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Finished this last night. What an incredible, unique game. I loved how it took me from being lost if someone wasn't specifically named to being fairly sure of someone's identity based on some tiny detail. I refused to brute force and I felt like a total genius noticing: The wedding ring on one of the female passengers The pipe flying out of one of the Russians' mouths The numbers on the hammocks The Chinese topmen's shoes The fact that the Bosun's Mate and the tattooed dude both got torn apart in the Kraken attack. That was a clever bit of misdirection that threw me off for a while I needed a hint with: The surgeon outright tells you where he is before you go into a single memory I outright had to Google: Who the hell Hamadou Dion was, and thus two other seaman. For some reason, in the sketch he didn't register as black at all. I was obsessed with the other black seaman (who ends up escaping), thinking he's the only black seaman so it's got to be him. So one hint, one solution looked up, I think I did alright.
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Apr 24, 2019 13:22
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Walton Simons posted:I outright had to Google: Yeah this guy was (unintentionally?) tough, I thought he was one of the Chinese guys for a while.
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Apr 24, 2019 13:39
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LinYutang posted:
The carpenter gets his due as far as being badass is concerned but his mate is definitely no slouch either, when your first reaction to crab riders is throwing your axe at him you deserve every praise you get. He doesn't even hesitate.
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Apr 24, 2019 14:45
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The midshipmen also go out like champs. Felt sad for the last one, his pals are dead, he fought and survived all the threats until that point, last words are regret/shame for not being able to save his friend 
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Apr 26, 2019 00:23
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You guys need to play Heaven's Vault if you liked this game. It's not the same sort of puzzle solving, but it also has what I found to be a really pleasing investigation gameplay loop that's completely unique to the game.
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Apr 26, 2019 02:48
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doctor iono posted:You guys need to play Heaven's Vault if you liked this game. It's not the same sort of puzzle solving, but it also has what I found to be a really pleasing investigation gameplay loop that's completely unique to the game. I will second this sentiment! Heaven's Vault is way more story-focused and hand-hold-y than Obra Dinn, but it does scratch that same basic itch of player-driven detail-oriented cross-referencing-based deduction.
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Apr 26, 2019 05:43
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Just started playing this, any general things to look out for or tips that aren't spoilers?
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Apr 26, 2019 17:49
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Levitate posted:Just started playing this, any general things to look out for or tips that aren't spoilers? Go slow. There's a piece of information you only get once per playthrough, and that's when people's portraits get unblurred. Try to solve as many as you can per scene and write down notes on the ones you can't quite figure out. You can also mark them in the log as 'some seaman', 'some passenger', etc
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Apr 26, 2019 17:55
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Don't worry about plunging forward into new scenes, you have all the time in the world to explore and you can backtrack at leisure. At the beginning, you have almost no info but eventually the names will fall into place. Its a good game. Enjoy!  Edit: well maybe ignore me then  I generally followed the story along making notes as I went but I didn't stick around in a scene too long if I didn't see the need. I managed to solve all fates without the need to look things up. For sure, explore to your heart's content!
Kore_Fero fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Apr 26, 2019 |
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Apr 26, 2019 19:14
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My top tip would be that the book is your best friend and contains a lot more information than you might think.
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Apr 26, 2019 21:56
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Kore_Fero posted:Don't worry about plunging forward into new scenes, you have all the time in the world to explore and you can backtrack at leisure. At the beginning, you have almost no info but eventually the names will fall into place. Its a good game. Enjoy! I blew through all the scenes my first time through and when I was at the end with a ton of unsolved cases and too much information to sift through I got super stuck Then I restarted and paid attention to things getting unblurred I had no issues
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Apr 26, 2019 23:20
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Ignore that dude who rowed you here, you can (and should) take all the time you want. It’s fun in the short term to open as many scenes as possible, but more rewarding in the long term to explore each scene thoroughly. Where is everyone in the scene and what are they doing? The game is full of well-crafted details and it’s worth your while to examine them. You can brute-guess a lot of solutions, but you never need to.
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Apr 27, 2019 19:09
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the gameplay is so great at getting you to catch details about people and i really admire that part of this game. thomas's guilt over the deaths of his fellow midshipmen, the chinese intrepreters' (probably speaking cantonese) barely translating the formosans that have their own dialect, that characters like lewis walker can be identified as topmen early just from noticing how climby they are... the ways relationships between individuals, as well as their roles and circumstances within the world they inhabit, are intuited by the player with hardly any neon signposting is such great storytelling to me. wish there was more mechanics based on abstract thought like this in games, though i get how difficult to do it is. feel like the bargain reveal is a real waste of potential though, esp with henry evans's character because its just never expounded upon how he knows about the watch, or his plan with the book? going back and looking at memories, i noticed he was like, really COMICALLY bad about preventing death as the loving doctor--the indians with the tuberculosis were one thing, but leaving john naples's leg where it was and him dying immediately after he's like "oh you're good lol", and then being all "i got you" while trying to help the butcher when hes got 3 spikes in him. i'm starting to think he was intentionally helping certain people die, possibly to leave a trail for the book? his attitude towards death has me thinking this way, but its frustrating because there's nothing else to go on. i'm less mad that the watch is unexplained and more that his motivations are not clear. also i don't how to feel about george shirley not being a disappearance when his body cannot be found? the rule has been that bodies being found for the watch to pick up get a page in the book, and i don't see why he should be an exception.
