
2018 video game
Return of the Obra Dinn is a 2018 adventure and puzzle video game created by Lucas Pope and published by 3909 LLC. It was Pope's second commercial game, following 2013's Papers, Please, and was first released for macOS and Windows before being ported to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One a year later. Return of the Obra Dinn was praised for its gameplay, art style, and narrative; it won several awards, including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
The game is set in 1807 with the player assuming the role of an unnamed investigator for the East India Company. The Obra Dinn, a merchant ship missing for five years, has reappeared off the coast of England with no known surviving crew or passengers. The player is dispatched to the ghost ship to perform an appraisal, reconstruct the events of the voyage, and determine the fates of all sixty souls aboard, providing a cause of death for those deceased or a probable current location for those presumed living. Investigation is accomplished through the use of the "Memento Mortem", a pocket watch capable of recreating a death at the moment it occurred. The game, played in first-person perspective, uses a "1-bit" monochromatic graphical style inspired by games on early Macintosh computers.
Return of Obra Dinn first released on macOS and Windows on October 18, 2018. It received generally positive reviews from critics who praised its story, puzzles, creativity, and favorably compared it to Her Story (2015). It was cited by several outlets as among the best video games of 2018, and retrospectively, one of the greatest of all time.
Source: Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA.