Let's have a look at Return of the Obra Dinn, a modern remake of the classic Apple Macintosh original. Obra Dinn was originally published for the Macintosh back in 1991 by TáltoSoft, an educational software company based in Hungary with a sideline in point and click adventures. Their other titles included Voyage of the Obra Dinn and the sci-fi-themed Arc of Orion. They were part of a small group of OG black-and-white Macintosh games that attracted attention in the non-Macintosh world, along with Glider and Shufflepuck Cafe and Uninvited, which it superficially resembled.
You know, I can remember the first time I used an Apple Macintosh. It was in the early 1990s, when they were still called Macintoshes. They're officially called Macs now. When did that happen? 1999, apparently. But when I was young they were Macintoshes. "The Apple Macintosh", that's what they were called.
My high school bought a room of Mac Classics in order to teach us about desktop publishing, which was the style at the time. The Classic was essentially a cost-reduced, memory-expanded update of the original all-in-one Macintosh, at the low, low price of around £700. The Macintosh platform had gone colour a few years before, and objectively the Classic was inferior to the Atari ST or Commodore Amiga that some of the posher kids had at home, but oh, that black and white screen.
The tiny, pin-sharp, 9" black and white screen. 512 pixels wide. 512 sharp pixels, much sharper than the fuzzy, wobbly pixels of a television display. As a games machine the Macintosh wasn't much cop, and I have no recollection of playing Obra Dinn from back in the day, but I remember reading about it.
A few years ago an indie developer called Lucas Pope had a big hit with Papers, Please, a point-and-click game with a retro feel. It owed a lot to the icon-driven 8-bit adventures of the 1980s, in which the player had to sift through files to work out whodunnit. I'm thinking of Vera Cruz, The Fourth Protocol, Killed Until Dead and so forth.
Four icon-driven adventures from the 1980s - clockwise from top left,
Vera Cruz, Killed Until Dead, Kobayashi Maru, Zombi.
The icon-driven "remember-em-up" is one of those long-dead genres that made
sense at the time - pre-internet, when people bought one game every few months
and were prepared to spend hours mastering it - but wouldn't work nowadays.
And yet
Papers, Please struck a chord, and several million sales later
Pope got hold of the rights to Return of the Obra Dinn and
rebuilt it with Unity. The remaster came out in 2018 for the PC and the
Macintosh.
I played it on
my Mac Pro, because why not:
The original had static images, but the remaster is in full 3D, although it has the same stark black-and-white-with-dithering look. This mostly works, although as the developer points out the effect doesn't scale very well. It also compresses poorly, so I imagine the screenshots in this article look odd.
The original packaging included a number of Infocom-style feelies that doubled as copy protection. The remaster incorporates the drawings into the game itself:
On a technical level the game runs perfectly fine on my Mac Pro, which is
unsurprising given that the machine is a supercomputer in comparison to the OG
Macintosh. The game is capped at sixty frames per second. It doesn't have separate
sliders for sound effects, speech, and music, which is a shame because the
music is generally a lot louder than the dialogue.
Can you redefine the keys? No, you cannot. Is it specially optimised
for VR? No, although the game could easily be made to work in that medium. The
engine apparently runs at 800x450, scaled to fit the monitor, which might
explain why the between-chapter subtitles look so odd. There are a handful of
graphics options, although they're essentially just filters:
What is Return of the Obra Dinn? It's a murder mystery set in
1807. A mass-murder mystery that owes a huge debt to the tale of the
Marie Celeste. Which was found abandoned in 1872, which means that Arthur Conan Doyle
was actually plagiarising Obra Dinn, not the other way around. Checkmate, Arthur Conan Doyle. Checkmate.
The player is an insurance inspector who has been asked to find out why
the Obra Dinn vanished. It departed from London in 1802, stopped at Falmouth to take on cargo, then set sail for the Far East. But it
never arrived, apparently disappearing somewhere off the Atlantic coast of
Africa. Five years later it drifts back to Falmouth, crewed only by the dead.
Rah! I'm a monstah!
The game has a magical realist tone. For the most part it's grounded in
reality, with no supernatural elements. The exception is the insurance
inspector's pocket watch, the memento mortem, which can transport the
inspector to the moment of a corpse's death - but only as a static tableaux.
The inspector can walk around the scene and study things, but everything is
frozen in time. Ultimately the inspector's task is to put names to faces and
work out who did what to whom and why and when.
In contrast Obra Dinn isn't sensationalist at all, and the
violence is portrayed as genuinely unpleasant rather than exciting or
shocking. I'm not sure if the monochrome dithering makes it less nasty, or
more nasty.
At the same time I wonder if Obra Dinn benefited from a certain
amount of class-ism. Back in 1991 the Macintosh was an expensive machine
sold exclusively to the right sort of people. Well-off middle-class people.
