Video Game / Return of the Obra Dinn

The year is 1802, and maritime shipping across the Atlantic Ocean is at its peak. One such ship, the Obra Dinn, begins a voyage from England to the Orient, carrying nine passengers and fifty-one crewmen onboard. However, the ship fails to meet her scheduled rendezvous point at the Cape of Good Hope, and after a year of unsuccessful attempts to contact her, the ship is declared lost at sea...

But in 1807, the lost ship mysteriously drifts into its home port of Falmouth, with no survivors aboard.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a non-linear adventure detective game developed by Lucas Pope, creator of Papers, Please, and released in 2018. The game is played from a First Person viewpoint and features a rather unusual graphical style—namely 1-bit monochromatic graphics, inspired by games on early Macintosh systems. You play as an insurance investigator from the British East India Company, who boards the ship in the middle of the night to figure out just what happened to the crew and passengers. A man named Henry Evans sends you a book with a manifest of all the people onboard and a mysterious pocket watch called the Memento Mortem, which can create an image of a person's exact moment of death. With these in hand, you set out to discover where everyone disappeared to, and what fates have befallen the people onboard.

The game's core gameplay concept is that corpses are strewn about the ship. By finding and interacting with a corpse, the Memento Mortem will open, letting you hear a short clip of what that person heard shortly before their death, before teleporting you to a strange pocket dimension where you can wander around in a frozen “snapshot” of the area at the exact moment of their demise. These deaths are documented in the book and divided into chapters that serve to illuminate the timeline of events. Everything else past that is up to you—figuring out who the dying people are, how they died, and who/what killed them is the primary purpose of the game. With sixty people to account for, this is no easy task—there are very few obvious answers, and you'll need to use your brain to piece together the identities of everyone aboard. Keeping track of everything - from their names to their ethnicities, to what they look like and what their role was onboard - is essential to uncovering what occurred onboard the ship.

Be warned that the spoilers here are even more extreme than usual for a murder-mystery game—due to the nature of the gameplay (which revolves around identifying individuals), it's impossible to even mention people's names without potentially major spoilers. As such, all spoilers on this page will be unmarked.

The Obra Dinn shipped with the following tropes:

• 100% Completion: Only by accurately recording the identity and means of death of people in every other chapter will the player be permitted by their benefactor to learn what happened in Chapter 8: "The Bargain".
• Accidental Murder:
  • Chapter 1 involves an accident with loose cargo, which results in Samuel Peters' death. His brother Nathan holds fellow seaman Lars Linde accountable for this and takes his revenge when they're about to leave the ship.
  • The Ship's Steward Zungi Sathi is wounded by spikes thrown by a crab rider. He drags himself to safety all the way into the portwalk, only for Charles Miner to miss his shot at one of the crabriders, penetrate the wooden wall to the portwalk, and finish off Sathi. Miner even gets fined for the "murder" in the final report.
• Acquitted Too Late: One of the Formosan guards, Hok-Seng Lau, is executed for the death of a passenger, but it's revealed later that said passenger was actually murdered by Second Mate Nichols. Perhaps the wrongs are rectified in the Epilogue: although Lau's reward or estate can never be known or claimed, at least his executioner got fined £50 for the murder of Fourth Mate John Davies, and attempted mutiny.
• Alliterative Name: The four Indian seamen all have one, as does the Danish seaman Lars Linde.
• Anachronic Order: The game starts with Chapter 10, "The End", showing the final few people who died before the ship became a Ghost Ship. Once "The End" has been cleared, the rest of the boat opens for exploration. This means the player can experience the story in just about any order, but certain deaths can only be unlocked by seeing other deaths first. In particular, Chapter 4: "The Calling" and Chapter 5: "Unholy Captives" are experienced entirely in reverse order, as are many of the other chapters.
• Anachronism Stew: Lucas Pope has gone on record stating accuracy was attempted to the best of his ability, but there wasn't time or space to include every single detail, and sometimes a line had to be drawn for the sake of the gameplay. That said...
  • In 1803, Empire Waist dresses were in fashion for women. None of the British women aboard dress anything like that. Jane Bird wears a layered skirt reminiscent of 1840s fashion.
  • One of the causes of death you can ascribe to a person is referred to as "electrocution". This word wasn't invented until the late 19th century and was used only to describe executions completed by the use of an electric chair: "Electro" plus "execution". Furthermore, there were no electrical devices or anything else that would result in accidental electrocution, as we would call it today on the ship. The term must be used to describe one death: a crew member being struck by lightning. And the magical beam that kills It-Beng Sia and stuns the mermaids, if you prefer that over "burned to death".
  • The names of the Chinese crew members follow the modern-day convention for transcribing Mandarin Chinese, called pinyin, introduced by the People's Republic of China in the 1950s. In the time period the game is set, "Li" and "Zhang" would be written down as "Lee" and "Chang" instead, based on their approximate pronunciation in English. Interestingly enough, the names of the Formosans were transcribed in fairly correct Min to distinguish them from the Chinese crew.
  • Huang Li, one of the Chinese crewmen, is heard speaking a mixture of Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien with a Taiwanese accent. Standard Mandarin was not invented and implemented until over a century after the events of the game. In addition, the Mandarin dialects were largely restricted to northern China. As the only accessible Chinese port to Britain during this time period was Guangzhou, Guangdong, in coastal southern China, this means that the most plausible language Li should be speaking is Cantonese. Not that this would help him with interrogating the Hokkien-speaking Chioh Tan, because Cantonese and Hokkien are mutually unintelligible.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game will only unblur a crew member's face when the game has given you the information needed to deduce their identity, making it easier to do the process of elimination. If you try to identify a blurred crewmember anyway, a warning will pop up informing you that there's no way to be sure.
  • There's a bookmark feature, allowing you to skip through the book by pressing on tabs to bring you to the next page with information on it. You can bookmark specific crew members as well, allowing you to mark every single memory they appear in and flip through them.
  • Every time you've correctly identified the fate of three characters (name, cause of death, and their killer, if applicable), they are locked in and cannot be altered. This also removes them as selections in the manifest when identifying crew. While this is meant to prevent the player from just brute-forcing every single solution, it still allows players to figure out some of the more obscure identities through trial and error, assuming you can reduce the number of variables (if you know you have two fates correct, a third can be brute-forced with minimal effort as long as you can deduce the profession of the victim and/or their killer).
  • By zooming in and holding on a person in a memory, their image will be highlighted and the backdrop will change to show their position in the illustrations, making it easier to identify some of the more obscured figures. And although the zooming feature does not work if most of the person's body is obscured or they're too far away to recognize, their picture in the sketch will still be highlighted to show they were present in the scene, so they can be roughly determined by process of elimination.
  • If a victim can be said to have died of multiple causes simultaneously, then any one of those causes is considered valid as their ultimate fate. For instance, one person dies because their leg was cut off by another crew member during a fight scene, which falls under the categories of "dismemberment" and "attacked with a sword". Either one is counted as correct, as long as you can identify the killer. By the same token, "fell overboard" and "drowned" are largely interchangeable, since one inevitably leads to the other should no one rescue them. However, it is important to note that wounds that would be fatal do not count if the victim did not die in that scene. Someone who is stabbed multiple times and then shot in a different scene died of the latter unquestionably, even if the former would have done them in.
  • There are a few instances where it's possible to have more than one person responsible for someone's death. For instance, one person is killed by being obliterated by a cannon blast during the battle against the giant sea monster in "The Doom" chapter. A seaman lights the fuse, but the Kraken causes the cannon to point at him. So is it the fault of the one who lit the fuse, or the one who aimed the cannon? Either one is correct.
  • After the death scenes have played out, a transcript will be provided for any dialogue spoken before death. If the deceased has spoken at all before their death, an X will appear next to their dialogue, meaning that the player can collect clues from words exchanged between crew members, as well as from their surroundings.
