Return of the Obra Dinn

Published: 19 Apr 2026

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Return of the Obra Dinn is a fantastic, visually distinct, puzzle game where you are tasked with identifying the fate of all 60 crew of the good ship Obra Dinn, after it washes ashore years after it was declared missing - with only a simple investigative journal and a strange pocketwatch that allows you to view, as frozen snapshots-in-time, the last moments of a given crewmember. Its ambitious (almost to a fault), beautifully presented and the entire gimmick of seeing these last moments turning to a slow, breadcrumb-esque unravelling of both the plot (which, while in sum total is rather thin and flimsy, how it is told is fantastic) as well as the disparate threads of information scattered around to identify the myriad of crew, all eminently solvable but frequently not explicitly called out - requiring deduction through name, nationality, role, relationship with other crew to be pieced together into something coherent, all with a reveal system that unlocks every 3 fates, ostensibly a video game compromise but it all adds together to a puzzle game that rewards “educated guesses” and “hunches”, building assumptions upon assumptions and feeling massively rewarded for each successful batch of people deducted. It culminates in a fantastic gaming experience (which can unfortunately can never be replicated) of getting to put a proverbial detective hat on - and while there are obvious QoL/nitpicky issues which derive from the game’s ambition in the first place (identifying cause of death was finnicky, identifying the obscurer crew such as the Chinese Topmen was inscrutable without an initial hint, revisiting and repeating scenes and sections over-and-over to try and find a lead was tedious at times, an underwhelming “secret” chapter), I was able to look past the rough edges and more cumbersome aspects and get wholly and totally absorbed and immersed into the fate of everyone upon the Obra Dinn, and was greatly rewarded by it.