The kind of cultured, knowledgeable people who could be trusted to own a
copy of American Psycho without turning into an actual psycho,
or a copy of Lolita without turning into Jimmy Savile, because
middle-class people can control their animal urges whereas lower-class
people cannot. They are not drug addicts, they are pharmacological
explorers. That kind of thing. I wonder if Obra Dinn benefited
from that. Who knows. I'm digressing here.
The game involves listening carefully to the dialogue and
studying the scenes intently to work out who is who. In the scene above the
victim is referred to as a Dane, and Lars Linde is the only Danish member of
the crew, so he must be the victim. And even if it wasn't the club that
killed him - perhaps he hit his head on the deck - he obviously did die,
because his corpse is there in the present day, and the game is forgiving
enough to accept any reasonably plausible cause of death, so "clubbed" it
is.
But who is the killer? The assailant mentions having a brother,
and there are a handful of names in the crew manifest that appear to be
related to each other, but which one is he? I'll have to do more detective work. Perhaps I
could match his movements up with a map of the ship to see if he sleeps in a
certain cabin, or perhaps he hangs out with someone I have already
identified. Maybe someone identifies him in one of the other memories where
he is a background character.
One thing the game doesn't ask for is the motive. The insurance company
doesn't care if the killing was morally justified, only that it happened. At
the end of the game the company rewards and fines the crew based on the
strict letter of the law, which is unfair, and is presented as unfair, but
such was life at sea in the 1800s.
Dinn attracted positive reviews for essentially three reasons.
Firstly the clever design. The game is fundamentally a slideshow,
because it was implemented with HyperCard, which had huge limitations.
Unlike almost every other adventure game the player doesn't have
an inventory and can't interact with the world, only observe. The remaster adds animations
for opening doors and climbing ladders, but the environment is otherwise
completely static and non-interactive because HyperCard couldn't cope with
state changes.
But the study-the-scene gameplay cleverly disguises the game's fundamental
nature as a bunch of frozen images, and it never really shows through. The game never
feels like a technical kludge.
Some images from the original 1991 release. As mentioned up the page the remaster embeds the original paper diary
into the game, whereas the 1991 original had a simple interface that
encouraged you to fill out the diary with a pencil. The reliance on
feelies might explain why the game was never reissued as a budget title, and within a few years the Macintosh had a completely different technical architecture and operating system (and then again a few years after that (and after that)).
The second positive aspect is the finely-balanced difficult level. My
recollection of text adventures from the late 1980s, early 1990s is that
they were a massive pain. The likes of Corruption were full of
massive logical leaps. They also had an annoying fetish for time-based
puzzles whereby the player had to be in location X at exactly 11:30 on Day
Three in order to hear the baddies talk amongst themselves otherwise it was
game over ten turns later. It still makes me frumple to this day. When you
have... when you have that level of granularity it's not a game any more,
it's... it's a Microsoft Teams meeting, it's a flowchart, a chore. It's not
fun. No-one wants to spend half an hour playing an adventure game only to
lose because you were supposed to feed some cheese to a mouse thirty turns
ago.
Obra Dinn on the other hand is unlose-able. You can't mess it up. Some of the detective work is obtuse, but the game is on the
player's side. In the copy-protection image further up the page the helmsman
is the man holding the helm. That's him. There's no trick. When one of the
mates is shown walking with a younger chap who has a plate of food, the
younger chap is that mate's steward. The chap sitting in bunk #51 is chap #51
on the crew manifest etc.
I hit a brick wall mid-way through the game, but I slowly chipped away at
it, and eventually I worked out the topmen and stewards by a process of
elimination. Of the two women that remained, Miss X was the one without
the wedding ring, because in 1807 unmarried women were called Miss.
If you make a wrong guess you can change it later on. The game
only locks in the answers if they're correct. And if you guess correctly -
and it's just a random guess you couldn't possibly have deduced - the game
doesn't mind, although it does warn you in advance. As a consequence you
could in theory brute-force the entire game, although it would take forever.
The game locks in identifies when the player gets three combinations of victim,
crime, and perpetrator correct, so brute-force-guessing is only really
plausible when there are only a few people left, at which point the game doesn't mind if you rush the ending.
The big downside is that the game has no replayability value. If you know
the answers in advance you can in theory just enter them straightaway,
solving the game in under a minute, or however long it takes you to click
one-hundred-and-eighty times or so (there are sixty people in the cast).
The story is told in reverse order, beginning with the final confrontation
and working back to the beginning. And then forward again to about
two-thirds of the way through the story, at which point the ending makes
more sense. I think the developers made it that way so they could put the
big action sequence near the beginning, and then they ran with the idea.
It suffers a bit from being prosaic. Without wishing to spoil things, the story begins with a few accidental deaths that put the crew on edge. Fearing some
kind of curse they start to turn on each other. In particular they turn on
the passengers, including some VIPs from what was then called Formosa, now
Taiwan. Following a series of murders and a botched kidnapping everything falls apart, culminating in a disaster that leads to a mutiny.
