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[Sensei]

Website & Download!
The content in the game currently is very short and perhaps best played without a description, so you might want to just download it and let it explain itself. Otherwise, description follows!

The very first demo of Lucas Pope's new game was quietly released a couple weeks ago. It features a unique graphic style that I can only describe as playing a modern 3D game with an original Gameboy screen for a monitor. In it, you board the The Obra Dinn, a ship which went missing and turned up with all of its crew dead or missing.



Your task is to explore the ship, determine the fate of each crew member, and record it in the crew muster roll book. To aid you in this, you have a magic stopwatch that takes you back to the moment of a cadaver's death, allowing you to examine the scene frozen in time and walk around. You can only see a small part right now, but it looks like the game will tell a very compelling narrative when it's done.

I'm currently watching for updates, I'll try to keep this thread up to date as things happens. Until then, discuss!

[Farce]

Oh man, I love games about ancient missing ships.

[Seamas]

Very cool.  What a creative angle for a game!  And the visual style is somehow compelling and brilliant, even if it is hipster nonsense.

[Sartain]

Kinda looks (and sounds) like something from the Amiga days

[Puzzlemaker]

I just spent my entire sunday sucked into this damn game.  Seriously.

It's really good.

[Ivefan]

For those that have not played yet, it is an interesting game that sucks you in the more you play because the whole game is about figuring out exactly what happened.
for the rest:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The story isnt that exceptional, but it really sucks the player in which really made it enjoyable. But i must say that while figuring out the last few fates, nothing new happened which made the blocked chapter much more enticing, but also so much more disapointing when i got to see it. Probably a large part due to i didnt have to figure anything else out and just had a few scenes shown me. a bit underwhelming

[Il Palazzo]

How is the figuring out achieved, mechanically? I'm looking at trailers and screenshots, and can't quite *cough* figure it out. Is it a hidden objects game? Do you have to manipulate the environment according to scattered clues? Is it a 3D point-and-click adventure? Like, what does one actually do in this game?

[Ivefan]

Using as generic language as possible but basically, you find a spot where you can use your tool. listen to the audio of what occured then you see a frozen moment in time which you can navigate and try to find clues.
you have a book in which you are to pair a name and a fate to a face in a sketch of the crew.

[Sirian]

How is the figuring out achieved, mechanically? I'm looking at trailers and screenshots, and can't quite *cough* figure it out. Is it a hidden objects game? Do you have to manipulate the environment according to scattered clues? Is it a 3D point-and-click adventure? Like, what does one actually do in this game?

I'm not very far into the game (about 20 scenes in), but far enough that I see a pattern repeating : you find a corpse, you see (and hear) the scene of his death, then you find another body in the scene, repeat. When you can't go further, you go back to the present and try to progress there : usually a door will have opened and you can find another body somewhere, rince and repeat.

Each scene has some clues, usually something someone says, and your book has a list of all the people and a big drawing with all of them.

So basically what you have to do is, for each person in the list, match their face with their name, who/what killed them, or their fate if they didn't die. Once you figured all of them correctly, you win !

To me, it feels more like a storytelling game than a puzzle game, things so far seem pretty obvious, even if you don't get all the info right away, you can just keep unlocking scenes regardless.

[Yoink]

Ooh, this looks intriguing!

[Sartain]

Using as generic language as possible but basically, you find a spot where you can use your tool. listen to the audio of what occured then you see a frozen moment in time which you can navigate and try to find clues.

Sounds a lot like Connor's crime-scene analysis from Detroit: Become Human, I think

[Virtz]

How is the figuring out achieved, mechanically? I'm looking at trailers and screenshots, and can't quite *cough* figure it out. Is it a hidden objects game? Do you have to manipulate the environment according to scattered clues? Is it a 3D point-and-click adventure? Like, what does one actually do in this game?

I'm not very far into the game (about 20 scenes in), but far enough that I see a pattern repeating : you find a corpse, you see (and hear) the scene of his death, then you find another body in the scene, repeat. When you can't go further, you go back to the present and try to progress there : usually a door will have opened and you can find another body somewhere, rince and repeat.

Each scene has some clues, usually something someone says, and your book has a list of all the people and a big drawing with all of them.

So basically what you have to do is, for each person in the list, match their face with their name, who/what killed them, or their fate if they didn't die. Once you figured all of them correctly, you win !

To me, it feels more like a storytelling game than a puzzle game, things so far seem pretty obvious, even if you don't get all the info right away, you can just keep unlocking scenes regardless.

Eventually you need to start looking at some really obscure clues to guess who's who, tho.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For instance, in order to identify most of the lower ranking crew you'll need to look at the numbers attached to the hammocks and look at identifiable bodyparts hanging out from under the covers.

Somebody actually saying a name in the scenes is a rarity. Not to mention there's some seemingly obvious but misleading details.

And one of the chapters you only unlock once you've worked out all but 2 of the crew's fates.

Using as generic language as possible but basically, you find a spot where you can use your tool. listen to the audio of what occured then you see a frozen moment in time which you can navigate and try to find clues.

Sounds a lot like Connor's crime-scene analysis from Detroit: Become Human, I think

If you had less handholding and obvious clues, at least.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Beat the whole thing and it is brilliant—a shooter in reverse, instead of moving through a level turning defined or even personified opponents into corpses, you move through a pile of anonymous corpses and names until all of them are defined individuals—the last two dead men, when I found them, I was like—oh there is the bosun and that mate—it was like meeting old friends!

You learn who was decent and who was a real bastard and it all feels really intimate and interesting.

It is also a great Lovecraftian subversion—especially vis-a-vis ethnicity and race, which is the big Lovecraftian bugaboo, and is here structurally important to identifying people, and key to the plot.

All in all it is much the same game as papers—a grand experiment to see if video games can produce real empathy, only where papers held your hand along the way, this makes it very clear that it up to you to do the heavy lifting—literally, as the only storyteller voice pries into your business, is told to sod off (the only time your protagonist speaks) and then says that he can’t lift the load for you—you have to do it yourself

[Dorsidwarf]

I really liked this game. There's quite a bit of guessing involved once you get to the endgame, but its so satisfying when you go "OH!! I KNOW!!! IT'S THIS GUY!!!" and immediately get a confirmation.

Spoiler: Hidden achievement (click to show/hide)

Apparently theres a secret achievement for if you write down that the captain caused every death and then leave

[Ivefan]

I really liked this game. There's quite a bit of guessing involved once you get to the endgame, but its so satisfying when you go "OH!! I KNOW!!! IT'S THIS GUY!!!" and immediately get a confirmation.

I don't think there was much guessing for the final fellows but then I kinda refused guessing because i wanted to find the clues and really only guessed on two russians. couldn't find the clue which one was whom but i did that midgame.