Towards the end of Return of the Obra Dinn’s four-and-a-half years in development, Lucas Pope had a friend come over to playtest it. He sat him down, explained how it’s a firstperson mystery game in which you discover the fate of the Obra Dinn, a merchant ship lost on its voyage into the Orient. Then he gave him the controls. “He played for a bit and his response was, ‘This game is about the book’.” The book comprises a ledger of the Obra Dinn’s unfortunate crew and illustrations of it in happier times, a map of the ship, and chapters that outline each death along its strange voyage, and it’s where you propose your theories on the name of each character and how they died. As such, it serves as your key interface to the game, or as Pope puts it to me, “On the surface you think it’s an exploration game, but then you realise that what you’re really doing is using the book to figure shit out.” But it started out as a manifest, a simple list of names. You can actually still play Obra Dinn as it was in a demo which Pope released for GDC 2016. It features five characters’ deaths to solve, and playing it today, it might seem to be pretty close in design to the final thing. But that’s an illusion. “This is the thing with Obra Dinn. I didn’t see how it would play out,” says Pope. “I had no idea about… [Read full story]
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