return of the obra dinn
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'Return of the Obra Dinn' comes to consoles on October 18th
Roughly twelve months ago, Return of the Obra Dinn stunned Mac and PC players with its time-travelling detective work. We shouldn't have been surprised -- the monochromatic adventure was developed by Lucas Pope, the creative mind behind the award-winning Papers, Please. If you're a console player that's yet to explore the 19th-century ship, good news: the game is coming to PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch on October 18th. As far as we know, the console and PC versions are identical. (Fingers crossed you can still change the filter to emulate your favorite retro hardware!)
Investigation game 'Return of the Obra Dinn' hits consoles this fall
Return of the Obra Dinn is an award-winning, monochromatic investigation game set on a spooky 19th-century ship, and it's heading to Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in the fall. Obra Dinn landed on PC last October and gobbled a handful of prestigious awards, including a BAFTA for artistic achievement. Nintendo announced the Switch version during today's Nintendo Direct, and creator Lucas Pope confirmed the additional platforms on Twitter.
Ghost ship mystery Return of the Obra Dinn waves in a demo
Return of the Obra Dinn is the first-person ghost ship mystery game with 1-bit rendering from Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope. Whatever else it is, you can find out right now with an early demo, downloadable for PC and Mac. The demo covers the first 15 minutes of the game. "It's still very rough and very untested," Pope says. "For such a low-res game, performance is not great on a 2011 Macbook Air running BootCamp. Hopefully it runs OK on most machines. The core mechanic is only lightly touched on, but you should be able to mentally extrapolate out what's here to a full game." Papers, Please, Pope's breakout game, swept the IGF awards this year, and Pope had planned to submit Return of the Obra Dinn to the IGF for 2015, but he says the game isn't quite ready: "That deadline was pretty useful in getting me through these past few weeks of crunch, but in the end I've decided not to submit the game as it is. Maybe next year." In Return of the Obra Dinn, a ship declared missing in 1802 suddenly returns to a London port six years later, badly damaged and with no visible crew. Players are the insurance adjuster for the East India Company's London Office, and must board the ship and recover the Crew Muster Roll book. It wouldn't be a game from Pope if it didn't involve official documents, after all. [Image: Lucas Pope]
Papers, Please creator unveils 1-bit mystery Return of the Obra Dinn
Lucas Pope, the designer behind the surprisingly thoughtful Papers, Please, has revealed his next project, a first-person mystery set aboard a ghost ship using what he calls "1-bit rendering." Pope describes Return of the Obra Dinn as unlike anything he's done before. "There'll be less creativity with the gameplay and instead I want to experiment with the rendering, story, and a few technical features," Pope wrote on the TIGForums. "I'm hoping to capture a compelling mystery with suspense and twists in the limited space of an old merchant sailing ship. It won't be the typical 'collect items and look for clues' structure. There's a slightly cool gameplay hook but I won't go into details on that until much later." Though Pope is building Return of the Obra Dinn in the increasingly ubiquitous Unity 3D engine, the game will feature a notably archaic aesthetic. "I'd like to capture the detailed black & white look of old Mac games in a realtime 1st person game," said Pope. "I plan to push it grittier and less cartoon-like than those old games; the hard part will be keeping everything legible without it becoming an unreadable mess of dithered pixels." Pope has yet to determine a release date for Return of the Obra Dinn, but those looking for more information can find a full rundown of the game's plot and his goals as a designer on the TIGForums. [Image: Lucas Pope]
