@SPArcheon I too would enjoy an Obra Djinn game. However, I am somewhat mollified by the fact that "Dinn" is a proper name meaning "brown," and is thus a reference to the game's art style.

Also, P. Djèlí Clark's A Master of Djinn just came out and so my djinn needs are currently being met.

@SPArcheon "70% off!"

"‘Attack The Block 2’: John Boyega Reunites With Joe Cornish, Nira Park For Sequel"

eeeeeeee

A thought: Return of the Obra Dinn shares a major theme with Dracula, one that crops up a lot in modern speculative fiction; confronting the supernatural and irrational with absolute logic and rationality.

yeah

that's pretty true honestly

a lot of weird stuff just sort of casually happens and you are expected to take it very much in stride

or at least, the character you are playing does

including,.. their own ability to just go back in time and witness death

XD

@Adeptus yes, I know. Funny part is that I don't think those are ever on sale un-discounted :P

Aye, though I'm talking less about "not freaking out" and more about applying predicate logic to the situation: to "win" the game you use the tools of formal deduction and quantificational investigation rather than, say, bargaining with the supernatural, employing rituals to ward off evil, or even taking interpersonal actions.

Compare, say, most versions of Alice in Wonderland where the protagonist's success lies in meeting the world's nonsense with a similar level of nonsense, and trying to force things to "make sense" just gets her deeper into trouble.

ah

well yes

the game is literally all about figuring out exactly what happened, and not worrying about why or how or if it makes any actual sense

your job is literally to figure out if the boat deserves to be covered by insurance XD

I'm always interested in "what are your tools for success" choices in stories and games.

but to do that you have to figure out where it went and what happened to all the people

hilariously, you can also just leave early by saying the Captain murdered everyone XD

that isn't what happened, people died at different times and due to a wildly different number of ways to die, but the Captain did kill some of the crew and it's like, a joke ending to just blame him quite literally for everything

I hate the missing spoiler support....

@trogdor spoiler

here. Should work this time.

oh

Right, but that's not the player's tool or the player's success.

that isn't you who does that

I'm looking at how the game defines the player's success and what tools the game decides the player needs to achieve it.

that's a thing you see happen

and everyone involved in that dies XD

Doesn't the gold ending require you to actually do something about that like returning the thing?

That's a particularly interesting thing to bring up though, because it's showing something the gameplay could have been about, but the choice was made to make the gameplay about something else.

@SPArcheon uh no you actually kinda just don't have any control over that

@trogdor then the recap I read is quite... imprecise :P

forget what I said.

what you are expected to do is completely and entirely encompassed by finding out exactly what happened to everyone on the boat

the Seashell, for example, is "returned" by other people

and,... other such things like that

I say "returned" in quotes because that got really messy really fast and a lot of people ended up dead

you have nothing at all to do with it except witnessing it

you do definitely have to find that scene to get the gold ending

Seems quite the opposite of Yomawari.

well, I don't know what that is, but it wasn't simply people trying to return the thing, a lot of people were also trying to stop them

and before that the crew had been relentlessly attacked by sea creatures

all in all it was not really confined to a single incident

it got like 80% of the crew killed at least in tangentially related ways

I looked up Yomawari's controls list, and I think it's useful to compare it to Obra Dinn's:

Obra Dinn has a single "interact with the world" button.

yep

Just like you can look at the "actions" available in Lasers & Feelings or Honey Heist and compare it to the actions available in D&D and tell that the games have dramatically different ideas about the kinds of problems the story is about and how you're going to solve them.

sorry, went away for a few minutes. What I meant is the Obra Dinn seems to be about some events (with some supernatural ones included) that made the whole crew die. But you don't focus on the nature of the events, just on what happened.

As BESW said, the fact they are supernatural is not the focus, you just rationalize things.

Yomawari is in a way the opposite. From the start the player probably would be aware that the dog is no more to be found, yet the game protagonist keeps looking for said dog.

yeah. More specifically I'm noticing that it's part of a grouping of stories that are very much about the supernatural/irrational, but in which the success of the protagonist is rooted in using logic/science to control and quantify the unscientific and the illogical.

And in the meantime, you are in the night, where the supernatural seems to just be malevolent without any reason...

Dracula's supernatural shapeshifting powers give him great mobility, but the human protagonists can use telegrams to communicate even faster; his mind-control powers don't keep information from being spread when you have audio recording devices and shorthand experts to preserve information outside of the mind.

(That said, what I always found odd in Yomawari is that I never understood if the supernatural does look the same to someone who is familiar to to Japanese culture. Somehow, I have the felling that some of the entities do have a reason.)

Sometimes I think of this category of story as, like, the nerd's version of the "I used my training to survive the untamed wilderness" story. The tools of "civilization" overcoming the raw power of the "uncivilized."

Whether that's "I know how to build a log cabin with nothing but a hatchet" or "I know how to use truth tables."

In Obra Dinn, success is framed as simply knowing the unknown. Which is interesting.

@BESW To be fair, I suspect it even goes beyond that, at least in a meta way.

Aye. While it diverges from Dracula in that Dracula presents scientific knowledge as the key to actionable opposition and destruction of the unscientific, I feel like they share the same root philosophy, the implication that to name the unnamed is to gain power over it.

@trogdor can correct me if I am wrong, but while the player experience is rewarded from "knowing all that happened", I seem to understand that in the plot, your reports are actually underused.

Basically, all ends up as "mass murder" for the insurance company?

uh I mean

it depends on what you report but yeah it's kinda weirdly,.. not for posterity?

Isn't there even an achievement for claiming "the captain did it all"? :P

it's for the specific purpose of finding out if the insurance company needs to pay anyone, and for what

The role of achievements for "doing it wrong" in the ludonarrative is probably fodder for an entire other conversation.

if you go down the route of accurately finding out everything that happened, they have to pay the families of all the people who died pretty much

and if I remember correctly, they pay more to the families of those directly murdered by the crew, and especially the captain (yes the captain himself does directly murder some crewmembers)

(you find that out as like the first thing in fact)