  • When reinvestigating a corpse whose death you've already witnessed, the hands of your clock will show when they died; the hour hand represents the chapter, and the minute hand shows the order in which they died. For instance, if interacting with a corpse shows a time of 4:15 on the watch, that means they died in Chapter 4, and they were the third person to die. This helps keep track of the bodies without actually having to relive the event. Opening the journal while centered on the corpse also jumps directly to their page.
  • When rewatching a death, you can skip the dialogue and leave immediately after entering the scene, unlike the first time, where you have to listen through the dialogue, watch for a bit, log the fate in your book, and then leave through the door/track another death. This is very appreciated when tracking a person through many memories and looking for clues.
  • The people whose fates are shown in "Bargain" (Martin Perrott and Fillip Dahl) are identified pretty explicitly in their first scenes, so you can safely rule them out even without being able to actually lock them in.
• Anti-Villain: The mermaids, as well as the squid and crab riders. The crab riders and squid are implied to have been summoned by the mermaids to rescue them after they were captured and locked in the lazarette, and the mermaids themselves largely lash out in direct response to provocation from the crew, such as fatally tail-slapping a crewman after he jokes about cooking them and then tries to take one of their shells. Even their first chronological appearance, which at face value appears to be an unprovoked attack, makes sense when one considers that the shell inside the Formosan chest is strongly implied to have been stolen from them in the first place. The real villains of the story are those humans whose greed and callousness provoked their anger to begin with.
• Apocalyptic Log: With your stopwatch acting as your window into the past, rather than piecing together an Apocalyptic Log, you're writing one. The game takes cues from the environmental storytelling techniques introduced with Immersive Sim games like the Shock games, and makes their very lack of completeness the linchpin of the game's mechanics as well as the backbone of the game's entire plot outside of the framing device of the player's presence aboard the Obra Dinn.
• An Arm and a Leg: Happens to both Seaman John Naples (who got his leg cut off by the Captain's Steward Fillip Dahl, possibly in an effort to free the mermaids from the lazarette) and Bosun Alfred Klestil (who got his arm ripped off at the end of Chapter VII, though he only makes it through to the beginning of Chapter IX).
• Artifact of Death: The Formosan chest seems to kill anyone who uses it through columns of fire. It-Beng Sia and Fillip Dahl have their arms melted down to the bone because of the chest.
• Artistic License – Ships: Lucas Pope has gone on record saying he aimed for accuracy in the ship's design, but he could not achieve perfection, and some allowances needed to be made for the sake of the game. Some standouts are:
  • The rigging is sparse for the size of the masts, even when the ship is intact. This was done for the sake of simplicity.
  • The captain's cabin room lacks doors that would be necessary to keep wind and rain out of the cabin.
  • The Obra Dinn would be severely undermanned in reality. At its stated weight of 800 tons, a crew of about 90-100 was standard for the East Indiamen of the time, so subtracting the 9 passengers, the Obra Dinn with its measly 51 crew members stands at around half of normal capacity. Probably necessary for the gameplay, as deducing who 60 people are is a daunting enough task; twice that would be far too intimidating. Not surprisingly, because it is so undermanned, there is practically no one left to man the ship by the time the danger is over as of Chapter X, dooming it. If it had been the historically accurate amount, the ship could have made it to port with the remaining 50 or so crew.
• A-Team Firing: In Chapter III, four seamen participated in the execution of Formosan passenger Hok-Seng Lau by firing squad for the murder that Second Mate Edward Nichols actually committed. Played straight when three of them missed, but averted when Seaman Henry Brennan managed to fire a gunshot that hit Lau. Surprisingly, of the other three who missed their mark and are not labeled as murderers, only John Naples (himself a murder victim) is rewarded for his valiant efforts, while Patrick O'Hagan and Aleksei Toporov are fined for other crimes such as kidnapping and attempted desertion after they both conspire to help Nichols.
• Back to Front: Since the Memento Mortem needs someone's body first to show you the moment of their death and automatically locks onto the latest corpse around inside memories, each part of the story uncovered through present-day remains is told in reverse order. The exception is the first chapter the player sees- as it's also the last chronologically, they must follow the trail of skeletons of the last four members of the crew to die to see what happened.
• Badass Bureaucrat: Downplayed example in the player character themselves, the Chief Inspector for the East India Company. They press on and on through horrific visions of death, gore, and terrible sea monsters, all in the name of accurate insurance investigation.
• Badass Normal: Most members of the crew qualify to some degree. Some members, however, stand out as their actions on the doomed voyage are revealed to the player.
  • Despite his immediate apparent Sanity Slippage, Captain Robert Witterel's murders of multiple men in close combat are the first set of deaths the player uncovers. The captain killed the three men when he had knives sticking out of him.
  • In perhaps the greatest Dying Moment of Awesome in the game, carpenter Winston Smith point blank explodes one of the spider-crab rider demons with his hand mortar as he's in the process of getting speared and stabbed by two of the crab's sharp legs, and this was after taking one of their spikes in the shoulder. Just to exemplify how badass this is, you don't see this moment through Smith's corpse. You see it through the corpse of the thing he killed.
  • Despite being a lowly seaman, Henry Brennan is very active throughout the entire voyage and is one of the last crew members to die.
  • Not only were they one of the few to make it off the doomed vessel alive, but Emily Jackson personally shot the violent Leonid Volkov with a rifle, avenging the First Mate's steward.
  • In an excellent instance of Royals Who Actually Do Something, It-Beng Sia stabs the steward of the treacherous Second Mate and is able to access the chest to repel the mermaids at the cost of his own life.
  • All the Midshipmen heroically perish in the line of duty, one fighting a crab rider, one fighting the Kraken, and one murdered attempting to expose a mutiny.
• Big Bad: Second Mate Edward Nichols, chronologically the first murderer on the Obra Dinn and the head conspirator of the deserters. The chain of events that results from his actions leads to the deaths of almost every person on board the Obra Dinn, including himself.
• Bilingual Bonus: If you understand either Hokkien or Mandarin, then you'll notice the Chinese crewman in part 1 of Unholy Captives is actually speaking in a mishmash of both languages to one of the Formosans, implying that (as confirmed by Lucas Pope himself) the Chinese crew members aren't actually able to communicate all that well with the Formosans.
• Bittersweet Ending: While the story of the Obra Dinn has a Downer Ending, the story in the present time ends like this. There is nothing you can do to change the fate of the ship and its passengers—all you can do is literally watch the tragedy unfold and catalogue the events in the book. Indeed, once you depart the Obra Dinn, the coming storm arrives and causes the poor ship to finally sink. However, if you achieve 100% accuracy in your results, it's made clear that you have fulfilled Henry Evans' last wish to document the tragedy of the Obra Dinn, and the families of the crew will finally find out the fate of their loved ones.
• Black Comedy: Some very dark comedy regarding the sheer unlikelihood of some deaths, particularly when pairing the horror of what's going on with the jaunty upbeat music. Not surprising, when you consider the game's pedigree.
• Blood from the Mouth: If you look closely enough in some of the death scenes, this happens to various crew members as they expire.
• Broken Bridge: Many doors on the Obra Dinn are locked until you see them open in a memory, limiting the order in which information is revealed. By way of example, the player will not be able to access First Mate Hoscut’s cabin until they have seen the first part of "The Escape", where he is shown exiting it.
• Burial at Sea: It is implied that most of the dead bodies are disposed of in this way, as you hear Captain Witterel's voice tell his remaining crew to "throw the bodies over" at the beginning of Part 2 of Chapter V. We see Leonid Volkov being thrown overboard in the scene after his death.
• Butt-Monkey: Helmsman Finley Dalton. He appears in exactly two scenes—Murder 3 where he's received a pole through the shin courtesy of the mutineers, and The Doom 7 while he's in the process of being dragged off the ship by the Kraken.
• Camping a Crapper: The fate of Edward Spratt, the artist. The Kraken crushes him while he's squatting at the front of the gun deck.
• Cargo Concealment Caper: One of the deaths is a stowaway who was killed when the ropes holding the cargo they were hiding in broke and the cargo crashed down into the hold. The crew member the cargo landed on was also killed.
