Want to Get Completely Obsessed with a Puzzle Game? Try Return of the Obra Dinn

I love puzzles. Not so much the jigsaw kind, I mean like the crossword and lately, Connections (I am VERY good at Connections). I played Myst (AND Riven!) and I’m drawn to games that are thinky-puzzly type things. Because of all this (and because I was continually searching for Switch games I would like), I immediately put Return of the Obra Dinn on my wishlist, and when it went on sale for half off, I bought it the second I could.

The premise is a puzzle dork’s dream: It’s 1807(!) and you play as an insurance investigator(!) for the East India Company(?!), and it’s your job to investigate the seemingly empty, formerly presumed missing ship, the Obra Dinn, and figure out what happened to each of the 60 people on board (Full Vince McMahon meme).

You board the ship with no information, but you have a little magic pocketwatch that lets you see the moment a person has died. It’s a frozen scene, but you can move around the scene and even go to other decks of the ship to see what was happening there at this time. Sometimes there is another body in another part of the scene, and you can pocketwatch THEM and then see THAT scene. Some of the answers are simple, some are incredibly difficult, or at least require a lot of thinking and backtracking.

It took me a little while to get the hang of Return of the Obra Dinn, but once I had gotten about 20% of the answers, I was absolutely hooked and I ended up playing one day for like four hours. I wish I could erase my memory of the Obra Dinn and play it again. As it stands, I may just wait a few months, my memory isn’t that good anyway.

One tiny gripe/warning: The Return of the Obra Dinn could do better in terms of accessibility. You get an audio clip (with transcripts on the screen) before each scene, and sometimes the accent of the character helps you figure out who they are. The transcript never says [Scottish accent], so if you’re not playing with sound, you’ll miss that. I understand that adding what accent a character has could remove some of the difficulty (the accents themselves are a puzzle within the puzzle), but adding an accent notation as an optional accessibility feature would be great.