Time to get your sea legs on and step aboard a ship full of maritime mysteries in Return Of The Obra Dinn, released today and latest from Lucas Pope, creator of Papers Please. A first-person murder mystery presented in grainy monochrome, players fill the well-worn shoes of an insurance investigator for the East India Company in 1807. A ship long thought lost has turned up again, and all the crew have been replaced with very dead skeletons. There's a mystery to solve, and only a deductive genius (who can also see the past) can crack the case. Sleuth on.
Return Of The Obra Dinn is proof that you can do a lot with very little. In this case, just solid white or black dots, creating an image that could be hashed out with pencil, given enough time. There's been a huge amount of effort put into retaining this look even in the sketch-art stills of the game. This little development clip shows how a 3D render was drawn over in order to make it look like a authentically historical pencil sketch. The end result is a game using cutting-edge 3D tech to render out something that looks like it's from that early monochrome era of Mac games.
Return of the Obra Dinn - Available Now Watch on YouTube
As the trailer above shows, the core of Return Of The Obra Dinn is piecing together the truth behind the vanishing ship. Granting you Sherlock-like powers of deduction (by that I mean 'pulling clues wholesale out of the ether') is a magic pocket-watch that lets you hear the final moments of crew-members, before having a chance to walk around the time-frozen moment of their death. Piece the bits together, and a picture forms. Hopefully. If you're smart. While I'm not sure who's on the job, a poke around the RPS Treehouse noteboard says a review is in the works.
Return Of The Obra Dinn is out now on Steam, Humble and GOG for £15.49/€16.79/$20.