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May 2, 2019 18:46
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Regarding your last item, I think the implication is that the actual rule is whether you died on the ship or not, not whether the body can be found on the ship. Do note that going by that rule the boats count as part of the ship.
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May 2, 2019 19:42
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Would I be correct in noting that "Loose Cargo" and "A Bitter Cold" are unrelated to later events? I mean, they're relevant in that people died and the overall goal is to figure out everyone's death -- but in terms of the sequence of events of parts III-X, they're unrelated. That storyline only kicks off with Nichols' theft of the shells. Or are there events in I-II that foreshadow or set up the shells storyline?
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May 2, 2019 19:54
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The Stowaway in loose cargo has some implications later in the story, though not explicitly to the SPOOKY SEAMONSTER poo poo
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May 2, 2019 21:36
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the disease in a bitter cold is never identified btw - evans specifically says it is NOT tuberculosis/consumption because it isn't contagious like TB
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May 2, 2019 21:38
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Coolguye posted:the disease in a bitter cold is never identified btw - evans specifically says it is NOT tuberculosis/consumption because it isn't contagious like TB I figured it was something like pneumonia, but I'm much further from an expert than even very-early-19th century surgeons are! I love this game a lot because of just the breadcrumbs left between the characters and how they relate to each other; I've probably posted about it before earlier in the thread, but even after solving all fates correctly it's so open to interpretation and speculation as to why. Is Nichols butthurt about being passed over for First Mate? Did the Hoscuts and Witterels have family back home who have to deal with being left destitute-- or whatever happens when the Crown seizes things? How'd the chest get this far one way-- with or without the Formosans is another variable-- but not the other? How the hell did Evans have the pocketwatch to begin with?  loving love this game.
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May 2, 2019 21:48
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loose cargo is there to inform a chronologically later bit. Bitter cold is there to give you an idea of normal life on the ship, it's here for contrast which helps of a lot of the less normal parts.
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May 2, 2019 21:49
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Flac posted:the gameplay is so great at getting you to catch details about people and i really admire that part of this game. thomas's guilt over the deaths of his fellow midshipmen, the chinese intrepreters' (probably speaking cantonese) barely translating the formosans that have their own dialect, that characters like lewis walker can be identified as topmen early just from noticing how climby they are... the ways relationships between individuals, as well as their roles and circumstances within the world they inhabit, are intuited by the player with hardly any neon signposting is such great storytelling to me. wish there was more mechanics based on abstract thought like this in games, though i get how difficult to do it is. For your middle spoiler there, medical technology was crude then, and I got the feeling H.E. was just lying to John for the benefit of morale. John died of shock there, so there really wasn't much H.E. could do except keep the others from panicking. John_A_Tallon fucked around with this message at 22:15 on May 2, 2019 |
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May 2, 2019 22:10
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Dual Monarchy posted:I figured it was something like pneumonia, but I'm much further from an expert than even very-early-19th century surgeons are!
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May 2, 2019 22:18
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John_A_Tallon posted:For your middle spoiler there, medical technology was crude then, and I got the feeling H.E. was just lying to John for the benefit of morale. John died of shock there, so there really wasn't much H.E. could do except keep the others from panicking. Yeah, I felt that was the obvious reason too, especially since they really had no idea where the leg was which is why you find it eventually.
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May 3, 2019 00:04
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Hey if you all like this game— you should consider checking out Hypnospace Outlaw. It doesn’t quite scratch the same itch but if you like to do completely freeform detective work, and particularly if you like just kinda observing the different crew mates relationships over time, it’s worth at least a gander.
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May 3, 2019 00:13
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huh, and I thought the thread title was just a joke
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May 3, 2019 02:24
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Sockser posted:The Stowaway in loose cargo has some implications later in the story, though not explicitly to the SPOOKY SEAMONSTER poo poo Wait, what?
