It’s the year 1807, in England. After five years of no contact, the missing ship, the Obra Dinn, mysteriously returns to its port. You, an insurance adjuster, are sent onto that ship to find out what happened. What you discover is an eerie ghost ship. All sixty of the merchant ship’s crew members gone; their fates… unknown.

That’s how Lucas Pope (yes, the guy from Papers, Please) starts his 2018 indie mystery, Return of the Obra Dinn. The premise sounds interesting and the plot so far promising, just like a lot of other mystery/detective games (I’ll be using the two words interchangeably throughout). But what is it exactly that sets Return of the Obra Dinn apart from its peers? Before we ask ourselves that, let’s consider why anyone ever decides to play a game. Think back to the first time you ever loaded up your Gameboy to explore the world of Pokémon, when you booted up Ocarina of Time on your emu… Nintendo 64 so you can go on an adventure, when you started a new game on Silent Hill 2 so you can experience dread like no other. Video games are inherently an experience. People decide to start a game because it promises its players an experience. But often these days, game developers seem to have forgotten this. While games like the Legend of Zelda strive to feel like an adventure, many of its successors and imitators strive to feel like a Zelda. But no genre has been more forgetful of their purpose than the detective game genre.

It isn’t a far-fetched assertion to make that detective games are supposed to make the players experience being a detective (not a boring real life detective, but rather what people imagine it’s like). It’s a pretty obvious statement to be honest. But too many times, mystery games fail to deliver on that statement; many of them ending up being a glorified walking simulator slash movie, while the players watch the game do all the hard work for them. In many mystery games we see the player asked a question and given four options on the screen, one out of four of them being the obvious correct choice that the player was not given the opportunity to figure out for themselves. Elsewhere, the player stumbles onto a new clue that leads to a new question in their head, but when they approach a witness for interrogation, they disappointingly realize that none of the question options provided are what was on their mind. This leads to the kind of gameplay where, for example in Sherlock Holmes, players end up watching along with Watson while Sherlock does all the heavy lifting. To summarize, you are essentially playing a game where you watch a detective work, rather than a game where you work as a detective.

Sorry, Watson

Of course, video games right now cannot imitate real life to the extent to which players can ask whatever questions they want, or answer from an infinite set of possibilities. Technology has not quite reached there yet. But maybe what game designers are doing wrong is trying to imitate reality in the first place. Maybe what needs to be done first is to design a game where the players solve the mysteries themselves, with disregard to constraints such as realism. To explore this notion, let’s take a look at a mystery game released in 2018.

Return of the Obra Dinn was first released on October 18 of 2018 for the Mac and PC, its Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One release coming exactly a year later. Just like Papers, Please, Lucas Pope’s latest work does many things differently. The developer essentially went back to the drawing board when deciding what kind of game mechanic it was going to have. The first thing to notice is that there is no detective/cop/lawyer character. The insurance adjuster is just a vehicle to explore the ship, the detective is the person in front of the screen eagerly pressing the W button. They come upon a corpse of an unknown person, and using a pocket watch called the Memento Mortem, the player is taken to a frozen scene (after a short dialogue vignette) of the exact moment of death. Then the game asks the player two questions- Who is this person? How did they die?

A frozen flashback of the moment of death, all in glorious 1-bit “dither-punk“

Simple enough, isn’t it? But the most genius part of the game mechanic is what the game does next, which is to stop there. You read that right. The game does not follow up with a scripted interrogation sequence, a detective-vision segment, a deduction bar minigame, or anything of that sort. The players can go from corpse to corpse figuring out the identities and fates of each crew member without the game accidentally solving it for them. In most other titles, the game would stumble onto itself to guide you to the answer, holding your hand along every second of the way. For example, decision making in games most often comes down to choosing three or four options on the screen, and if the player chooses the wrong choice, they usually only get a slap on the wrist and another shot at getting it right. This often leads to the player choosing all the possible choices until they select the correct one by chance.

Pilgrimage? Oh, why didn’t I think of that? Of course!

Return of the Obra Dinn does have choices, but it counters this issue by providing a large selection of options from the menu to choose from, in turn eliminating any room for guess work. From a wide range of options, you have to choose, for example, if the character was knifed, eaten (yeah…), or electrocuted. If you choose knifed, then you have to select who knifed him from an option of around sixty names. The players have to create a combination of words (identity of victim + cause of death + killer) to provide the full answer (called ‘fate’). The sheer number of possible combinations prevent the players from randomly guessing their way through the game, but it doesn’t end there.

Imagine you filled in the identity and cause of death for one crew member. If the game told you it was correct, then hooray! But if the game doesn’t respond with a congratulatory message, then you would know you filled in something wrong and would try to play around with the combinations until you got it right. Again Return of the Obra Dinn counters this. This time by involving a mechanic where you need three separate correct fates before the game reveals if you got them right, thus preventing players from knowing which fate is wrong and abusing the system.

Fill in the notes to complete each crew member’s fate

So far, we’ve seen only one part of the equation that Return of the Obra Dinn does right, the game mechanic. What about the other part, the mysteries themselves? Admittedly, Return of the Obra Dinn may not have the best set of mysteries the genre has ever seen. However, what it does right, compared to so many other games, is the method it provides for players to deduce them. In most other detective games there is only one solution to a problem. The player can only progress when they discover this one specific evidence, they can only trigger the next cutscene when they ask the witness this one specific question, and so on and so forth.

In Return of the Obra Dinn, however, you are given multiple solutions to the same mystery. And it is even possible to complete the entire game without getting a single fate correct (albeit with an alternative ending). To be more specific: say you found a corpse of a man wearing a steward’s uniform. If you already know the identity of the other stewards, by process of elimination you can deduce the corpse’s identity. Or if you didn’t notice the uniform, you may notice in the dialogues before the frozen flashback that the man had an Irish accent. Or you might notice an accessory on the character that is exclusive to only one person that was present on the ship. There are many more other possibilities available, making it almost impossible to ever be stuck in the game.

The crew sketch: clues are abound

With that said, what everything talked about so far does is create a recipe for a game where players, and not the playable avatar on-screen, are the Sherlock Holmes. Return of the Obra Dinn reminded me what I wanted in a mystery game. It doesn’t hold our hands; it lets us be free to figure things out ourselves and craft our own “a-ha” moments. This is what is very much needed in the mystery game genre moving forward. By the time I reached the final moments of the game, the secrets and revelations felt earned. It wasn’t the character on-screen that made it this far, it was me.

“I didn’t actually know I was making a detective game until Obra Dinn was mostly done so I wasn’t basing design choices on how other detective games worked. The core loop in Obra Dinn is finding a corpse, exploring the moment of death, and noting information in the scene. Defining those limits early helped me to focus on how to structure the overall narrative and progression to keep it understandable and revelatory.” -Lucas Pope

Of course, I’m not saying all detective games should now start implementing this design, but the way it plays around with reality to create a work that can only make sense within a game is worthy of consideration. Lucas Pope managed to create a better detective game than most by not trying to be like a detective game. Return of the Obra Dinn would not make sense in a movie, just like Super Mario World wouldn’t if it were adapted “faithfully”. It constantly disregards realism in order to create a situation enjoyable only in video game format. And that’s what I think is more important than trying to imitate mystery movies or real life detective work. From top to bottom, Return of the Obra Dinn was an experience that so many other detective games promised but ultimately failed to deliver. Developers need to start remembering what that promise was.