Return of the Obra Dinn

I have opened this game and streamed it to a Discord call just to make my friends play it so I can vicariously live through their experiences.

I think that it is ideal for new players to come to this older but still brilliant deduction game without any detailed fore-knowledge, so that they can experience the same sense of puzzlement, surprise, gradual enlightenment & small triumphs, and overall awe at the developer's vision and accomplishment, as I did when I played Obra Dinn for the first time four and a half years ago. So no spoilers here, just a heartfelt recommendation to play this magnificent game, to which I return periodically (i have just completed it for the fourth time). Can you piece together the story of the Obra Dinn and its crew? What a voyage of discovery you will have..!

It's a mystery game that actually makes you think. Every deduction makes sense, and you'll have plenty of "aha!" moments throughout the game.

Extremely enjoyable, interesting in every way, and it never feels like a slog to get through. Highly recommend.

A detective/mystery gem that blends a superbly eerie atmosphere with satisfying deduction mechanics. The backwards chronology and flashback mechanic (which sometimes triggers when you click a corpse, other times it auto-triggers) can be disorientating at first. But it’s all forgivable for an indie game that stands in the hall of detective/mystery greatness.

I guess I never played this using my Steam account, but I'm shocked I haven't reviewed it. I completed this back in 2019 on my Switch and replayed it earlier this year with some friends on their account. Quite simply, Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the greatest puzzle games ever made and fundamentally changed what I look for in this genre. I'm so happy that detective games in this style are so popular right now. It's a must play.

Yes best game, dont spoil yourself on anything and just play it! its worth it i promise!

One of the greatest puzzle games of all time, bar none. I strongly recommend doing this one without a guide, as it requires some of the most intelligent deductions I have ever performed in a video game.

Must-play
The music gets a lill old after a while, but its okay
Only hint i would give is that the game accepts multiple answers to a certain death. So its not "Yes" or "No" based.

Whilst a decent amount of it was me guessing correctly, later on i found out certain ways of figuring things out are in the details.

Great game with a lot of attention to detail. Whenever you think "Thats a bit of a lame oversight" it turns out to be the clue you were looking for to identify someone! I could have used a few more button prompts for the first 2 minutes of the game as the controls aren't exactly what you are used to, but there is few enough inputs that you get a hang of it quick.

I highly recommend this if you are in the mood for a detective game.

This game was so fun, great atmosphere and style. The gameplay is incredible and one of the best mystery games I have ever played

There are few games my wife, who’s not really into gaming, has enjoyed playing with me, but Return of the Obra Dinn is one of them. Enamoured by the mystery, we sat down and ended up 100%ing the game in just a couple of sessions. Unravelling the mystery of what happened on the ship was incredibly rewarding.

The game strikes a perfect balance by giving you just enough guidance to keep you from getting lost but never holds your hand. Solving the puzzles feels satisfying because you’re the one figuring things out. Every time you identify a person or piece together how something happened, it feels like a true accomplishment.

What Lucas Pope has done with Return of the Obra Dinn is nothing short of perfection in delivering that detective puzzle mystery vibe. It’s one of the rare games that makes you feel like you're piecing together the story with your own intuition, where solving the mystery feels genuinely earned.

Visually, Return of the Obra Dinn is unique. The 1-bit art style might be off-putting at first glance, but it quickly becomes part of the charm. It’s often striking and enhances the atmosphere.

It’s unique, rewarding, and one of the best at making you feel smart and like you're actually doing the detective work. If you're up for a good mystery, and are into detective games or challenging puzzles, Return of the Obra Dinn is worth your attention.

Fantastic puzzle game that is held back a bit by the fact that the game likes taking its sweet, sweet time.

It's just good from bow to stern, and if it inspires a new wave of deductive reasoning games that relentlessly and shamelessly steal it's 3-correct-guesses system the way that Chants of Senaar did, I'll be one damn happy gamer.

My goodness this game is exceptional.
The sound design is excellent, the graphic style is unique, and the story is engaging.
The Return of the Obra Dinn is worth your time.

I remember when this game came out in 2019 and captured the hearts of indie gamers and journalists alike. I finally (shamefully) got around to playing it in 2025 and I totally get the hype. That said, this one didn't quite enamor me as well as some other mystery/detective walking sims have in recent memory.