• The Cassandra: The members of the Formosan royal family can't speak English and require a translator for anyone to understand them. This wouldn't be so much of a problem, except the language barrier prevents anyone on the crew from knowing about the dangers of the Formosan chest, and the mermaids that eventually hunt down the kidnappers.
• Cassandra Truth: "Those ungodly beasts carry a curse!" Unfortunately, rather than rationally explain himself to his Captain, Fillip Dahl had cut another man's leg off in a desperate attempt to free the mermaids, and only achieves getting himself locked up.
• Cast of Snowflakes: All 60 characters have unique designs. They all have a unique face along with different variations of body type and clothing.
• Chekhov's Gun: On the Obra Dinn, if you look at the sea, you can see a little speck of light coming from a very specific spot on the sea. It never plays a role in the investigation. In the true ending, you discover the events of Chapter 8: The Bargain. The sailors make a deal with the last mermaid, and give her the shell the chest contained. Said shell emits an extremely bright light. And suddenly, you remember that little speck of light at large, and you realize what it is...
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: In the early part of the game, the man in the rowboat will keep calling out to you until you retrieve the journal and the Memento Mortem. If you solve every possible fate on the ship, the game will tell you "there is nothing left to do on the Obra Dinn" so that you know it's time to leave.
• Cool Sword: While there's no shortage of sabres to go around, one of the crew members is seen using a large scimitar. Finding it hanging off his (numbered!) bunk is an easy way to identify him.
• Crazy-Prepared: Presumably the causes of death given as options were prepared in advance by the Company, which means they must have anticipated the possibility of people having such unusual fates as being impaled with spikes by "terrible beasts" while at sea. Whether or not this means they know of the sea-devils' existence is not touched upon.
• Crime of Self-Defense: All deaths at the hand another crew member/passenger are considered murders by the Insurance Company. Even clear cut examples of self-defense, or defense of someone else. The "murderers" have their estates fined post-mortem. The only killing that the insurance company considers lawful is the execution of Hok-Seng Lau by firing squad, as it is not counted in the murder tally of the crewman who actually shot him.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Most of them. The only crew members who get off lightly are the ones who die from illness.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast: Two of them due to those mysterious shells, which seem to inspire Too Dumb to Live in some people. Thomas Sefton attempts to pry a shell from a living mermaid and gets struck as it flails. Later, Captain's Steward Fillip Dahl. With nothing to do while locked up in the lazarette, he breaks free of his chains, opens the Formosan chest, and extracts a shell from it. Just like it had with It-Beng Sia, the chest kills the horrified Dahl a couple of moments later.
• Cutting the Knot: The game takes pains to avert this from a gameplay standpoint. While it's possible to simply enter in names and causes of deaths with faces at random, any face that isn't unblurred will have the game tell you that there's no way to be sure that you're right. Brute forcing things simply isn't an option, given that fates are approved in sets of three. And with so many different options in the log for both names and causes of death, the chances of accidentally stumbling onto the right answer three times is basically nil. As such, the game encourages you to keep playing and find out the answer using logical deductions.
• Dangerous Deserter: The penalty for desertion is death, as Nichols and his party well know, hence the ease with which they kill anyone who threatens to expose them.
• Dangerously Loaded Cargo: Chapter 1 involves an accident with loose cargo which results in Samuel Peters' death.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The entire game is only two colors and highly pixelated with shades of grey represented by a dither effect, meant to mimic the colors of old CRT computer monitors, which also neatly resembles the pen-and-ink stippling of the in-game era.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The game takes place in the early 19th Century, and some of the punishments listed in the report reflect this. Charles Miner was fined for his Accidental Murder of Zungi Sathi, several people are fined for the Crime of Self-Defense, and the only murder that didn't get fined was that of Hok-Seng Lau, who was legally executed, though it turned out he was falsely accused of the crime. Also, the four who took the life raft in "The Escape" were fined for desertion, despite the Captain letting them go. Said Captain also get dishonored and vilified for committing suicide which at the time period, was seen as a crime.
• Developer's Foresight: When you see his death scene, it is immediately obvious that Charles Hershtik has been both impaled by the crab rider and set on fire, and either cause of death is accepted by the book. However, if you feel like being cruel, you can also blame his death on Peter Milroy, who is stabbing the crab rider with a sword in Hershtik's direction. Not only does the game consider this a valid answer, but the final report will also fine Milroy's family for murder.
• Dirty Coward: Second Mate Nichols. Once the mermaids attack during his attempted escape, he immediately hides under the longboat seat while they proceed to kill the rest of his allies and captives. His steward calls him out.
• Downer Beginning: Due to the story being told in Anachronic Order, you start at the very end of the story, neatly titled "The End". The last few members of the crew mutiny against Captain Robert Witterel, and he kills them all before shooting himself in the chest over the guilt over everything that's happened as part of the voyage.
• Downer Ending: The tragedy that befalls the Obra Dinn and her crew is a sight to behold. Nearly the whole crew dies. Only four people make it off the ship, by desertion, and several innocents die either from unfortunate accidents or other horrific deaths. While some of the crew die heroically, many more expire either in painful or depressing ways. In the end, only four men remain—the Captain, his First Mate (also the Captain's best friend and brother-in-law), and the last two survivors of the crew. The captain is forced to kill them all in self-defense, and he shoots himself soon after, the weight of the whole ordeal leaving him utterly broken.
• Driven to Suicide: One of the methods of death that can be chosen is suicide. Only one person commits suicide—Captain Robert Witterel shoots himself after surviving the entire ordeal.
• Driving Question:
  • What exactly happened on the Obra Dinn to cause the entire crew to disappear/die without a trace?
  • A second question develops after exploring more of the ship's history: what happened in chapter 8 to stop the Kraken from attacking the ship?
• Dwindling Party: Throughout the Obra Dinn's ill-fated journey, the people aboard the ship get whittled down due to loose cargo, a lung disease, sea monsters, and some rogue crewmen. Of the crew of sixty, only four of them got out of the ship alive.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Winston Smith, despite being spiked in the torso multiple times by the giant crab monster, blasts it point-blank with his hand mortar, killing it before he himself expires from his wounds.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: They have been for several years before the ship returned, but the fact still stands. Is played somewhat more straight after you complete the game, as Henry Evans eventually passes, being one of the final passengers of the Obra Dinn to die.
• Every Bullet is a Tracer: Convenient when you need to identify who held the gun. But it's not just bullets—every spear and spike is a tracer too, and one thrown axe leaves a remarkable helix-shaped trail as it tumbles through the air.
• Evidence Scavenger Hunt: The only way that the player can solve the mystery is to hunt through the ship and find whatever remains can be found across the ship's various decks. Then it's up to the player to hunt through memories and create connections, ultimately piecing together the story of the Obra Dinn.
• Exact Words:
  • The journal can only record who killed someone without any room for motive. This ultimately causes kills in self-defense, executions of innocent people, and accidents to go down in history as murders in the eyes of the insurance company. Captain Robert Witterel's several kills in self-defense go down as murders, and his estate is posthumously fined severely for it, although given that he committed suicide, his entire estate was already forfeit anyway. Although Henry Brennan is one of four seamen participating in the (wrongful) execution of Hok-Seng Lau, it was Brennan himself who fired the shot that hit Lau, while the others missed their mark, this is not a crime he is fined for, as the execution was sanctioned (his killing of John Davies, however, was not and his estate is fined for it). Charles Miner, who causes friendly fire, is labelled as a murderer as well. In a similar vein, although Thomas Sefton's foolish actions caused the death of William Wasim, no fate allows you to name Sefton as his murderer, so his estate is rewarded.
  • There's also the alternative interpretation of events that the player can take—there's an achievement for blaming every single death on the Captain, described as 'loosely true, in eyes of company and crown' since while they were at sea he was, on paper, responsible for his entire crew's safety and wellbeing.
  • In "Soldiers of the Sea", two characters are decapitated by one of the crab creatures. The game, of course, accepts "decapitated" as a cause of death, but it also accepts "strangled", since technically speaking, they were being suffocated at the moments their heads were cut off, as well as "clawed", since the crab was using its claws to strangle and decapitate them.
