702 - Return of the Obra Dinn

Best Games - Return of the Obra Dinn

It’s the sort of premise that could only come from an indie developer. At a larger development studio or publisher, Lucas Pope and Obra Dinn never make it past the first pitch meeting.

In Return of the Obra Dinn, you play as an early 19th century insurance investigator.

That description would have already lost half the room at Ubisoft.

You are tasked with figuring out what happened to a ghost ship that has recently washed ashore. Lost for years, the Obra Dinn is full of unimaginable secrets.

Maybe a producer or two finds this pitch interesting. They are quickly shouted down by someone in the room citing marketing metrics. Boats don’t appeal to a core demo.

As this investigator, you will use a supernatural stopwatch that lets you witness the exact moment of a persons death.

That seems like an amazing hook. Might be enough to raise a few eyebrows.

The visual aesthetic is stippled monochrome. The modern 3D equivalent of a 1985 Apple Macintosh.

And with that all the air leaves the room.

It probably goes without saying that Return of the Obra Dinn did extremely well both critically and commercially. After all, I am putting it on this list of Best Games. Pretty easy guess that it’s a good game.

It is a truly exceptional game, but it’s one that I really don’t see getting made if it wasn’t primarily created by one person. Or at least a very small number of people. The cascade of risk aversion once the team exceeds more than a few people would pretty much negate the chances of ever greenlighting a slow paced logical deduction game set on a boat in the early 1800s.

It would, but it shouldn’t.

All of the things that would make Obra Dinn unpalatable to an old guard publisher are all the things that they should be running toward.

A high concept premise wrapped around solid, even traditional, gameplay. A unique visual flare that usually doesn’t hamper the gameplay (though, from time to time it does make accurately reading what is going on a bit more difficult than it should). Good, but not overly showy, sound design.

It’s just a good, satisfying puzzle/deduction game. It’s fairly well priced. It isn’t overly long. A large publisher could bankroll several of these types of games from small indie studios every year. One or two of them would have the same success as Return of the Obra Dinn. A tidy profit every time.

But a tidy profit isn’t good enough. That’s why they don’t regularly make games as good as Return of the Obra Dinn.

It took a single developer, working without compromise, or sanding the edges off of their vision to create Return of the Obra Dinn. But that’s not because Lucas Pope is some sort of genius auteur. It’s just that he had to work within the limits of his own fears and limitations. He didn’t have to bow to the fears of a room of other people who believe they are being paid to say no.

Return of the Obra Dinn could only have been an indie game. It is also, undeniably, one of the Best Games.