This year I finally had a chance to play Return of the Obra Dinn. When it premiered in October 2018, created almost single-handedly by acclaimed designer Lucas Pope, no game quite like it had ever existed before. Six years later, it still remains a uniquely quirky masterpiece -- the Moby Dick of immersive indie games.
I don't just mean that in the most obvious sense, that the game and Herman Melville's novel both take place on an ill-fated sailing vessel of the early 19th century beset by storms, beasts, and the madness of the human heart. Each of them also take the form of their genre (the novel, the first-person game) and shatter our preconceptions about them in daring ways.
(If you haven't read Moby Dick, by the way, intimidated by the length and often heavy, curlicue prose, there's an easily digestible solution: Here's a free, very good audio version read chapter by chapter Tilda Swinton and other great actors/interesting people.)
But back to Return of the Obra Dinn. If you haven't played it yet, I'm tempted to say you should just skip the next section for potential spoilers and to maintain the joy of foreboding surprise:
Obra Dinn is not an immersive first-person game in the typical sense, in that the 3D graphics resemble pointillist paintings or stippling drawings rendered into 3D. (They are consciously designed to resemble graphics from personal ancient computing systems like the Apple II.) You play an insurance adjuster who is inexplicably gifted a magical timepiece that allows her to move through frozen slices of time, while hearing all around you the voices and ambient ship noises happening right before that specific petrified instance, where designated crew members or passengers meet their miserable fate.
This is where Obra Dinn really shines alongside Moby Dick, giving you these perfectly wrenching instances of humanity in its most desperate moments, in all their vain glory or pathetic futility, some killed while heroically defending the innocent, others dead during the act of literally taking a crap -- all snuffed out just the same, their final moments arrested in time forever for you to examine, and ponder.
And you do ponder! If you want to establish who actually killed someone executed by firing squad, for instance, do you put causal blame on one of the rifle men, or the officer giving the firing orders, or better yet, the captain who ordered the execution? Stories within stories keep emerging from these resonant images, almost abstract in their detail, yet propelling us to think about the interlocking lives that led them to the moment of their death. (Or, sometimes, not.)
The miracle is that Obra Dinn is also an unqualified commercial hit, selling nearly 1 million copies (estimated), far more than most games with many times its scant budget, despite or probably because of its scintillating artistic ambitions.
The unsolved mystery of Obra Dinn is why, six years later, we see few games in its singular genre. (Or none.) Lucas Pope himself has said the sheer effort and scope of creating the game was far too much for him to do a sequel (as originally planned). But I suspect there are thousands more immersive stories of lives frozen in amber that are yet to be told.
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