  • In "The Doom", two crew members are shot when a lit cannon is knocked loose by the Kraken and therefore aimed at them. The only death accepted is "shot by cannon" but the game will accept the culprit as either Abraham Akbar (who lit the fuse) or the Kraken (who technically aimed it) as acceptable answers.
  • Anyone who falls into the ocean, either by accident or malice, can be considered to have either "drowned" or "fell overboard", since the latter leads to the former if no one fishes them out (and in such cases, no one does).
  • An audible example regarding Zungi Sathi's death, which players can easily chalk up his cause of death being spiked by the crab-riders by inspecting his body, but paying close attention to his final moments reveals that the last thing he heard was a gunshot, hinting to his true fatal injury. Additionally, before the shot, First Mate Hoscut can be heard shouting, "Someone shoot the damn thing!".
  • The third mate's final request to the captive mer-creature, in exchange for granting her freedom, is that the Obra Dinn make it safely home to port. But he never specified that any of the people on board needed to reach Falmouth alive...
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • During "The Calling", Samuel Galligan calls out to another man, asking if he can still row—while it's plainly obvious that the man has a spear sticking through his neck. In fairness, the scene is a lot more chaotic than it would appear from your perspective.
  • This is also the case for some of the bodies that can still be found by the player, while the other bodies from those periods are missing. Presumably, those missing were thrown overboard, while those remaining were unfound or nobody got around to dealing with them. A particularly notable case is a body found in the port walk, who died during the crab rider attack and no one thought to check that area.
• Featureless Protagonist: The nameless player character is never shown, and their voice is randomly picked to be either a man or woman's voice with each new playthrough. All a player can ever see of them is their gloved hands and coat sleeves, which are not different between male and female.
• Final Speech: Averted most of the time since most of the deaths occur during high action sequences, but some speeches are provided—for example Thomas Lanke manages to gasp out a few final words after being stabbed, lamenting how he was unable to save Peter Milroy from the kraken. Martin Perrott's final speech in the last part of the Bargain, while not the last lines heard in the game, work as a final speech for the ship itself as well.
• First-Episode Twist: Initially, the game appears to be a historical murder mystery with some mild supernatural elements. The fact that sea monsters exist in this world is revealed immediately after the tutorial chapter, and completely changes the direction of the story.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In present time, the player can see a twinkling in the distance in the ocean that they can never reach. It's the shell, proving the sea monsters held their end of the bargain.
  • Henry Evans, the ship surgeon, has a monkey with him frequently in the early sections of the story, in particular Chapter 2. Come Chapter 9, said monkey is nowhere to be found on the longboat. Eventually, it's revealed that Evans shot the monkey in order to obtain insight into the final two deaths on the Obra Dinn that he otherwise would have had no way of knowing by creating a body for the player to use the Memento Mortem on.
  • If it wasn't obvious that the Henry Evans on the manifest and the Henry Evans whose preface begins the book are one and the same, the case containing the journal and Memento Mortem can be seen with him on that longboat. It's also present during Chapter 2, stowed underneath the bed in the surgery as Evans' assistant is cleaning it.
  • A cow skull hung on the wall lets you view when it was slaughtered, which hints that even animal deaths can be viewed if there are remains available. This, plus two human deaths viewed solely from the bones of severed limbs, also confirms that complete remains aren't necessary for the Memento to work. At the end of the game in the Golden Ending, Evans ships you the severed hand of his pet monkey, which he had previously killed inside a locked room in order to see what happened within. There's your remains.
  • The sketch "Justice at Sea" eventually gets shown as one of the deaths when someone is tried on the sea for murder. The culprit is hung from the mast and shot by several of the seaman in the back.
  • Spikes can be seen sticking out of the bulkhead that divides the rest of the cargo hold from the lazarette.
  • During the third-to-last scene of The Escape, a scream can be hard in the background. This turns out to be the crew member in the previous scene immediately prior to being shot.^note This creates a little bit of a Continuity Snarl—in that previous scene, which is a second or two after the scream, the characters from the next scene can be found already well into their actions.
• From Bad to Worse: Sums up perfectly the entire journey of the Obra Dinn. It started off with a fatal accident and some sickness, and ended with attacks by a Giant Enemy Crab, a Giant Squid Sea Monster, and the crew going steadily insane until they were nearly wiped out.
• Ghost Ship: The Obra Dinn sailed back to port with nary a person onboard, and the only noticeable remains of the crew are skeletons. The entirety of the game is trying to figure out how the ship met such a grisly fate.
• Giant Squid: The Sea Monster the crew encounters in "The Doom" takes this form. It's a massive beast that easily dwarfs the Obra Dinn, with its tentacles able to snap the main rigging in half like it was a twig. The crew call it a Kraken.
• Going Down with the Ship: Zigzagged. Captain Witterel is the last person to die in chronological order after shooting himself, and the ship sinks with his remains on board, but he definitely didn't go down with his ship in the naval sense.
• Gorn: Some of the deaths depicted in this game are downright horrific in their brutality, obfuscated by the 1-bit graphics. Special mention goes to Maba, who gets torn in half by the Giant Squid. Another excellent example is Olus Wiater, who gets the top part of his skull blown clean off when he is shot with a pistol at contact range. Even worse is Christian Wolff, who gets accidentally shot at contact range by a cannon and leaves behind a corpse that is barely recognizable as human.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Played with. While moments of death are fully visible to the player, the Retreaux graphics and monochrome color scheme obscure the worst of the details. If not for that, many of the game's scenes would be very graphic.
• Gratuitous Latin: Your pocketwatch, the "Memento Mortem". It's a slight variation on the phrase "Memento Mori".^note Both are translated as "remember death", but using the verb Mori (meaning "to die") rather than the noun Mortem (death). This changes the meaning from "remember you will die" to "remember the event of death", which sums up this pocketwatch's power.
  Memento Mortem – Remember Death.
• Gray-and-Gray Morality: The conflict between the humans and the sea monsters. The sea monsters are directly responsible for the majority of the deaths on the ship, killing many innocent crewmembers. However, they do have justified reasons for attacking; first, they come after the Formosan chest, which contains a shell that is implied to have been stolen from them at some point in the past. The rest of their assaults are aimed at rescuing the three mermaids the crew took captive. Despite their violent behavior, they are also shown to have some sense of honor; after the last mermaid is given back the Formosan shell and released, she obeys the dying request of the man who set her free and returns the Obra Dinn to its native port. On the humans' side, most of the crew had little to do with the actions that provoked the sea creatures, but are still killed in the crossfire while attempting to defend the ship. However, it was still human actions that provoked the sea creatures in the first place. In addition, their treatment of their captives is far from humane; one man jokes about cooking and eating the mermaids, and the captain's response to the other creatures' attempt to mount a rescue is to murder his captives one by one until the last surviving mermaid finally gives in and calls off the attack.
• Groin Attack: Narrowly avoided by the Captain, who has a mermaid-fired spike miss his groin and instead bury itself in the deck planks between his legs.
• Guide Dang It!: The obscure or complicated methods you need to identify some crewmembers means some players are required to abuse the automatic confirmation mechanic or use a walkthrough.
  • The four Chinese topmen can only be distinguished by their shoes, a fact most players miss, leading them to frustrating trial-and-error guesswork. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw describes it best in his review of the game:
    "...you're probably going to have to cheese it when it comes to the four identical Chinese topmen; I have it on good authority that there is some method of telling them apart, but whatever it is, I doubt it's easier than randomly swapping their names around until you get a hit, like you're fussing over seating arrangements with a very indecisive bride."
  • Trying to figure out which Peters brother is which often comes down to brute-force, as neither is identified by name. There is only one way to tell them apart: in The Doom part 2, you can see a hammock with the number 48 on it, meaning its owner, Nathan, is still alive at the moment. This clue is extremely easy to miss, requires a good amount of deductive reasoning, and is found in a scene neither of the brothers appear in, meaning most players won't think to check the scene when looking for clues relating to them.
