games to earn currency. Then they can spend that currency to decorate and build up a Animal Crossing style island. One of the mini-games was a very clever tile placement thing I found quite fun. I didn’t really experiment with the other parts of the game, but there’s a lot of potential. I’m going to keep an eye on this one, even though it’s not really a genre in my personal wheelhouse. Side Note: I chatted with the devs a bit. They’re aiming for a multi-platform and cross platform release. It’s ambitious, and I hope it works out.

Then I went to actually demo Nostalgix. Nostalgix is an Indie TCG that feels like a combination of Hearthstone and the Pokémon TCG. It was actually quite fun! I’ve written a bit about other indie TCG’s (and my skepticism of MetaZoo). I may try to do a full writeup at some point on Nostalgix, but it played the best of any of the indie TCG’s I’ve seen so far.

After that I wandered and found Infernax. I legit didn’t know anything about it, other than that it looked like gritty Shovel Knight Castlevania. After playing for a bit, I would say that it was fine. It felt a bit tonally weird, but the actual mechanics of the demo didn’t feel special enough to make me love it.

Then it was time for board games. I demoed Skytear: Horde. It’s a co-op PVE defense game. I’m not a huge PVE board game person, so it didn’t grab me. Might be worth checking out if you are into that sort of thing though. It did have nice art.

After the expo hall closed, I checked out the board game library.

The first game I ended up playing was Downforce. Downforce is a diceless tactical movement game where you’re racing racecars by playing movement cards. Each card can move multiple cars, and there’s also a bidding element. It was quite neat, and I would play it again, but I did not win.

The second game from the library was Air Land & Sea. It’s a neat bluffing game. Players take turns placing cards, and try to win two of three battlefields. At the same time though, it’s possible to retreat early. Doing so lets you minimize losses, and keep playing.

The last game of the night was Macaryoshka. It was a sort of incredibly interesting Japanese homebrew, with what appeared to be home machined parts, and a set of English rules that weren’t translated 100% correctly. It placement game about Macarons. It was pretty neat! We did have to google translate the Japanese rules to figure a few things out though. Fantastic components, interesting gameplay. I would be shocked if I ever see another copy of this thing again in my life.

Image of Makaryoshika board game
Here’s an online image I found. I can’t actually find a website or link for the developer.

And with that, PAX East 2023 day 3 was over! But we still have one more day left. So for now I am going to get some sleep, and try to prepare mentally for Sunday.