Game Report: Return of the Obra Dinn
Apr. 19th, 2023 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indi_timberpathOne of the things that lots of games seem to desperately chase is a sense of "immersion." These days, that seems to usually mean super-realistic physics, fancy lighting techniques, and of course high-rez graphics. And yet, if immersion is about how deeply you're pulled into a game, how much you get a good sense of its world and the people in it, I think one of my most immersive experiences in recent memory was in a game that has almost no non-player motion, two-tone graphics, and a pixelated effect that looks like I'm running it on the already-outdated computers in my elementary-school computer lab.
What immersed me in Return of the Obra Dinn wasn't those graphics (as much as I found the retro style really cool and charming) but the intricate way the world was put together. The game sets you up on a very detailed recreation of an early 19th-century trade ship, to the point that it includes a pretty extensive glossary to help make sense of it. (A side note on the user-experience of immersion: There's one way of looking at immersion that says this breaks it: you're meant to be playing a 19th-century insurance investigator, who would know those terms. But I would argue that giving the player the tools to know what the character knows, within the game, helps situate that player in the character's place, preventing them from having to hunt around elsewhere for such information). I was sucked in just from wandering the ship. I'd never given much thought to how such a vessel would fit together, not to mention all the different roles of crew having to keep it running, but throughout the game I had to learn more and more to piece together the identities and fates of the crew. Tracking them down led me to surprising little parts of a very limited space, and by the time I was done, I could navigate it all without having to use a map.
It's no surprise, given how much I like immersion, that the genre of games now called "immersive sims" really appeals to me. Obra Dinn is not, in a traditional sense, an immersive sim. One hallmark of immersive sims is how they use a bunch of interlocking systems that allow players to get through huge complicated levels using multiple methods. A small game with almost no mechanic, taking place in a single constrained space, with no one and nothing to destroy, doesn't qualify. But another hallmark of immersive sims is environmental storytelling. Like Obra Dinn, most immersive sims have you journey through a place where something bad has already happened, and they present little clues about it. The posters on a wall, the placement of a body, the recordings of a voice. Sometimes, you need this information to progress in the game. A bit more often, you use it to find cool hidden things. Most of the time, it's there for atmosphere and depth. I love this. I remember scouring the halls of the Von Braun in System Shock 2, trying to make sure I didn't miss any audio logs, just because I wanted to know what happened to people. The Return of the Obra Dinn asks, "What if that was the entire game?" To progress in the game, you need to keep an eye out for everything the environment is telling you, hear all the 'recordings' of the people involved, and put it all together. It was hard. There were points I was worried I wasn't going to be able to do it. But the fascination of exploring that world, the curiosity to find out just one more thing, and just the feeling of getting to know the space so well, kept me going throughout all the frustration.
What immersed me in Return of the Obra Dinn wasn't those graphics (as much as I found the retro style really cool and charming) but the intricate way the world was put together. The game sets you up on a very detailed recreation of an early 19th-century trade ship, to the point that it includes a pretty extensive glossary to help make sense of it. (A side note on the user-experience of immersion: There's one way of looking at immersion that says this breaks it: you're meant to be playing a 19th-century insurance investigator, who would know those terms. But I would argue that giving the player the tools to know what the character knows, within the game, helps situate that player in the character's place, preventing them from having to hunt around elsewhere for such information). I was sucked in just from wandering the ship. I'd never given much thought to how such a vessel would fit together, not to mention all the different roles of crew having to keep it running, but throughout the game I had to learn more and more to piece together the identities and fates of the crew. Tracking them down led me to surprising little parts of a very limited space, and by the time I was done, I could navigate it all without having to use a map.
It's no surprise, given how much I like immersion, that the genre of games now called "immersive sims" really appeals to me. Obra Dinn is not, in a traditional sense, an immersive sim. One hallmark of immersive sims is how they use a bunch of interlocking systems that allow players to get through huge complicated levels using multiple methods. A small game with almost no mechanic, taking place in a single constrained space, with no one and nothing to destroy, doesn't qualify. But another hallmark of immersive sims is environmental storytelling. Like Obra Dinn, most immersive sims have you journey through a place where something bad has already happened, and they present little clues about it. The posters on a wall, the placement of a body, the recordings of a voice. Sometimes, you need this information to progress in the game. A bit more often, you use it to find cool hidden things. Most of the time, it's there for atmosphere and depth. I love this. I remember scouring the halls of the Von Braun in System Shock 2, trying to make sure I didn't miss any audio logs, just because I wanted to know what happened to people. The Return of the Obra Dinn asks, "What if that was the entire game?" To progress in the game, you need to keep an eye out for everything the environment is telling you, hear all the 'recordings' of the people involved, and put it all together. It was hard. There were points I was worried I wasn't going to be able to do it. But the fascination of exploring that world, the curiosity to find out just one more thing, and just the feeling of getting to know the space so well, kept me going throughout all the frustration.
