4.5/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Return of the Obra Dinn.

I was so convinced I was going to love this that I, no joke, relegated and saved it for a day when I truly needed it. Like a cigar you vow to smoke when your kid goes off to university or the champagne your mum leaves in the cupboard for nine years just to randomly pop when your sibling gets passable GCSE results. I thought, wait for a proper bastard of a week; one of those 'sit down on the sofa and put your head in your hands for five minutes' kinda weeks. Only when I've been well and truly kicked down can I ascend and reclaim my rightful place as digital Columbo. And after six long years, I had that week, and goddamn it felt righteous to be on the trail of clues like a bloodhound on Adderol. I think from the moment you boot this up, you're reminded that Lucas Pope is well and truly a genius. Between this and Paper's Please, this dude is a fountain of creativity and imagination, but what I love most about him is that everything he does is in service of telling a truly meaningful, unique and bold story. He takes something mundane, shifts it into a deceptively addictive gameplay loop, and then uses that loop to subtly spin a narrative entirely centred on how you interact with the game and its components. In Paper's Please, that's coldly desensitising you to the plights and hardships of the Arsthozkan people by giving you your own responsibilities and family to provide for. You simply stop trying to help those begging for mercy or asking for you to turn a blind eye, because in this corrupt political hellscape, money means your family's survival, and you make money by being quick, efficient and following the rules. Return of the Obra Dinn utilises that same genius 'gameplay feeds into the story' shtick, albeit if it's more about using the gameplay as a framing device. You're an insurance officer and you have to figure out how much is owed to the crew of the long-dormant Obra Dinn cargo ship. Sounds like a grandad-ass game. But wait, now you have a pocket watch that sends you back in time and the game wants you to deduce the identity and fate of every person on the ship. And, without even realising it, as you're dipping between bodies, taking notes in your journal and naturally putting together the pieces of the grander, scurvy-infused jigsaw puzzle, you slowly realise the story it's telling has its hooks in DEEP. The way it's mostly told backwards and the fact characters you initially judged are proved to be completely different when viewed from an altered perspective; it's such a cool way to make what is, in many ways, a very simple story into a narrative that's riveting entirely because YOU pieced it together. You've figured out the broad strokes through context clues, snippets of dialogue and, at some points, even just the hammock someone sleeps in, and its so deeply rewarding. It's why I love the genre in the first place. Because on top of that, it's just a clever, well-assembled mystery. The solutions to each fate are mostly firm but fair, and reward your observation skills. The tale it's telling and the freeze frames you see are so detailed that you can put together full character arcs without ever seeing a single person move a muscle. And, dear god, the art style is absolutely stunning. To not be too one-sided, it's very clunky at points, and the game lacks major quality-of-life enhancements that wear heavy in the endgame section (the fact you can't just trigger memories from the notebook and, once you're in one, you can't replay dialogue is criminal). But, overall, this had me absolutely locked in and wearing my favourite little digital Columbo hat from start to end. Lucas Pope is just THAT dude. And while I could sit here and say I wish we got more good detective games that let me figure shit out with a pen, some paper and a lot of thinking out loud, I think the reality is very few would be of this quality. The truth is, men only want one thing, and its to see Lucas Pope's name appear under a game where you play as a corrupt member of the press releasing propaganda supporting a fascist dictator so you can feed your fictional wife and three children, and goddamn it, we're being STARVED out here.