On the plus side: The art style is certainly unique. The gritty, claustrophobic setting feels thematically appropriate. The monochrome palette makes the player feel like a dispassionate observer, almost entirely removed from the tragic events that took place on the Obra Dinn - and also allows the developers to depict pretty gruesome violence without it feeling gratuitous. Also, the writing is clever and the narrative events - which the player experiences in a non-sequitur, episodic, and often reverse order - are brilliantly and intricately constructed into a remarkable feat of stagecraft; each of the *dozens* of characters have a unique set of lines, movements, and interactions that intertwine without a hitch.

On the minus side: 4.5 hours in, the gameplay loop is getting tiresome. Where the game shines is in deduction and reasoning - poring over the logbook, trying to figure out what you missed and how to identify and distinguish the butcher or one of the dozen seamen or the first mate from one another, narrowing it down, bit by bit. It's the sheer tedium that takes place between these moments that's the problem. In order to witness a scene, you have to complete the same menial action over and over again: approach a body, press the action button, observe the scene, press the action button to show you where the next body is, press the action button to exit out of the dream state, press the action button to cause a spirit line to guide you - VERY slowly - toward the body that you just walked to in the dream state, except this time in your cogent state, then press the action button again and repeat. I found myself getting frustrated at the pacing - it just felt like the game was artificially handicapping my rate of progress.

My other minor complaints: the very good music (unpopular opinion here) could've been better utilized and played more of a starring role. Don't get me wrong, sometimes the score really sweeps you away in some of the more dramatic set pieces. But sometimes it doesn't, which feels like a gaping hole in a game where there is very little variance in the visual experience. Also, don't play in the dark, or your eyes are going to be hurting after a few hours.

This game has been played and reviewed by countless people so no one is going to read this, so it's more a way for me to log and remember my experience. All in all - really cool game concept, great writing and "flavor", so-so visuals, good but underutilized music, and tedious and repetitive mechanics.

I didn't hate it and I think it'll continue to click with a *lot* of people, so at a decent sale price, it's a general thumbs up from me.

This game is such a gem of a story and investigation. The idea that you travel though events by finding a point of death is clever and spurs along discovering everyone’s fate. I would warn though, getting everyone right is fairly difficult. I got through all available scenes before being stumped on most when you have to retread everything. No detail is too small to be important or lead you to a person’s identity. Either hold to this and investigate thoroughly, or look up a guide to help you get along. The story is still worth it even if you do have to look up the answers. This is experience is massively recommended.

Amazing game. Will take between 4 and 10 hours to complete but has little to no replayerbility. I would recommend completing the game in chunks as I binged it in only two days. Great puzzles and story.

This game can be difficult, but it is one of the best and most well thought out mystery games I have ever played and the satisfaction of solving the mystery and understanding the story of the Obra Dinn is worth it if you ask me.

Super cool game, the music and sound effects are phenomenal, and the visuals lend well to the feel of the story. Its insane how much detail was put in.

I couldn't stop playing. I cancelled weekend plans for it.
Worth it. 10/10

The art direction and sound design were amazing. Amazingly good story and setting. Loved every minute of it.

A guy has a slight lisp during dialogue and you're supposed to pinpoint who it is off that
Pretty good detective game

A well-crafted detective / mystery game that can be off-putting at first but is highly rewarding after a couple hours if you keep at it.

This is one of my favorite games I've ever played. Succint and sweet, yet with enough head-scratching for multiple gaming sessions (my real time ran about 7 and a half hours - I left the game running one night).

Some of the fates were extremely difficult, and though I guessed on a few, later when I revisited chapters for other fates, I noticed pieces of evidence I could have used to deduce the crew members without the need for guesswork, though some clues were very subtle.

Overall, a phenomenal game that really breaks the mold. I'd say it's worth the full price, as you'll never play anything like it again.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a detective simulation game. The main gameplay is a walking simulator mixed with a hidden object game and putting in your best guesses in a journal. This is not an exciting game, and there is no voice acting or animations (for the most part). I put this at the front, not to deter you, but to make sure you understand what you're getting into.

This game has one major flaw, but if you can understand that flaw going into it, you'll likely have a much better time. The flaw is unintentionally teaching the player to expect answers much earlier than the game provides. The tutorial of the game guides you through a few flashback sequences, and has you solving a few of the crew member's death right away. This is not how the rest of the game runs. For the most part, you'll need to watch every single flashback, make a few minor notes on each one, then start following every lead you can to learn who is who, and what happened to them.