  • Maba, the topman from New Guinea, gets his face unblurred in his death scene. It will be the sixth death scene the player unlocks, long before you view any that will give you clues to his role aboard. At that point, the only way to identify him relies on knowledge external to the game: he has distinctive tattoos that the player is apparently supposed to know in advance are typical of people from the South Pacific. This is made all the worse because he looks more like a European and his tattoos do not accurately resemble any traditional tattoo styles used in New Guinea. To make it even more confusing, shortly after his death, the player sees the death of the Bosun, who asks for 'his Frenchman' who had been 'torn apart'. Plenty of players would assume Maba to be that one, unaware that the man next to him whose death we never see was torn apart as well.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Several members of the crew are literally torn in half as they meet their ends. The Giant Squid they encounter in "The Doom" is introduced ripping topman Maba apart at the waist and does this to quite a few other sailors offscreen. One unfortunate fellow in the same chapter is blasted point-blank by cannon fire belowdecks, shredding his body, when the same Sea Monster reaches through a gunport and shoves the cannon sideways just as it's about to go off.
• Hate Sink: Second Mate Nichols is devoid of redeeming qualities. He is notably the crew member with the dubious honor of the highest amount of fines charged to his estate due to his manifold crimes committed on the Obra Dinn.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: In a few of the deaths, namely those of Renfred Rajub, Martin Perrott, and Alfred Klestil, a faint heartbeat can be heard during the final second or two of the voice lines. Notably, all of them die slowly and are conscious in their last moments.
• He Knows Too Much: The reason why two people get killed. Thomas Lanke overhears a mutiny plan and immediately panics, yelling "Mutiny!" at the top of his lungs. He warns the other crewmen but is fatally stabbed for his trouble. Earlier, Nunzio Pasqua has the misfortune of walking into Second Mate Nichols' plan to steal the Formosan chest and also receives a fatal knife wound.
• Hell Is That Noise: The crab riders make a very creepy whirring or buzzing sound during their attack on the ship.
• Heroic Mime: The protagonist utters a few words at the beginning of the game as they approach the Obra Dinn via rowboat, and that's all they'll ever say.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Third Mate Martin Perrott opens up the lazarette and gives the Artifact of Doom back to the last mermaid in exchange for sending the Obra Dinn back home, and receives several lethal wounds for his trouble, before he can make the creature understand. Although Perrott dies of his wounds, the mermaid holds up her end of the bargain... or she would have, if several attempts at mutiny hadn't gotten the rest of the crew killed.
  • Attempted by It-Beng Sia, the Formosan leader, who gives up his life to open the chest and activate the defenses that stun the attacking mermaids. Unfortunately, by that point nearly everyone else had been killed anyway, and all he really achieves is saving Second Mate Nichols and allowing him to carry the mermaids back to the Obra Dinn, sealing the fates of the rest of the crew.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: The captain, dealt a tragic hand and forced to kill the last of his crew as mutineers in self-defense, goes down in history as a murderer, and his estate is fined posthumously for it.
• His Name Is...: The fate of Chioh Tan, who is killed mere moments before Captain Witterel can extract any details about the Formosan Chest or the mermaids. The (translator-aided) interrogation only makes it as far as 'there's a shell and it's dangerous'.
• Hourglass Plot: The ship's manifest lists captain Robert Witterel on first position and seaman Samuel Peters last. The captain is the last person to die aboard and his fate is the last one listed in book, while Samuel Peters is the first casualty on the ship and accordingly his fate is the first one listed in the book. It's actually possible to play in a way that his death is the last one you see aboard the Obra Dinn, while the Captain is the first person you see in a memory.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The methods of death include "speared" and "spiked", and a number of the crew members get skewered quite severely.
• Impossible Insurance: The final resulting insurance verdict in the Golden Ending. While it does reward the estates of victims who died valiantly in the line of duty and punishes the estates of criminals with heavy fines, some characters who killed in self-defense or accidents are labelled and fined as murderers, such as the Captain. But then again, English law at the time stipulated that his estate was forfeit to the crown anyway as a result of his death being a suicide. Charles Miner, who tried to kill a monster but hit a person instead, is also labelled as a murderer.
• Improbable Infant Survival: The only crew member addressed as "boy", the particularly young-looking Davey James, is one of the few survivors of the Obra Dinn.
• Improvised Weapon: Most of the deaths by bludgeon are carried out via clubbing someone to death with whatever piece of wood is close by. One egregious example is Abigail Hoscut-Witterel, who is killed by the kraken slamming the ship's mast into her.
• Injured Self-Drag: Twice over the course of the game:
  • After being hit by a spike during the crab rider attack, the ship’s steward, Zungi Sathi, drags himself to the port walk in an attempt to recover. There, he is accidentally shot by bosun’s mate Charles Miner.
  • After being stabbed by gunner’s mate Olus Waiter, midshipman Thomas Lanke drags himself to the midshipmen’s cabin. First Mate William Hoscut attends to him as he dies.
• Instant Death Bullet: Every character shot by a gun dies in that instant and no later. Which has a gameplay purpose as multiple deaths hinge on bullet trajectories. The death of Henry Brennan suggests this is a Downplayed Trope: while his death scene ends with his throat being slit, his death rattle can be heard at the beginning of the next part and his hands are now on his throat, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the bleeding; suggesting that the Memento Mortem counts the moment of the lethal attack in cases of near-instant death as the moment of death.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • One of the crew members in the ship's log is Henry Evans. Since Henry Evans was the one who sent the player character the journal and the Memento Mortem pocket watch in the first place, it can be reasonably assumed that Evans made it off of the ship alive.
  • Some of the possible methods of death are oddly specific as well. What does it mean to be "spiked", for example?
  • Edward Spratt, the artist aboard the ship, isn't in any of his own sketches. Identifying his body is therefore trivial—it's the one with his signature, "E.S.", instead of a portrait in the journal.
• Jerkass: Second Mate Nichols is revealed to be the most abhorrent member of the crew by an order of magnitude. His Evil Plan seems to have been to hold the Formosan royalty and their magic chest for ransom. While implementing it, he kills an innocent man and frames one of the Formosan guards for his murder, resulting in his conviction and execution. Nichols then kidnaps the royals, sets out with his co-conspirators, and ends up getting everyone with him killed as he cowers in his rowboat. When Nichols tries to bargain with the Obra Dinn as they catch up, he is dealt a very deserved Karmic Death by the last remaining Formosan.
• Kill It with Fire: One of the crab riders is killed by being set on fire, with a midshipman unfortunately being caught in the blaze.
• Late to the Tragedy: Five years too late, to the point where you don't find a single living soul left on the Obra Dinn. Not everyone on board died, but most of them did, and your job as an insurance inspector is to find out what happened.
• Left Hanging: At a certain point in the game, you will run out of crew members to find and memories to explore. As a result, since the player is only privy to the events in which crew members die, much of the story of the Obra Dinn is left unfinished. If you want to fill in the log book as much as you possibly can, you'll have to get the last few fates through guesswork and logical deduction.
• Lethally Stupid: In Unholy Captives, the ship's cook notices the crew is hauling still-alive mermaids through the ship. He jokes about cooking and eating them, then tries to pry "a pretty shell" free from a mermaid, despite the warnings shouted to him from the rest of the crew. Not only does he get himself predictably killed, the mermaid's flailing causes one of the seamen carrying it to fall down the stairs and break his neck.
• Literal Genie: The Bargain reveals that the last mermaid and her shell were released in return for "seeing the Obra Dinn home." As the game's title suggests, the mermaid did as asked. After all the surviving crew members had either left the ship or killed each other, but as asked. To be fair, that wasn't the mermaid's fault, and it happened within hours, well before the request could have been fulfilled. On the other hand, bringing the ship back after more than five years would have been too late for the survivors in any case. It's not clear if the delay was an act of malice or not, but it's safe to say the result isn't what Third Mate Martin Perrott sacrificed himself for.
