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

An incredibly stylish problem solving game that really rewards attention to detail. Return of the Obra Dinn, even a few years after its initial release, feels unique and offbeat in ways that still feel fresh and unduplicated in the current gaming market. You play as an insurance adjuster who must head to the Obra Dinn, a stranded ship, to discover just what happened to the crew on board. You do that through the use of a book to help write down and store any important information and a pocket watch, like any well equipped insurance adjuster keeps on them at all times. The pocket watch has the ability to travel back in time essentially and see just what happened with the clues you will stumble upon. With both of these tools at your disposal, you'll be able to sift through the timeline of the Obra Dinn and start figuring everything out. This is where paying attention to small details will be so important since every event is a rather large scene frozen in time for you to walk around as you try and track down the crew and passengers of the Obra Dinn and attempt to match names to faces. In total you will need to find 60 people and discover their true fate. You'll be tasked to doing three things with each person; figure out each person's name, whether they are alive or dead, and where they escaped to or ultimately how they died, and in some cases, just who was responsible for their death. The puzzle to all of this though occurs in many ways. First, the game will unravel this story for you out of order and missing a piece of the puzzle altogether (one portion of the timeline cannot be uncovered until you find a majority of the fates of the people on board the Obra Dinn.) Luckily you do have a record book that will put the timeline in order for you. On top of that though this game will provide you very few obvious clues. There are very few lines of dialogue in this game, so when you are exploring parts of the story, they are all frozen in time, a picture essentially. There will be a few clues you can get from the audio in this game but for the most part you'll be tasked with matching up the photos you have to minor details you find in these scenes. Whether it's going off of uniforms, or bed numbers, or the tasks you see them doing in the background of other scenes. This does make backtracking the scenes fairly consistent as you'll sometimes see new things coming back to something that can match up with something in the future or in the past of the Obra Dinn timeline. This backtracking never really got tedious because the story being uncovered was so interesting. The scenes presented are also so well constructed and stylish that coming back to them rarely feels like a chore. The game's graphic style resembles a game fresh out of the late 80s when pixels and color were severely handcuffed. The style just fits perfectly with this game. Though there were a few times where the lack of detail or color did make figuring out some details a little harder since the graphical detail can be so limited. On top of that, going through the record book and some of the mechanics behind it are a bit clunky feeling and not the most user friendly. Trying to go through the micro stuff in this game like trying to timeline out a passenger's start and finish isn't the easiest to do in game. The record book is broken down by chapters. However, many passengers timelines go through multiple chapters. When you backtrack and are bringing up previous scenarios to try and find new clues/details, that'll start you on that chapter's path until you exit out of the scenario. However, if you're wanting to follow a character's specific timeline and want to jump to a new chapter while still exploring a different one, you unfortunately can't, you'll have to exit out and walk in the present day ship to the part on the ship that find that next scenario yourself. This can get a bit tedious at times. This game also does not do a good job of laying out what you need to do, at the start. The beginning of this game can be a chore to get through as you're trying to trial and error the mechanics, especially since the story is out of order and hard to filter through out the gate. This game's story and mystery are quite good and eventually it hooked me, enough to make those beginning hurdles seem pretty minor in the grand scheme. I could definitely seeing some people bouncing off of this game though at the beginning before those things really shift. It's well worth pushing through though and uncovering the mystery of the Obra Dinn. If puzzle/deduction style games are your thing though, you need to play this game.