The first time I played this game, I thought that I was too stupid to really play it, because after going through about 10 flashbacks, I still didn't know what was going on, who was who, and what happened to anyone. Turns out, this is pretty usual. So, the tutorial primes you to think that you can solve "most" of the puzzles in each flashback pretty quickly, but this turns out not to be the case.

If you are willing to put in the time this game requires, and you enjoy searching for every possible piece of evidence to solve mysteries, this is one of the most singular experiences you can have. However, bottom line, this game isn't going to be for everyone, so know what you're getting into

this game is amazing, i still think of this game and hope i forget all the answers so that i can play it again. its such a cool game, so eerie and interesting. i literally cannot recommend this game enough. it rewards paying attention to small details which feels really good when you get something right.
i keep telling all my friends to play this game!!

Fantastic mystery game that really forces you to pay attention and work your brain. Also good spooky sea vibes. 10/10 would sail again.

I can't believe I forgot to review this game. It has the most fumblable(?) premise in history and uses it so perfectly. The music and visuals are immaculate but aren't even the main draw, it's the fact that this is a *real* detective game. You have a extensive set of tools that are all given to you at the start, and a bible's worth of accidents and murders to fill out. Even games that take inspiration from it (cough cough chants of sennaar) unknowingly butcher the satisfaction achieved from it, because everything in Obra Dinn was made for Obra Dinn. Each little detail serves as one of many clues that push you towards each solution, very few clues completely outweigh others and make them obsolete (these still exist, such as E.S., but this makes sense anyway and is a cool way of figuring out an identity). Lucas Pope is an absolute visionary, just the stylisation alone deserves praise for how it mixes oldschool macintosh visuals with 19th century photographs. Ok, I've been yapping on too much, but it is well worth anyone's time, definitely recommend.

7/10 for me. Great style, great story, fun mechanics, but I'm not the target audience. Requires a lot of patience and attention to really tiny details that I just can't be asked to focus on. Good game tho.

Video games bore me when they tell their story like a movie. Those "story-driven" games are nothing more than a mediocre 10-hour film. In this game, it's up to you to uncover the story through its mechanics, and in the end, you feel like a detective who had the satisfaction of discovering a great story. Some games are more works of art than games—this is one of them.

I've never played anything like this, and I'm not sure there even is something else like this. It's a really unique experience and I loved it.

I recommend playing with a notebook, btw! (You can totally beat the game without taking extra notes, but I found it way more fun and involving)

10/10
The characters' premise fits my needs of perspective.
This might not mean anything, and I apologize if this isn't misleading.
I don't leave bad reviews, all efforts are a perfect score.

Okay, at first I wasn't sure I actually liked it because the game starts off SUPER DRAMATIC and OVER THE TOP. BUUUUT after you unlock everything (except secret stuff) it shuts up and gets out of the way of your VERY IMPORTANT investigation for INSURANCE PURPOSES.

10/10. Fun and (sometimes) silly lil maritime insurance scam investigation game.

11 out of 10!

Can't stop once started if you are big on mysteries and puzzles. The setting is fascinating as well, with people of different nationalities and cultural background on board a voyage to an unknowingly calamitous demise. I enjoyed the 1-bit but vivid 3D art style and music throughout the game. Definitely want to play something similar next time!

Its amazing. Probably one of the coolest and most unique detective games that exists.

really fun mystery game, not too long. Nice eerie vibe without turning into full blown horror (closest I will ever come to completing a horror game)

Best puzzle game I've ever played. Doesn't leave you in spots where you have to make erroneous assumptions about each puzzle, and was incredibly enjoyable for someone who's been playing puzzle games for almost 15 years.

I could write an essay on how incredible this game is both on its own merits, and on how much it personally impacted me during a difficult time in my life. A masterpiece, from concept, to music, to execution, to game mechanics, etc, etc. It is a labor of love and Lucas Pope is a real artist. If you haven't played it, don't read anything about it, just play it and experience incredible storytelling and game design. 5 stars. Has taken the top spot for my favorite gameplay experience and I wish I could wipe my memory to play it again and again. I have a rule for myself that I am not allowed to recall any names or faces when I think about the game to attempt to forget.

This game will be burned into your memory the way its black and white style is burned into my monitor and retinas. Like a good book unfolding before you, this game has many moments of ever greater twists and reveals. Best to go into this one blind.