• MacGuffin: The shells. Clearly very important to the mermaids, instantly assumed to be very valuable by all the humans who see them, and the only moving things during the death memories. But not even the Golden Ending will reveal why they are so important.
• Magic A Is Magic A:
  • The Memento Mortem has a few abilities, all of which behave consistently. When used, it lets you hear the last few moments of a creature's life, see the exact moment they died with time frozen for one minute around you, and it lets you do the same to corpses you see in those visions, transferring an image of them into the present. Also, it's shown that these powers are not limited to just human deaths. You can use the watch to see a cow getting killed for its meat in Chapter II, and Henry Evans uses these abilities to learn what happened in a locked room in Chapter VIII. Evans throws his pet monkey into the room through a grate, shoots the monkey, then pulls it back out on a rope. That done, Evans uses the Memento Mortem on the corpse of the monkey and makes his way back through the several other bodies in the room to find out what happened in there.
  • Opening the magic treasure chest that contains the shell will set you on fire. One of the Formosans, as well as the Captain's Steward Fillip Dahl, find this out the hard way when their flesh is charred to the bone upon each one opening the chests.
  • While it's not detailed exactly what the magic shell does, it always gives off a consistently eerie glow. And that does mean always, even during death flashbacks with the Memento Mortem. This is especially noticable during the flashbacks, since nothing else is moving during the flashbacks.
• Magical Accessory: The Memento Mortem, a magical pocketwatch which allows the bearer to see and hear visions of the past at the very moment when a person died.
• Mathematician's Answer: When the main character is asked how their companion is supposed to hoist the (far too heavy) suitcase they brought with them onto the ship, their answer is "Carefully."
• Meaningful Background Event: While the focus in every vignette is obviously the person dying, most clues are found by meticulously examining the scenes and paying attention to seemingly innocuous background details.
• Metaphorically True: You can get the hidden achievement "Captain Did It" by blaming the Captain for all deaths aboard the Obra Dinn, since this is, according to the achievement description, "Loosely true, in the eyes of Company and Crown".
• Miscarriage of Justice: Hok-Seng Lau confesses to murder and is executed. You soon learn that someone else committed the murder. If you pay close attention, you may eventually realize that one of the people who has been serving as a translator (including, most likely, during said "confession") is in on the actual murderer's scheme.
• Multinational Team: Downplayed. The Obra Dinn is an East India Company merchantman, so a lot of the crew are British, especially English, but like most commercial vessels they pick up crew wherever they happen to make port (typically places where the British Empire has colonial holdings) and large numbers of itinerant migrant sailors were a profitable staple of English shipping at that period. The game prompts the player to research this while deciphering the term "lascar". ^note A lascar was a semi-slave Indian, SE Asian, or Arab sailor, available for hire at the port "lascar houses" both in England and the colonies (one of these houses is mentioned in-game), working at ridiculously low wages (20 times less than a white person or a Negro), underfed, and unable to leave his employment at will. Lascar sailors were mistreated and neglected to the extent that in 1815, a special petition was published that required the employers to provide them with a bed, a pillow, and at least one change of basic clothes, including one pair of shoes.. As a result, a significant portion of the crew is not British-born. This has a gameplay impact, as it can help to identify who-is-whom when piecing together the record of what happened.
• Multiple Endings: The ending changes depending on how complete your records are of who died and how; as soon as all the flashbacks have been seen, regardless of how complete your records are, it's possible to leave the Obra Dinn on a rowboat. The people responsible for the inquiry will be dissatisfied with a lack of effort if you didn't identify enough crew members' fates. Miss Jane Bird, one of the survivors, will also write a letter to the inspector commenting on their efforts.
  • If the inspector has solved 27 fates or fewer, Bird's letter will say that Dr. Evans died of disappointment; the book is so incomplete that it disheartened him to the point of worsening his health. He then used his last moments regretting having entrusted the inspector with the task. Granted, Dr. Evans was on his deathbed, but still!
  • If the inspector has solved between 30 and 56 fates, the letter will say that the book is incomplete, but Dr. Evans appreciates the effort, acknowledging the difficulty of the task. Bird will say that the remaining survivors: she, Emily Jackson, and Davey James, are content living in Morocco and asks the inspector to not write back.
  • If the inspector has managed to solve all 58 fates, the letter will say that Dr. Evans died pleased with the inspector's efforts. As an expression of his gratitude, he returns the book to the inspector along with an object necessary to complete it. Bird will then ask the inspector to not write back, as the memory of the voyage is too painful for her, Jackson, and James.
• Mundane Utility: The Memento Mortem. A powerful artifact that allows the player to look back at the moment of a person's death, and it's used to... investigate insurance claims. Such a thing would have single-handedly trivialised murder investigations such as the murder of Nunzio Pasqua, since the accused was framed for it and you find Pasqua's true murderer.
• Mundanger: Life aboard ship in the 1800s was dangerous enough even without mermaids, crab monsters, and kraken. Four men die of illness and in cargo-handling accidents even before the supernatural elements take hold.
• The Mutiny: Three of them. They all fail.
  • Second Mate Edward Nichols leads a mutinous expedition to the Canary Islands, with the Formosan royals kidnapped and the chest stolen. The mermaids track down their rowboats and slaughter almost all everyone involved, including the Formosans. Nichols survives the ordeal and catches up with the Obra Dinn, but gets gunned down in revenge by the one Formosan he left on the ship.
  • In Chapter IX. Escape, Gunner's Mate Olus Wiater broaches the subject of taking the ship and selling the Formosans' treasure with Fourth Mate John Davies, but they don't get far before Thomas Lanke overhears them and calls out to warn the rest of the crew. Lanke dies for his trouble, but the would-be mutineers are killed in the resulting fracas as well.
  • The few surviving crewmen attempt to take the ship from the captain in Chapter X. The End, but Captain Witterel kills them all instead, leaving him as the last man alive aboard the Obra Dinn. He shoots himself shortly thereafter.
• Never Found the Body:
  • Chapters IV, VII and IX all have 'conclusion' pages, allowing the player to enter the fates of crewmembers who vanished during that chapter without leaving a scannable corpse. They can generally be deduced by returning to the memory in which they were last seen alive, and determining what was about to happen, or in one case what another character said happened to them even if you never find the actual body.
  • The skeletons that can be found in the present day were bodies that were never found and/or disposed of by the crew. This makes sense for the last people on board the ship, since nobody was left to clean them up, but the trope then crosses over with Failed a Spot Check for John Naples, whose leg is found behind a staircase at the other end of the ship from which he died; Edward Spratt, who got strangled while using the ship's head (toilet) at the bow; and Zungi Sathi, who crawled into the portwalk to hide, got hit by friendly fire, and lay there dead without being found for the remainder of the voyage. The same goes for the unidentified stowaway in Chapter I, who died in a barrel, got neatly stored away and then nobody ever noticed.
  • Averted with Timothy Butement, whose leg is found outside the First Mate's window; investigating the first part of The Escape shows the First Mate leaving his cabin with a very serious I-have-a-dead-man-hanging-outside-my-window expression; in the next part, we see a topman climbing over the side of the ship near the body and the captain standing near him. This indicates that they were about to salvage the body, with the First Mate gathering crewmembers to help, when they waltzed into the titular escape. This implies that the events from Chapter IV to Chapter X happened during a stretch of a day or two at most, so certain bodies just got missed in the general chaos of everything that happened.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Focusing on the moments of death for the crew means that the player avoids seeing the (mostly) gruesome causes of death. However, that doesn't mean that you don't hear them play out. Sometimes they're quite mundane (such as the deaths caused by illness) but when you're listening to, say, a man being ripped in half by a giant squid monster...
  • The fact that you see the monsters in freeze-frame does nothing to diminish their frightfulness. If anything it only makes them scarier, because you're forced to imagine them in motion...
• Notice This:
  • Remains that you can use the Memento Mortem on have a swarm of flies around them. In an environment where everything else is still, this helps in locating particularly small pieces of a body.
