The Videogames Tab

Tools    





The People's Republic of Clogher
Return of the Obra Dinn

96 minutes played.

I don't know if I love this or not yet, but I don't think I've ever played anything quite like it. At its heart, Obra Dinn is Cluedo, albeit Cluedo with a murdered cast of 40-odd people - You have to figure out their name, their murderer and their manner of death. It's an extremely stylish puzzle/adventure game.

At the moment I'm running around, working out disperate seemingly unrelated strands in the hope that each is a key to unlock another, rather than me missing pieces of evidence. We'll see.
__________________
"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan



Obra Dinn looks and sounds interesting.

I've been playing a ps3 rpg, Lost Dimension. It has tactical battles where you move around a 3d map within the diameter of your movement range. There is a trust mechanic with characters' relationships with each other. And there is a Mafia theme where you actually have to kill one of your characters. You have to figure out who the traitor is. Either way you loose that character, but get a materia themed after them. The story is that you're a team of psychics climbing a tower to defeat an evil villain who's threatening to destroy the world with nukes.




28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
Looks like RDR2 might break some records as a lot of pre-orders won't arrive on time due to the extreme demand.
__________________
"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews



The People's Republic of Clogher
Obra Dinn looks and sounds interesting.
Turns out that I had totally walked past an important clue and, with it now in place, things seem a lot less haphazard.



The People's Republic of Clogher
TIL you can lose in a walking simulator.
I wouldn't call it a walking simulator, really. It's much more of an adventure game than, say, Firewatch, where you basically found out where your next waypoint was then walked to it and interacted with something. There's a certain amount of pixel hunting going on here but in order to advance things at certain points (I think) you've got to have specific bodies identified, as well as their murderer and cause of death. There's a bit of Ace Attorney in there.

As I'm finding, that's nowhere near straightforward in the majority of cases. I've been playing 4 hours and have tied up 6 loose ends ... out of 60 crew and passengers.



Yeah I was just playing around, since you mentioned walking as a form of gameplay.

I'm very excited about it. I love puzzles and mysteries, but let's be honest, most of them slot into a familiar mechanic. Find this item and make it go into this gear and get things to line up, trace this power line and flip the switch. Even when it gets away from those hoary adventure tropes, it's not really deduction. That's what I'm excited about: real-world deductive puzzles with pure information. I got some taste of that during the demo at last year's PAX, with one cool example I won't even mention so as not to spoil it.

I imagine the hour/loose end thing is nonlinear, like a physical puzzle, where all solid progress makes the remaining progress easier through sheer economy of choices.



The People's Republic of Clogher
There are parts I wish were a bit cleaner, like the entire UI. In a game where you're repeatedly listening to 20 second sound clips, you need to have them to hand easily and it's a bit of a slog in the game presently.



Yeah, every demo I've played (the one posted like a year or two ago included), I've felt like there was too much waiting for the watch mechanic in some way. Obviously it's pretty but I imagined/hoped it would be streamlined in the final product, presuming you'll need to do it over and over and over.

I also still kinda wish the aesthetic were different. I admire the choice more than I like it. Nice homage, and impressive what can be done in that style. If anything it's sort of a meta decision, I think, designed in part to show people what a stupid waste of time it is to get into some kind of resolution arms race when you can do this much with nothing but black and white dots. But with the evocative sound design and the potentially lush setting, it is kind of a shame it can't be experienced any other way.

That said, even now I'm arguing about it in my own head, since it kinda reminds me of The Witness and the whole "scale everything down so the puzzle is the focus" vibe. But even that saw fit to put its pure puzzle solving in a lush setting, so I dunno.



The People's Republic of Clogher
I'd love a quicker way to get each vignette to play other than walking back to where the body was found and clicking the corpse, especially when the corpse was moved post mortem (the vignettes are a person's actual death scene, nothing else). First time, sure, but once you've unlocked a scene? There might be a way to streamline it because I've stumbled into quite a few important mechanics already - They really should be explained a bit better.

The Witness and me didn't have the best relationship but, boy, was it a beautiful looking game. Obra Dinn is brave, but I'm finding it rather hard on the eyes.



Re: The Witness. Yeah, I really appreciate that it offset the purity of the puzzles (purity to some, dullness to others, I suppose) they were basically placed in a Puzzle Cathedral. It seems backwards, though: you'd think you'd put the focus on them by having everything else stripped down, more like Return of the Obra Dinn, but somehow The Witness got to have it both ways, with all the beauty around it contrasting with the simplicity of the panels and having a similar effect and focus.

BTW, the sort of thing you're talking about is one of the reasons I love Tom Francis: he's the king of "I'm cutting all the cruft from the core gameplay loop so you never have to sit through the same thing dozens of times." So many games do things that are great the first time, okay the 5th, and boring the 20th.



The People's Republic of Clogher
It might seem like I'm ragging on the game, but I've hit a brick wall and haven't a clue where to turn next. It's all a bit arbitrary...

Papers Please entranced me immediately. I think it'll take this one a bit longer, if it ever does.

I want to like it.



Wife and I started Obra Dinn. Played a little over an hour and a half. I love love love it. There's so much going on, so many details to try to link together. Love the deduction. Makes the puzzles feel like real world mysteries rather than contrived adventure game puzzles.

I can feel some fatigue, since you actually have to scour for hints and clues, and the style can grate a little after awhile, but it feels so rich and full of information and possibility. The sound, in particular, is tremendous.

Really good stuff. Kind of overwhelming, but I assume we just need to press on and gather as many bits of information as possible about the crew and the events on the ship, and eventually each piece of information will reduce the number of other possibilities, and it'll start a virtuous cycle in the game's second half.



“Sugar is the most important thing in my life…”
I was doing some fence-sitting on RDR II. When would I play it, do I really need to get it D1, there are no pre-order bonuses and I've noticed they are selling the Special Edition ($10 more) which is essentially all the garbage worthless stuff you use to get with regular pre-orders. R* had no exclusive pre-order bonus on their site. No shirt, or cowboy chotskies, or card and dice set...


Who am I kidding? I'm gonna eliminate going to the movies for a month (no First Man Imax showing) and then I will be at peace with have a $60 game I'm not playing.



The People's Republic of Clogher
Wife and I started Obra Dinn. Played a little over an hour and a half. I love love love it. There's so much going on, so many details to try to link together. Love the deduction. Makes the puzzles feel like real world mysteries rather than contrived adventure game puzzles.

I can feel some fatigue, since you actually have to scour for hints and clues, and the style can grate a little after awhile, but it feels so rich and full of information and possibility. The sound, in particular, is tremendous.

Really good stuff. Kind of overwhelming, but I assume we just need to press on and gather as many bits of information as possible about the crew and the events on the ship, and eventually each piece of information will reduce the number of other possibilities, and it'll start a virtuous cycle in the game's second half.
I think I've missed something important, because I was running around for an hour without anything new to click on, getting more and more frustrated. Might be worth starting another save.



The People's Republic of Clogher
Yeah, I see you're a few hours behind me in total play time. I've uncovered 9 fates, I think.

EDIT - If nothing else comes of this game, at least it'll give me plenty of new userpic options. They're fantastic.



Yeah, really gets some expressiveness into the dithering, eh? Pretty impressive how evocative it manages to be.

We've only nailed down three, and so far it seems like there's just this sprawling web of information and always something new to check, but I imagine that'll change.