Seeing and Return of the Obra Dinn

Return of the Obra Dinn has a lot of incredibly engaging elements, and many factors that play into that come to mind - from the excellent setting of tone to the setup and payoff of suspense and suspenseful situations to the instantly impression-making visuals.

The visuals in particular help to simulate part of what the player character is doing: returning to and living in a point in time perhaps not seen previously. Due to the range of display systems simulated, there is a high chance that players will not be familiar with some of these displays, which will add some aspects of alienation in time from the game, which, considering the time travel-y mechanics, is an apt extension of the game scenario to the player scenario.

In addition, the visuals rely on stylization over realism. It is this stylization that also helps to pull in the player. The default view, that many people in class, it seemed, didn’t know they could change, is similar to an old Macintosh display. This display in particular is interesting specifically because it is the default, and the one that a lot of players, by that fact, will be interfacing with. The cross-hatched, old-timey art style of the sketches in the book, for instance, lend themselves well to the character designs as elements within the world, on the boat. The styles blend well, and since this display particularly makes the graphics in general look as though they could come straight out of a book from the time that the game is set, the players are primed, initially and continually, to further cement the timing of the game in the time that it is set. This is admittedly a more of a default-play-centric than a play-centric view of the graphics, but there are, of course, more aspects to the game than just how things look. But it is fair to bring in the visuals as part of the world.

Jenkins points out the importance of constructing a compelling space in which a game may be set: “Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation.”

While this does echo somewhat in Return of the Obra Dinn, with our player character essentially doing some accounting on board for an insurance claim, there is also a lot of importance placed on character intentions and actions as a result of our player character’s goal. We need to learn what happened - and that sometimes includes who got killed by whom, and since we need to identify the fates including who did the killing of any one person, we need to pay attention to the reasons why someone might be killing someone else. The clearest example of this comes from one of the more difficult (in my opinion) guesses. One of the final sections we may see - or at least, the last one I saw - is the first chronological event - the “Loose Cargo” episode. During this episode, one person dies, crushed under falling cargo, that fell when it should have been held up. This victim has a brother that then kills the person who should have been keeping the cargo up. This information is important to linking the identities of the people whose fates we need to determine. And it’s easier to know that information and piece at least those parts together than it is to simply guess. So we can, as players of this game, make our lives a lot easier simply by completing the objectives of the game - to literally just play the game.

Part of our job, after all, is to witness. We must watch and complete the book and return to our state of normalcy. The player and the player character share that much in common.