Al_B on 7/11/2018 at 21:54
Just finished it and although it's not a game that readily lends itself to replay once you've solved all the fates it kept me engrossed until the end and I feel I got my money's worth for the ~12 hours or so that it took. That was actually split over two save games - the first was completed early because I thought that chapter eight would add some clues to the character's identities in other chapters rather than being self-contained. I had visited all scenes by that point but hadn't filled out every available fate. The second time allowed me to focus a bit more on the identification of characters and looking for more subtle clues. I completely missed the number of clues available in part 1 of the terrible cold the first time from arms and legs in the bunks. Highly recommended.
demagogue on 26/11/2018 at 02:25
Curiosity got the better of me and I got this and bumped it to the front of my queue so I've been playing it over the last week in bite-sized 30 minute pieces here and there. What I really like about this, from a dev perspective, is he manages to do an awful lot with an awful little. He makes these really epic scenes and a deep and tangled story with lots of little thoughtful details of the storylines strewn about in hidden corners, but when you get down to it it's just rearranging the same stock models in the same small & cramped space with some great voice acting & sound direction... and this whole larger world and time frame emerge. It's kind of inspiring in terms of thinking of game-making, that you can be pretty ambitious with your story and interaction if you think about how to boil it down to simple assets and mechanics.
As for the story & puzzle itself, I'm really not getting very far very fast because I'm not trying all that hard. I just like walking around the scenes and piecing things together at a slow pace, but that suits me fine. I'll have more to say about that when I near the end or finish it.
demagogue on 28/11/2018 at 11:53
Quote Posted by Starker
For example, there's the timing mechanic that forces you out of the scene and into the solution page (often with incomplete information)
Pope has a quote about this in the RPS interview for this:
Quote:
Until that point [a month before release], the scene would appear for a minute, the book would appear, and then the game would send players back to the present, giving no further opportunity to examine the scene for clues. Pope's change was to allow players to wander around after the minute plays out and the book fills in, but he knows it still leaves players waiting for the book to appear so they can start adding their solutions. “To fix that would have been a lot more work,” he concedes. “I felt, OK the game's not perfect but I felt that after four and a half years, I could ship it. You can get a little ship-happy, basically.” And besides, that minute of forced time with the scene slows you down, helps you notice the details you'll need to solve the game's mysteries.
It's interesting, contra Twist's observation, that Pope saw it as a way of slowing players down.
But I completely sympathize that while he understood that it was a clunky mechanic (because it is), and I don't doubt he could have made it work better with more time & effort, after 4.5 years of work he felt it was good enough to ship & he was ready to kick it out.
The whole (
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/11/07/how-a-book-binds-the-return-of-the-obra-dinn/) article is kind of cool.
Starker on 28/11/2018 at 19:21
Hmm... A timer rarely slows people down. And from what I've seen on Youtube, a few players reached the wrong conclusion because the book popped up before they could explore the scenes more thoroughly... which they then didn't do, because they probably felt they had solved it already. And some people felt compelled to put in their best guess, leading to a bit of a trial and error gameplay. Perhaps a good compromise might have been if the book had had a forced appearance only in the first scenes in the the cabin. I think the players would by then already get the gist of what they're supposed to do.
Pacing is tricky in games even at the best of times, so I find it's generally best to leave such things up to players more often than not. Otherwise you'll force the people who have already figured things out to wait and the people who haven't just have an unnecessary interruption in the middle of their exploration. Plus it adds up to a small but noticeable amount of artificial difficulty in a game where it's not the point. And it doesn't help immersion or have any ludonarrative significance, as was the case with Papers, Please.
Anyway, it's a minor issue in a game that I feel is otherwise close to perfect, and I can definitely understand the urge to just ship the game after years of working on it and not try to fix every minor annoyance or clunky mechanic.
Starker on 1/12/2018 at 19:18
I just realised while watching someone else's playthrough why the Formosan guard was executed -- the translator was in cahoots with the second mate.
These are the sort of inferences that really make the game worthwhile.
Nameless Voice on 1/12/2018 at 23:45
Oh, that never occurred to me but certainly makes sense.
