Reverse-Engineer How Ghosts Are Made in 'Return of the Obra Dinn'

Lucas Pope made a name for himself with his previous game, Papers, Please. It was a clever and daunting experience, a follow-up to the browser game The Republia Times, which had players sweat through their own moral litmus tests as an immigrations officer to a fictional country. Pope's new game, Return of the Obra Dinn, is more spiritually infested than spiritual sequel to either of those games.

In his latest game, it's the year 1808 and the Obra Dinn is a ghost ship you're tasked with investigating. Without a captain, it sifted into port with no signs of life, but plenty signs that lives had been there. As one of the East India Company's insurance adjustors, you need to find the muster roll, and in doing so discover how the ship came to be deserted. In a weird, fantastical twist, you are loaned a device that makes this task simultaneously convenient and eerie.

A pocket watch, jeweled with a skull, allows you to turn back the clock. When you see the last remnants of a shipmate, you can roll the scene backwards to see how a skeleton ended up in its resting place.

Each death is pretty brutal looking, and it's hard to tell if the game's monochrome existence improves or worsens their depictions. It's a story of death and murder told in stages, and each clue points you in a new direction. After all, you are reverse-engineering a haunting.

Pope recently released a demo for Obra Dinn over itch.io, fishing for reactions and opinions over the sea vessel based game (which, by the way, seems to be the new big indie game thing to do). It's a pretty striking departure from his previous work in many obvious ways. Its style of play isn't what you'd describe as complicated, while Papers' cluttered, claustrophobic, complications was a mechanic in itself. Regardless of all that, there are still some funny consistencies.

It finds a way to make a remedial and bureaucratic task extraordinary. Who would have thought a game about a border patrol officer, like Republia, would have made for so many people's top picks of last year? And then, in a sea of first person shooter games, who would have thought we would hotly anticipate a game about being an insurance agent for next year?

The other returning factor is the aesthetic, which like other Pope games can be described as 'old broken Mac' style. Paper's drained colour vision came from the unseen fringes of computer nostalgia. Republia, especially, uncannily looks like an old square Macintosh's window. It's even feels suspicious that it doesn't make those goofy chimes when you click around or boot it up.

They are games from alternate timelines, one dominated by antiquated technology. As a first-person, fully 3D game, hovering around in a brownish-green world, Obra Dinn is all the more surreal. A reality filtered through the Game Boy Camera.

The demo is only about ten-minutes long, but in that span you can see where the game can go and where it could not go. There are radio drama-y audio transitions loosely introducing each flashback, but the rest is to be reconstructed by you. Not to mention, in this build, a lot of the violence seems perpetuated by a man who looks like a Nick Cave song sounds.

You can also really seek out the nitty-gritty details. There's also little bit of classic misdirection available in the gameplay: straying away from obvious centrepieces can reveal unusual, unexpected details that can help you solve the haunting.

Pope said players shouldn't expect to be able to interact with the spirits you see. You are simply there to watch, you can't stop them, they can't stop you.

The Obra Dinn is haunted by those who used to live upon it. When the game is fully released, you'll need to spot a number of those ghosts to learn just how they got trapped in this 1-bit hell.