From the very opening of Lucas Pope’s mystery puzzle detective game Return of the Obra Dinn, I have been amazed by the visual elements he used to construct the storytelling of space, time, and memory. Aside from the unique exploring and cataloging mechanics of the game, every detail of its distinct visual design contributes to the gaming experience for the player on the ship Obra Dinn. While visuals and environment have been sometimes considered as having a less direct interaction with the player, the visual presentation of the Return of Obra Dinn is, in my opinion, one of the most important features that construed the gaming experience, and greatly affects how players would choose to navigate the game. It is therefore crucial to dive into the game through a visual analysis perspective, which is commonly used in the field of art history, in order to deconstruct and examine the significance of each visual element.
From the first scene, the text, book, people, and Obra Dinn itself are presented in monochrome. Obra Dinn stands out from the relatively dark background with vague fog on the horizon and a pale moon in the sky. Piled up by pixels, the complex details of the ship are drawn with simple outlines and shadow blocks. The strong contrast of the scene is also built up through the monochrome aspects, highlighting the objects in the “happening”. The style reminds me strongly of specific art genres like etching and woodcut prints, which are practiced around the period of the Obra Dinn, and is rarely seen in most video games. The monochrome outlines and shadows single out the spatial relations without introducing distractions with other colors and guide the player through the space to explore.
As the inspector obtains the pocket watch and travels back in time for the first time, I was shocked at the scene after the initial dialogue, where I stand in the hallway facing a man who points a gun at my face. The trajectory of the bullet forms a dispersed pixel distribution that cuts through the air. At first, I had the impression that I, the inspector, went into the memory of another person and was shot, but later as I moved around, I realized that I was a ghost venturing through a frozen moment of the memory of the dead — or, the memory of Obra Dinn. Rather than displaying the entire boat and background in a specific slice of time, a considerable number of the memory pieces are limited to a certain smaller space, which the player could not go beyond. Pixels in this case do not only function as a unit that draws out the scene, but also as an outward expression of “happening” in the game. Just like how the pixel paves out the bullet trajectory, it also signifies to the player the intensity of actions on the ship, such as fighting, bleeding, pain, anxiety, dramatic death, and so on. While monochrome stresses the spatial relations of the scene, the pixels create an impression of high image noise that collapses the space into a two-dimensional surface. When venturing through the frozen moment, it is even like journeying through a compiled file of black-and-white film photography that captures a specific moment in the time flow. By presenting moments of past memory through connecting with the dead via the watch, it is actually making a copy of the memory of the dead that implies the past life of the ship, further contrasting the “now” and “then” of the space.
When looking at a work of architecture, one seeks to consider not only how it is built but also how it interacts with its visitors/residents. It is through human activity that architectural structures realize their function, which completes their mission. The constant shifting between the Obra Dinn “now” and the Obra Dinn “then” in the game presents an interesting juxtaposition of a twofold space where first, the player observes an empty ship awaiting “happening”, and second, the same ship compiled by “happening” throughout time. The contrast between the happening and the lacking of happening in the exact same space highlights the Obra Dinn as a combination of all that has occurred and leads the player to find out what has happened. Through spatialized time, it is the interaction with the crew, the sea, and the environment that constructed the comprehensive identity of Obra Dinn.
Utilizing monochrome, pixel, first-person perspective, and space-time juxtaposition, Return of the Obra Dinn constructs a unique space where the player observes, explores, and comprehends the happening that made the ship Obra Dinn.