This is certainly a game that continuously surprised me in great ways. A true innovative take on unraveleling a mystery and storytelling! I won't say more on that because of spoilers, but I will add that playing this with a friend was a true delight.
If you want to pick this up, do it! play it, it's great! Even better, drag a friend or two along for the ride :3

Such a delightful puzzle game! Piecing together little bits of environmental, wardrobe, and dialog to identify the misfortune of the entire crew was great fun! The storytelling is awesome and several moments made me gasp!

Excellent game, 9/10
(-1 point from no sprint when your going multiple decks of the boat looking for clues on a single person)

Great mystery. Found the specific graphics style, although beautiful, difficult to parse at some points which is important for mode of death information but no major complaints.

This game seems to have sprung, fully-formed, from the brow of Zeus. Lucas Pope is a genius. I have literally never felt so utterly bamboozled, and then so madly brilliant, while playing a video game ever in my life.

A wonderful detective game with a fun gimmick and no stressful time limits. I just wish you were able to play it all over again.

Amazing! Puzzle and logical deductions. Feels great every time you solve 3 fates. Had a blast with this one. Unique game.

10/10!
This game is one I really enjoyed with its unique art-style, interesting and enveloping story, and mental challenge all adding to its greatness. I love puzzle games, and this game is just that, one giant puzzle! Definitely one of my favorite games played to date, go play it now if you haven't already!!

What a great game!! While I was initially 'horrified' by the basic graphics - it works well for this game. Adds to the challenge. And it is quite challenging. I recommend playing it through until you win or you give up. If you decide to take a break, it's hard to get back into the groove because much of the info is memorized. You keep mental track of who everyone is, what their job is and how they died. There's a place to put this info but when you have only partial info, you're keeping more of a mental note for those things. Thus if you take a break, you'll be doing a chore trying to catch up with all the info you had (and possibly now forgotten). I had solved 24 fates, then took a break of over a year... mistake. wasn't sure if I should start over or try to figure out where I was... painful. In the end, I didn't start over, but it was confusing until I got the hang of it again.

So it's a good game that will exercise your observation skills - even with the fuzzy graphics. Don't overlook the scenic drawings of the crew and pay attention to who is sitting/standing beside who! That will help you solve quite a few people.

I used a supplementary spreadsheet (available in the guidelines) which was very helpful for tracking down names and occupations.

It's a weird story that I'm still not entirely clear about (the monkey?) but entertaining none the less.

Thoroughly enjoyes this game. I should probably try Papers, Please as I understand that's also quite good.

Despite being better-known for Papers Please, this game is absolutely Lucas Pope's magnum opus (as of now, at least - hopefully he continues to make awesome games!). It intertwines a wonderfully-delivered story with incredibly unique puzzles. There's really nothing else like this out there; the puzzles require means of logical deduction that you won't see in other games. On top of that, the music is fitting and pleasant (albeit a little repetitive, after 9 hours, especially given that you can't - as far as I could tell - lower the audio of the music without lowering the other sound effects). Personally, I think anybody that enjoys puzzle games should play this.

Genuine A-Tier work, Lucas Pope's "Return of the Obra Dinn" is the kind of gem that sometimes appears from single-developer studios who have one great idea worked to solid perfection. The gameplay loop feels very enriching, the puzzles are recurring drips of dopamine, and the ambiance draws the player into this 19th-century world of nautical tragedy. More comprehensive reviews are available elsewhere so I will simply add my thumbs-up to the chorus of other contributors who have enjoyed their experience with this title.

Only one caveat, though. Like others who have mentioned the same complaint, I also loathe how the game forces long, long waits between uses of the watch. Titles of this sort often create these artificial waits either to pad out runtime or to force visitors to really imbibe the scenery crafted by the studio. While the developer may have wanted to encourage suspense, these extended breaks actually creates regular scenes of boredom just like unskippable cutscenes in other games but worse because there is no animation or moving action from the title. I wish the developer had been more considerate of this user experience, but I still have to applaud the work that went into crafting this for us and can otherwise credit the title for it's superb worldbuilding.

Really satisfying murder mystery puzzle game. I wish there was a better way to go into and out of the memories, since that started to really eat up time when I was working through things. Even with that though, it was a fun time. Some of the people were absolutely painful to figure out though.