- PC/Mac, Switch, PS4, Xbox
One of the most unique gaming experiences I’ve ever had came from the prodigious mind of one Lukas Pope. Of course, I’m talking about the horror-simulation Papers, Please which I played way back in 2014 when it arrived on iOS. Completely unique and terrifying in how it roped you into hurting others to save yourself as you worked in the slowly grinding gears of an dystopian bureaucracy.
It seems fitting that the next game that gripped me as much as that title also came from Lukas Pope in the form of Return of the Obra Dinn. An incredible mystery game that managed to be unlike anything before or since. If you’ve been waiting to play Obra Dinn for some reason, your time has come. On October 18 we can expect it on Switch, Xbox, and PS4.
Return of the Obra Dinn puts you in the shoes of an insurance claims adjuster working for John Company to determine what happened on a ship just arrived from the Far East. You see, everyone on board is dead or missing and it’s your job to figure out which corpse is whose and what exactly happened to every passenger on the manifest.
Unlike other mystery-themed games, Obra Dinn is a true mystery to solve and will test your skills of observation and deduction as you try to piece everything together via short audio and video clips from the past. All of this happens in a unique and haunting monochrome style that pairs computing in the 1980s with bullet-time.
The only issue I had with Obra Dinn was the first-person perspective which made it playable only in very small doses. I’m hoping the smaller Switch screen helps with the first-person vertigo I usually experience and I can, finally, see the mystery to its conclusion.
You can expect Obra Dinn to arrive in the Nintendo eShop on October 18.
- Return of the Obra Dinn for PC/Mac via Steam, $20
- Return of the Obra Dinn for PC/Mac via GoG, $20
- Return of the Obra Dinn for PC/Mac via Humble, $20
Obraout time!