So, I've also been playing this after Al_B gifted it to me out of the blue. Finished it two days ago.
I agree with pretty much everything people here have been saying, both about how interesting and innovative it is, and about some of its minor design flaws, so I can't think of much more to add to it.
I think I should also watch some other peoples' playthroughs, as I'm sure I missed a lot of clues, and there were two cases in my game where I couldn't figure out which of two people someone was and I just ended up guessing - I'd like to know what I missed there.
(Actually, three cases, but I later discovered what I had missed and how to identify those people properly.)
demagogue on 4/12/2018 at 17:03
I finished it with everyone done.
I'll list one of the more subtle clues I liked...
[spoiler]
- The numbers in The Cold on the bunks helped... It let me know the two bearded guys were Russians. But the place where it worked for me best is Alexi, the third Russian. Although he was hidden asleep, he had a pipe in the bag next to his bed. In The Calling, when he was being dragged under by the mermaid, his pipe was flying out of his mouth!
Speaking of that...
- An arm coming out of bed #38 had the woman tattoo on his forearm, but I never did see the tattoo again. I'll have to look it up now that I know everyone.
- In the photo sailors of the same nationality & job tended to be together... They also had characteristic dress, which was especially helpful for the stewards, who were mostly dressed alike. That's an obvious thing I guess.
[/spoiler]
Edit: Some questions...
[spoiler]
- Why was the surgeon throwing his monkey into the lazarette & shooting it? What was he testing? Whether there were any mermaids still alive that'd eat the thing?
- What's the thing about the captain's steward going crazy? Was that the influence of a shell? I missed that...
- If there was the shell in the Formosan cabinet from the beginning, why did the monsters only attack when the 2nd mate went rowing off with it and not earlier?
- How were we supposed to know the 4 survivors went to Africa? Wait, never mind, because the surgeon said in the preface to mail the book back to him in Morocco.
[/spoiler]
Starker on 4/12/2018 at 18:36
Quote Posted by demagogue
Speaking of that...
[spoiler]- An arm coming out of bed #38 had the woman tattoo on his forearm, but I never did see the tattoo again. I'll have to look it up now that I know everyone.[/spoiler]
It's the guy who tries to stop the second mate from kidnapping the Formosans and gets shot for his efforts.Quote Posted by demagogue
[spoiler]- Why was the surgeon throwing his monkey into the lazarette & shooting it? What was he testing? Whether there were any mermaids still alive that'd eat the thing?[/spoiler]
He had the memento mortem watch and wanted to get "access" to the corpses in there by "recording" the monkey's dying memory.Quote Posted by demagogue
[spoiler]- What's the thing about the captain's steward going crazy? Was that the influence of a shell? I missed that... [/spoiler]
He was just desperate to get the mermaids off the ship because he thought they would curse and doom them all. Maybe he knew some tales or was just deeply superstitious, as sailors are wont to be. The captain thought he had lost his mind, because he attacked the guard to get access to the lazarette. Btw, he's one of the first people to see the mermaids being bought on board in the last scene of The Calling.Quote Posted by demagogue
[spoiler]- If there was the shell in the Formosan cabinet from the beginning, why did the monsters only attack when the 2nd mate went rowing off with it and not earlier?[/spoiler]
The Formosans said that the shell must be protected, so they might have had some way to hide its presence (that the second mate then must have ruined by opening the chest). Perhaps that's what the mercury-like liquid was for. Also, the mermaids were probably hesitating to attack the ship directly, because the humans' overwhelming numbers and weapons had the potential to inflict heavy casualties even with a surprise attack.
Nameless Voice on 4/12/2018 at 18:41
Quote Posted by demagogue
[spoiler]
- How were we supposed to know the 4 survivors went to Africa? Wait, never mind, because the surgeon said in the preface to mail the book back to him in Morocco.
[/spoiler]
I loved that one, the clue was right there from the start, but it took me a really long time to even think to look there.
Starker on 15/12/2018 at 06:40
Mark Brown did a video on the game as part of his Game Maker's Toolkit series. Lots of spoilers from the very start.
[video=youtube;V0qxLrFycrc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0qxLrFycrc[/video]