  • If remains can only be found in a vision, the Memento Mortem will release a pulse that causes the remains to glow white and be visible through any surface. This is particularly helpful for visions which have events taking place on multiple decks.
• Obvious Rule Patch: The last few fates are confirmed in batches of two as to not make the last batch just one person.
• One-Hit Polykill: In Unholy Captives part 1, Hamadou Diom is holding Chioh Tan while Captain Witterel interrogates him. One of the mermaids being hoisted onto the deck lashes out with a spike barrage and one spike goes right through Chioh and Hamadou.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Averted, as the crew list includes both two Johns and two Charleses. Naturally, both pairs have one flashback each naming the person in conversation by first name only, requiring the player to deduce which of the pair is actually being referred to. There are also two Edwards, two Henries, two Samuels, two Thomases and two Williams, but no such confusion arises between them.
  • This helps infer the fates of the four who escaped from the ship. The Memento Mortem and the journal were sent to you by someone named Henry Evans, which is not coincidentally the same name as the ship's surgeon. It's entirely possible that someone else named Henry Evans wrote to you, but if you search the surgeon's cabin or the longboat he escaped in, you will find the case that held the Memento Mortem, so it is the same man.
• Only Known by Initials: The Chief Inspector's initials are A.G., but the signature is otherwise illegible.
• Ontological Mystery: To an extent. Finding out what happened to the ship's crew is important, but in doing so the player is slowly revealed to a second mystery: the purpose of the voyage and why it went so wrong.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: The mermaids are treated as "terrible beasts" by the game. They have claws instead of hands, react like feral monsters when attacked, and can shoot long spikes that make pincushions out of the crewmen. They also have three pairs of mammaries.
• Pensieve Flashback: The player character solves the mystery by finding corpses and using the Memento Mortem to look into their last memories.
• Plucky Middie: All three of the Obra Dinn's midshipmen are particularly valiant in the face of danger. It doesn't save them.
• Poor Communication Kills: Third Mate Martin Perrott is only able to explain to the captive mermaid that he's releasing her after being fatally spiked by her in self-defense.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Say what you will about the Captain, but the man is pushing at least 40, likely 50 (evidenced by him telling his steward "Twenty years my steward!" in one scene), and he still fights off, and kills, two other sailors who are presumably much younger than him; shrugging off strikes to the chest from a sharpened wooden stick and a literal stab to the back with a knife. He also kills two mermaids by himself. Granted, they were encaged, but they had already killed a lot of people near-effortlessly.
• Real Footage Re-creation: Done In-Universe, where Justice At Sea (a pencil sketch of an on-board execution by firing line with much of the crew watching) ends up in the player's hands, who then uses it to identify the individual crew members depicted therein. The player eventually ends up travelling back in time to the very moment of the actual execution, where the sketch turns out to be remarkably faithful to the real thing, albeit with some minor embellishments.
• Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: Averted: Although all four female passengers wear their period-appropriate dresses, Emily Jackson shows that she has a gun and is not afraid to use it when Leonid Volkov is attacking her and her companions as they are escaping.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Prior to his apparent Sanity Slippage in Chapter X, Captain Witterel shows this during chapter IX when he threatens to shoot Leonid Volkov if he doesn't let the escaping party go peacefully. This also suggests that Witterel authorized them to take the longboat to begin with.
• Red Herring:
  • Quite a few of the choices for possible fates don't actually happen to anyone, which makes it harder to simply randomly guess a cause of death^note For example, no one freezes to death, nor is anyone killed with an axe. This is also true of the possible culprits, as there is no "foreign enemy"—every death is down to an accident, illness, the sea-dwellers (all "beasts"), or members of the crew. Similarly, there are multiple choices for suicide, but only one of the crew, the Captain, commits suicide, and he's one of the earliest and easiest fates to figure out.
  • Some seemingly obvious assumptions may also turn out to be wrong. For example, the dying Bosun asks about "his Frenchman" and is told that he was "torn apart" by the kraken. A few scenes prior features a crewman being torn in half. This is not the Bosun's mate, and neither is he French—he's actually the sole New Guinean on the ship. The actual Bosun's mate is a few meters away, last seen fighting a tentacle of the kraken, right next to his Bosun. His body is never found and his face doesn't unblur until much later in the game; presumably you're meant to deduce his identity from the fact he's always seen near the Bosun^note or, if you already know your naval history, the fact that he's the only one wearing a marinière, or French sailor's shirt.. Also, the Gunner's Mate's hat may fool you into believe he's one of the higher ranking officers, since they also wear fancy hats.
• Retreaux: Obra Dinn is a 3D, polygon-based game, but with a shader that renders everything such that every frame looks like a heavily dithered, entirely pixel-based image on a one- or two-color monitor from the early '80s. The game defaults to the off-black and off-white of the original Apple Macintosh, but can be tweaked to IBM, Zenith, LCD, and more, with stippled shades of grey and a slight glow effect from the brighter 'lit' pixels.
• The Reveal: A nested series of escalating reveals as you go deeper and deeper into the ship. The captain put down a mutiny and then shot himself, the ship was attacked by a colossal squid and then invaded by giant crab-like horrors, the attacks occurred because Second Mate Nichols robbed the Formosans of their treasure and ended up summoning a host of mermaids, framing one of the royal guards for a murder he'd committed (that guard being the man killed by firing line in the "Justice at Sea" sketch). The first two chapters are mild by comparison, containing a few deaths by sickness or accident. The final reveal, in "Bargain", is that Third Mate Perrott gave his life to return the shell to the mermaids and free the sole survivor, and that the captain's steward, Filip, burned to death after getting his hands on the shell. Perhaps the greater reveal is that, supernatural though the plot might be, there was no eldritch madness at work. All the deaths that weren't due to monsters, accidents or illness occurred thanks to the usual combination of human cupidity, hatred, and paranoia, and even the monsters might have been avoided if not for the murderous Nichols and his party of thieves and kidnappers.
• Riddle for the Ages: The player never learns the full story of the Obra Dinn. They only receive the bits and pieces that stem from the deaths that occurred around it.
• Rule of Three: The game confirms the fates of the crew in sets of three: once you have accurately recorded three fates, those fates are locked in and can't be altered. This prevents players from brute-forcing every fate, but also allows players to brute-force some fates as long as they're sure of two others.
• Same Surname Means Related:
  • Two members of the crew have the surname Peters, which would probably go over the head of the player the first time they read the crew list—it only ever gets mentioned when one of them takes revenge for the death of his brother. However, the tricky part is identifying which Peters is which.
  • Early on it's revealed that the Captain's first mate was his brother-in-law. Luckily his wife listed her maiden name as a middle name on the manifest, making it simple to guess.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Two groups of people try and get away with longboats. It ends very badly for the first group, since they try right as the kraken attacks the Obra Dinn, and all of them drown in the chaos. The second group, who does it after the attack, is much more successful, and its four members are the only survivors of the tragedy.
• Sea Monster: The Doom is all about an attack from a giant kraken, with tentacles that tear the ship apart and crush several crew members as they try to fight it off.
• Senseless Sacrifice:
  • Third Mate Martin Perrott is killed trying to release the last mermaid and her shell, in exchange for "seeing the Obra Dinn home". The mermaid fulfilled her end of the bargain. Unfortunately, the remaining crew members swiftly see to it that there's no one left alive on the ship, which leads to, well, the return of the Obra Dinn as a Ghost Ship. That's probably not the result he had in mind.
  • It-Beng Sia sacrifices himself activating the chest's defenses in order to stop the mermaid attack on the mutineers' rowboats, hoping to save Ms. Lim. Unfortunately, unknown to him in the confusion, a mermaid had already clawed out her throat just a few seconds earlier.
• Serial Escalation: In both directions. In chronological order, events get more and more over-the-top, but when viewed in roughly reverse order during normal gameplay, the player's discoveries become increasingly fantastical, from a giant octopus to crab riders to actual literal mermaids.
• Sherlock Scan: Invoked. Your pocketwatch allows you to see and hear a reconstructed version of events. From this, observant players can deduce the identity of everyone onboard by paying attention to not only the role they play on the ship, but also how they act in many situations. Every single person has clues to their identity.
