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

When I was looking around for games that filled the same kind of void as Outer Wilds (not to be confused with The Outer Worlds), I found people recommending Subnautica and Return of the Obra Dinn. I played a bit of the former after getting it through Xbox Game Pass, and while I liked it enough, it was too big of an undertaking for me to devote much time to. This game, though? This was an especially fun one. Return of the Obra Dinn puts you in the role of an insurance agent for the East India Company, sent to assess the state of a ghost ship, which was thought lost at sea, and has seemingly resurfaced after five years. You have, in your possessions, a journal that contains details of the crew and can be filled in with the deaths they experienced, and a magical amulet that lets you relive the last moment of the lives of each corpse you find. The result is a strange series of vignettes that you experience out of order, going from the mundane (people dying of illness, people being murdered during a mutiny) to the fantastical (no spoilers, but it goes into some more supernatural themes). What the game asks you to do, ultimately, is to go through each vignette and find out the name and fate of each of the 60 people aboard the ship. Yes, Obra Dinn ultimately ends up being a detective game, where you use observation, deduction and process of elimination to fill in your journal with the fates of the people aboard this doomed ship. If this doesn’t appeal to you, that’s fine! But I think you should give it a chance anyway. If the gameplay doesn’t motivate you, the art style might - the entirety of this game is monochromatic, and it’s beautiful.