I’m following one nautical theme game with another here. This is a tough one to talk about or even show any screenshot of unfortunately because just about any information I can give about it is a spoiler that would prejudice a person’s first experience of the game. Still, I suppose the game has been out for long enough now that anyone who is likely to play it has already done so. That means I will say that this is a mystery game set on a ship that returned mysteriously empty of its crew in 1807 after having been declared lost at sea in 1803. You’re an insurance investigator who is sent to write up a report about what happened. More spoilers will follow after the fold.

The task seems impossible but you have an edge. You are given a pocket watch that when brought near a corpse allows you to experience a snapshot of that person’s final moments. It’s just a single moment frozen in time though you can move around the scene to look at things from different angles. There is also perhaps a few seconds of sound around that moment. You are also given a log book that contains all of the known information about the Obra Dinn’s final voyage. This includes a map of its voyage, a roster of all sixty of the crew members and passengers who were on it and deck plans for the whole ship. Your job is to fill out the log book, recording the fates of everyone who was onboard the ship by piecing together every clue and scrap of information that you can find. It can be a little daunting at first as there is quite a long list of possible causes of death that you can choose from, from being shot with a gun by someone to being cannibalized by a monster. But the game helps you out. Every time you get the fates of three people correct, their fates are validated and locked.

As you can see from these screenshots, the game uses low resolution, monochrome graphics. There is only very rudimentary animation as you navigate the ship in first person view and the memories you can explore are frozen in time. Even so the detail at which the Obra Dinn is depicted is astounding. If you ever wanted to know what it’s like to live on an early 19th-century sailing ship this is the game for you. The line art style is designed to ensure that all pertinent details are as legible as possible so that there is no confusion about whether or not some graphical detail is just incidental. The details of the character’s clothing, tattoos, the equipment they carry and have nearby and so on, are all extremely important in order to identify who is who. The same attention to detail goes to the sound as well. Identifying who is speaking by the language they use and the accents they have is part of the game.

This is of course nothing like what real investigative work is like but I think this is the closest anyone can get with gamifying the process of deduction and logical reasoning. Every detail and scrap of information matters. Sometimes conclusions must be drawn only after exhausting all alternative possibilities. You can revisit a given memory again and again and notice new pertinent information that you never realized previously each time. You can also just guess blindly and try to get lucky and sometimes that works. That’s not quite in the spirit of the game but it may sometimes be necessary and the game doesn’t penalize you for it. At the beginning some of the fates are fairly obvious as you can see a character shooting someone else. Later however it may be as obvious why someone died and it may be necessary to visit several memories to piece together what happened. When you do figure it out however, the satisfaction is immense.

One complaint that I had early on, and I expect everyone to have as well, is that there is no easy way to navigate between the memories. You always have to return to the corpse or whatever is left of the person to access that memory. This seems unnecessarily troublesome once you have unlocked all of them. But I realized it gets less annoying later on because eventually you know the layout of the Obra Dinn so well that going to where you need to be is a snap. It can also be quite daunting at first to choose between different fates. For example did so-and-so die due to being speared by an enemy or being spiked by a terrible beast? Happily, it turns out the game accepts multiple correct answers when there is some ambiguity so it’s not really an issue. You can be assured that designer Lucas Pope thought of just about everything so this is a polished experience with everything in it presented just so as per the designer’s intention.

I didn’t realize until after I’d finished the game that Pope is also the person who made Papers Please which I truly loved. I should have expected that a game this innovative must have been made by someone with an established track record. I do want to note what a wonderfully diverse and yet period-appropriate cast of characters the game features. Most of the crewmembers are from the United Kingdom, but there are also Russians, Indians, Chinese and the passengers are from Formosa, which is today Taiwan. These different origins help provide vital clues during the investigation but it also makes the world so rich and remind us that the world that the people of the 19th-century knew may be bigger than what we imagined for them. That kind of diversity seems apt coming from a person who has lived a life as varied as Pope, an American who currently lives in Japan and previously lived in Singapore. Anyway it should be clear that I love this game and it’s a wonderful testament to how much innovation there is in the games industry.