It has emotional power, because with only a couple of exceptions the crew
are good people put into an impossible situation. But the
characterisation is perhaps understandably spartan, given that there are
sixty castmembers, and so although I felt sorry for some of the characters I
never really developed an emotional bond with them. In particular the
Captain is presented as the main character, but he spends the first
three-quarters of the story as a bystander, and by the time of his dramatic
end I didn't know a great deal about him. But on the other hand each of the sixty characters stands out, so the developers mostly succeeded at a difficult task.
On a fundamental level Obra Dinn is just a murder-mystery, with no pretensions to any great message. This separates it from modern art games such as
Journey or The Talos Principle, in the sense that it
isn't really about anything. I left the game with a sense of sadness,
because most of the victims died for nothing, but after a few days it has
already started to fade from the memory, whereas I still think about
The Talos Principle occasionally, because it had something to say about life and death.
There is one quasi-supernatural aspect. The crew's fate is sealed when a
giant and possibly sex-starved octopus takes a fancy to the Obra Dinn's svelte lines and
seductive mainbraces etc during a huge storm. But even then the story
implies that the octopus attack is either an illusion borne of collective
panic, or at the very least wildly exaggerated. In particular none of the
crew are directly killed by the octopus. They're either lost overboard or
crushed by falling rigging or poorly-secured cannon. The game implies
that the ship was hit by a lightning storm at exactly the wrong time, causing the crew
to go into a panic that doomed the ship.
So ultimately Obra Dinn is a clever piece of design with a gripping story that feels hollow, but when it works it's dead smart. It
post-dated LucasArts' Secret of Monkey Island by a year and has
the same frustration-free gameplay - the developers wanted the player to
experience mystery and wonder and not e.g. crushing frustration and impotent
rage. It has aged extremely well, and the visual style is striking. But the
story is prosaic, and it would have been nice if Pope and his team had
perhaps expanded some of the original text. Or at least tweaked a couple of
the clues so that they were less annoying.
Now, as an indie labour of love I don't want to go too hard on
Obra Dinn. The original had dialogue captions, but the remaster adds voice
acting. Apparently the Formosans are spot-on. They sound exactly like
upper-class Formosans from 1807. I assume Pope was terrified of the kind of
"in da fresh" pseudo-Chinese voice acting that was common right up until
the 2000s.
Unfortunately the rest of the cast have the unmistakeable cadence
of software engineers. In particular the Captain, who has in theory spent
at least forty years shouting commands while at sea, sounds like a senior
software engineer who is annoyed that his team has been working on the wrong
build. It strikes me that the game would have had a harder impact with
professional voice actors. But perhaps it's an ironic homage to CD-ROM voice acting of the 1990s, I dunno.
Also, the music was fine for 1991. But that was a long time ago. The modern
rendition uses strings and period-correct instruments, but the problem is
that the chord sequences and melodies sound like Depeche Mode. Because the
original composer was a self-taught europop musician rather than a
professionally-trained soundtrack composer, because in 1991 publishers
weren't willing to spend money hiring James Horner.
A few
of the cues work really well, so perhaps I'm being nitpicky. The thing is
that the culmination of the Captain's story - which happens right at the
beginning - should be sad, but the melody is... well, it's a single-finger
Depeche Mode synthpop tune.
But in summary Obra Dinn is well worth the £10 I bought it for,
and the £16 it normally retails for. I finished it in ten hours. I'm no good at maths, but according to my calculator that's like watching four films but for the price of one film plus popcorn etc.
There is one thing. Dinn really highlights the tragedy of the text adventure. Of all the genres that existed in the 1980s the text adventure should have dated the least, because writing is writing. Even the best-looking games of the 1980s look and feel ancient today, but writing is still writing. Very, very, very few films from the 1980s haven't dated at all. Down by Law? Paris, Texas? The Elephant Man? But there's nothing specifically 1989 about The Remains of the Day, nothing inherently 1984 about Ironweed etc. I'm not saying that literature doesn't date, but it has fewer opportunities to date, whereas even the most carefully-shot 1980s film has old-fashioned cars in the background.
But because text adventures were written for machines with less than 64kb of usable memory, and because the games had to be take hours to finish, they had terse writing and annoying puzzles, so the writing didn't have space to breathe and the games were no fun to play. By the time the hardware had enough memory for actual proper writing the world had moved on, and so the text adventure died off.
There were attempts to push the genre in the 1990s, and there's still a text adventure scene - they call it interactive fiction these days - and perhaps the text adventure might one day be the future of literature, but it's sad so little from the 1980s and 1990s remains and has any lasting worth. In which case Obra Dinn is a minor miracle, and I'm glad that it exists.
