I Completed Return Of The Obra Dinn, Now What?

I’ll start this piece by saying I completed Return of the Obra Dinn about forty minutes ago, so these are my initial thoughts and let me start by saying WHAT. A. GAME.

I’m sat in my living room as I type these words, overcome with the strange yet familiar sense of melancholy I get when I finish a good book or a good movie. You know the kind of stories I’m talking about, the ones where you know now that its finished you’ll never experience it the same way again. Obra Dinn is that kind of story.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about Return of The Obra Dinn is an indie puzzle game by Papers Please creator Lucas Pope. One of the East India Trading Company best ships, the titular Obra Dinn returns to port in Falmouth in 1807 after being thought lost at sea with its entire crew missing. The EIC asks the chief inspector to board the ruined vessel and discover what exactly led to its terrible fate. To aid in this, the ship’s former chief surgeon Henry Evans sends the EIC the ships logbook which contains all the ship’s necessary documents alongside a strange pocket watch that allows the inspector to travel back to the moment of a crewmember’s death frozen in time. You must then deduce who they are, how they died and who or what killed them.