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May 3, 2019 17:30
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Dalaram posted:Wait, what? forgive me, it’s been months since I’ve played, but the stowaway is the brother of one of the ships crew, who later shoots one of the other bottom bois once poo poo goes down, holding him responsible for killing his brother
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May 3, 2019 17:47
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Sockser posted:forgive me, it’s been months since I’ve played, but the stowaway is the brother of one of the ships crew, who later shoots one of the other bottom bois once poo poo goes down, holding him responsible for killing his brother Nah, that’s separate, there are two deaths in that chapter. Though the Let’s Play brought up the interesting question of is the reason the rigging fell apart due to them misjudging the weight of the cargo because they didn’t realize a full-grown man was hiding in there
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May 3, 2019 17:50
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Chev posted:Regarding your last item, I think the implication is that the actual rule is whether you died on the ship or not, not whether the body can be found on the ship. Do note that going by that rule the boats count as part of the ship. I don't think it's based on that considering I listed the bosun's mate as torn apart, going off the 4th mate's testimony. And George can be listed as drowned OR shot as one of the "on boat" deaths, yet his body isn't on the boat. Kind of a gray area, granted, but when we can't intuit what happens to them from just by looking at their last memory, the question of "can we find the body?" allows for more ambiguity past the "did they fall overboard or escape to Africa" trap that the on/off boat distinction implies. Chev posted:Yeah, I felt that was the obvious reason too, especially since they really had no idea where the leg was which is why you find it eventually. Then why are the locations of bodies that kick off chapters typeset into the book and circled for emphasis from the start, including John's leg (and who says he couldn't have gone looking for it afterward)? Tallon might be right about him not necessarily killing anybody for the stopwatch, but why is that information prepared for you in the book? ....is what I want to say but there's many more questions than answers this line of thought brings, mainly for how he could have known about certain bodies (the stowaway, the guy hanging by the 1st mates window, ESPECIALLY all the ones in Ch 10 when he was long gone). It's frustrating cus it's probably just a piece of game design and nothing else, but I'm stubbornly wishing it actually implies something. The monkey killing is such a horrible tease; that there's nothing to reasonably infer about Evans's relationship to the pocketwatch in light of that, in a game where reasonable inference is the whole point, it kinda sucks. Flac fucked around with this message at 03:53 on May 6, 2019 |
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May 6, 2019 03:39
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It is a literal magic book. It inks in itself after you pencil in the right answers, works according to a ritual rule of three intertwined fates, literally unblurrs faces as the correct circumstances are satisfied, and was sent to you by a weird old guy that also gave you a magic watch. If you have to ask "why didn't H.E. do this or that with the book" the answer is it's magic, and magicians don't have to explain poo poo!
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May 8, 2019 01:31
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By far my proudest moment was after I had narrowed down all the chinese topmen except 2 the ones who are on each side of the mast in the picture, I could distinguish between them because one was fat and one was skinny. They were both in numbered bunks in a bitter cold, and one bunk dipped noticably lower than the other due to the extra weight. What an insane attention to detail
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May 8, 2019 02:24
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Quandary posted:By far my proudest moment was after I had narrowed down all the chinese topmen except 2 the ones who are on each side of the mast in the picture, I could distinguish between them because one was fat and one was skinny. They were both in numbered bunks in a bitter cold, and one bunk dipped noticably lower than the other due to the extra weight. What an insane attention to detail This is real good, I did not notice this. 
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May 8, 2019 02:36
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In a way, Return of the Obra Dinn threw me because I'm not used to details mattering in games. Even, all too often, in adventure games. Like, moon logic puzzles, I'm used to those. And I'm pretty good at wrapping my brain around that subset of logic we call "adventure game logic". After a few decades you get a sense for what that feels like. But I'm less accustomed to games where there are, you know, a lot of details, and these details are well-placed and internally consistent and you can rely on them to solve mysteries and advance in the game. Basically there were a lot of times in this game when I neglected to look at things and think about them because (in retrospect) my jaded gamer instincts had assumed those efforts wouldn't be rewarded. And if I could go back, I'd reassure my younger self that in this game, they are.
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May 8, 2019 04:53
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I played this game. It is super good. My favorite twist was the kraken and then after that several other times, but when you realize it's going There you're like oohhhh!!!
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Sep 26, 2019 03:22
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Sockser posted:forgive me, it’s been months since I’ve played, but the stowaway is the brother of one of the ships crew, who later shoots one of the other bottom bois once poo poo goes down, holding him responsible for killing his brother the crate the stowaway was in landed on the brother sailor. living brother blamed the guy who was handling the ropes the only reason the stowaway is in there, from a plot perspective, is so we get two distinct deaths in that chapter - the death of brother sailor, and the death of the stowaway it looks like nobody on the ship knows the stowaway was in there since his corpse is still in the crate Pick posted:I played this game. It is super good. My favorite twist was the kraken and then after that several other times, but when you realize it's going There you're like oohhhh!!! yeah, that reveal signals the end of the tutorial to me and the game being all "aha, you thought this game was about one thing, but now it's about a different, more exciting thing!"
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Sep 29, 2019 02:56
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Oh look big crabs!! ... oh they shoot spines, they're um.... weird crabs? Did this guy not research spider crabs or it's yeah... a monstrous version maybe..... CRAb RIDERS fuuuuuUCK AAaAaAA
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Sep 29, 2019 03:59
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The shift from the stuff on the bridge to The Doom chapter was so well done. The music kicking in just as you're probably starting to look up was fantastic.
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Sep 29, 2019 04:25
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Yeah both of those scenes were amazing 'reveals' that you explore yourself.
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Sep 29, 2019 17:40
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadL-6wpp3U There's a soft claw snapping sound at the beginning.
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Sep 29, 2019 17:56
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Pick posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadL-6wpp3U
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Sep 29, 2019 17:59
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If you haven't played it yet, this is now out on consoles. It's a wholly unique, captivating game, and a strong Game of the Year candidate if you're in the target audience, so go play it. If you have played it, envy these poor bastards who will soon be cross-referencing people's feet out of desperation
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Oct 20, 2019 02:57
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