Return of the Obra Dinn Review

The design problem was how to make a mystery that cannot be brute forced, and the answer is the cleanest solution anyone has found: the book confirms fates only in batches of three, so a lucky guess tells you nothing and a chain of real reasoning tells you everything at once. What you are reasoning from is a series of frozen dioramas, each a single instant of a death, and the evidence is in accents on the audio, positioning, tattoos, who is standing near whom on a crew manifest and which bunk a man sleeps in.

Working out that the Formosan passengers can be identified by where they sit at a card table is the sort of deduction almost no game trusts a player to make. The one bit dithered monochrome look is both a striking aesthetic choice and a practical one, forcing you to read silhouette and posture. The last handful of identifications lean harder on process of elimination than on evidence, and the walk between chapters gets repetitive. Otherwise close to perfect.