  • The most important clue is that people sleeping in their hammocks have tags on the bottom of them that correspond with their number on the crew register. Going a little further, most of the sleeping crew keep their heads under their blankets and so names cannot be directly attached to their faces... but their shoes poke out, and players can match them up in other scenes by looking carefully at characters' ankles. A little deeper yet, one fellow has a distinctive pipe and satchel in several scenes. In another, that same pipe is seen sticking out of that same satchel hanging from one of those numbered hammocks. Similarly, an arm with a unique tattoo pokes out from one hammock.
  • Once you've figured out that some of the paintings group together the people who work under the same role and that many people with the same job dress the same, it's possible to deduce several more key identities without their names ever being said.
  • For the most part, people of the same nationality tend to be together when they aren't on watch. But look closely and you'll notice one white sailor frequently seen spending his free time with the Chinese sailors. If you go into one of the scenes where everyone is sleeping and look closely at the numbered hammocks, there is one section where all the Chinese sailors and one Englishman sleep.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the "true ending" finale, a bookshelf contains a few items in displays:
    • The Scarab of Ra.
    • One of the large crystals from Crystal Quest.
  • The Bargain chapter features a deal that is kept in nearly the worst way possible. It is accessed through a monkey's paw.
  • The ship's carpenter is one Winston Smith, for no apparent reason. Perhaps it's just another reference to The '80s.
  • Former Naughty Dog employee Lucas Pope couldn't resist including a pair of brothers named Nathan and Samuel in a nautical-themed mystery game involving a supernatural Artifact of Doom.
• Shown Their Work: Lucas Pope has stated that he has aimed for accuracy while designing the Obra Dinn. Even considering the limitations of the format, it is clear that he has done his research.
  • Captain Witterel's estate was forfeited to the Crown because he committed suicide. Suicide was considered a crime in England during the 1800s, and the penalty was to have the suicide's property forfeited to the Crown.
  • The giant crabs the crew are fighting are modeled after the Japanese spider crab.
• Sickening "Crunch!": Heard nearly everytime someone is crushed to death by an object.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: While there are a few exceptions during certain memories, the majority of the game's musical cues are jaunty and nautical-sounding, even though they play over such merry and whimsical events as a ship-wide murder spree, a mutiny, an attack by a giant sea monster, an invasion by crab-riding merpeople, and suicides.
• Spike Shooter: One of the possible methods of death is "spiked by a terrible beast". One of the nastier things about the crab monsters is their ability to launch volleys of bony spikes with enough force to pin a man to the wall, through the chest and out the other side of the wall, from across a room, multiple times.
• The Stoic: The protagonist. Corpses everywhere, mysterious visions, monsters in said visions... They never seem even slightly fazed.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: Some characters die in the middle of a conversation, or while doing some mundane action on the ship, so suddenly seeing them in the middle of a gruesome death scene can be quite jarring.
• Take Your Time: When you have seen all scenes, your ferryman will tell you there's a storm coming and you should finish up. Having seen what happens in these parts around storms, you may be tempted to hurry. There's no need to, especially since there is no Post-End Game Content. Once you're off the ship, the game has a denouement and is then over.
• Taking You with Me:
  • Charles Hershtik sets one of the crab riders on fire by throwing a lantern at it, and burns to death along with it.
  • Winston Smith manages to kill the other crab rider with his hand mortar, shortly before dying of his wounds.
• Talking to the Dead: Captain Robert Witterel speaks to his dead wife Abigail, confessing that he killed her brother moments earlier.
• Time Stands Still: Played with. When you see someone's death, it's at the exact moment they died, and you're allowed to wander through the fate with time frozen. That being said, any fate that contains the mystical beast shell still has the shell giving off a pulsing light, to show that it's a supernatural element.
• Too Dumb to Live: You'd really like to fill that one in as cause of death for some people. Like the cook who jokes about cooking a still living mermaid that has already killed two people in the last five minutes and attempts to reach for a shell it's holding. And the foolhardy carpenter's mate who attempts to attack a much bigger threat. Not to mention the Captain's wife, who walks out on deck while the ship is being attacked by a sea monster to ask for the location of her husband.
• Translation with an Agenda: Captain Witterel states that Hok-Seng Lau confessed to murdering Nunzio Pasqua during his execution, but in the very next scene, it is revealed that Nichols was the one responsible. The player later finds out that a crewman who could speak both Chinese and English was in league with the actual culprit, suggesting that the "confession" was actually a deliberate mistranslation by Hong.
• Trash the Set: At the end after the Inspector leaves to avoid an oncoming storm, the Obra Dinn gets sunk because of it, preventing any further investigation and putting the 56 souls who perished at rest.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: For some of the more obscure identities, finding the correct name often boils down to cycling through a list of likely suspects (usually based on profession) after you have confirmed two other fates. The Chinese topmen tend to be figured out in this fashion, as the method of identifying them properly is somewhat unintuitive.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In Chapter VII, Part 2. Surprisingly, almost no one seems to notice the kraken attack that killed Artist Edward Spratt at the bow of the ship, since most of the crew members are sleeping and some of them are having an early breakfast. Steward Paul Moss, on the other hand, appears to have heard something... a little strange going on...
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Second Mate Edward Nichols' personal greed sets off a chain reaction of events that ends up getting almost everyone killed. Some blame can also be given to the Formosans whose cargo was the target of the mermaids and other beasts.
  • Might also be true of the stowaway, if his or her greater weight than whatever was supposed to be in that barrel was a contributing factor to the accident in "Loose Cargo". If so, this led directly to Samuel Peters' death as well as their own, and indirectly to the murder of Lars Linde ... possibly even to the deaths of the first three deserters, if Nathan's quarrel with Linde delayed their departure until the kraken showed up.
• Video Game Tutorial: Chapter 10 serves as this, introducing you to the mechanic of the Memento Mortem watch. Chapter 10 includes some of the easier identities to discover as well, easing the player into the concept of using intuition and collected knowledge to solve the mystery.
• Villain Ball: For Second Mate Edward Nichols: When returning to your ship after a kidnapping plan that goes awry because of the mermaids, disposing of the bodies of your fellow mutineers is one thing, but leaving your dead captives on a longboat along with the stolen treasure in front of their bodyguard who doesn't understand English is a bad idea.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: During "A Bitter Cold", one crew member vomits off-screen as a cow gets slaughtered on the orlop deck. You do hear him vomit, and you end up seeing the aftermath, but the lack of colour ends up softening some of the grosser details.
• Walking Spoiler: In perhaps an unprecedented case, everyone. All members of the crew start out unidentified, and each provides varying degrees of insight into the overall narrative of the Obra Dinn.
• Walk on Water: When you get to the second half of the two-chapter story arc (Chapter IV), you get the ability to walk on water and explore the ocean for clues, obviously due to the Memento Mortem allowing scenes to be frozen in time in death memories.
• Weather Manipulation: The mermaids are implied to be capable of this. The attacks on the Obra Dinn begin with crab-riders boarding the ship exactly when a crew member is killed by lightning; they end when the Kraken leaves with the storm. As soon as the inspector has seen all available death scenes, it starts to rain. And after the inspector leaves the ship, a storm sinks the ship and the dead mermaids with it.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 7: "The Doom". It begins by interacting with a corpse in the captain's quarters, and features an attack by a giant squid. This chapter is the time first the player will see some of the more fantastical features of the story, revealing that the Memento Mortem is not the only supernatural element in play.
• Wham Shot: Quite a few. Because of the structure of the game it's possible to encounter numerous different ones. Many of the deaths are in effect fully-navigable Wham Shots.
  • The death scene of Abigail Hoscut-Witterel. Up until this point, all the deaths shown have been fairly mundane and caused by an attempted mutiny. When you get to see her death, it's first shown she was crushed by a falling mast. Then you look up to see the tendrils of an enormous sea creature.
  • Finding the corpse of an enormous crab located in the cargo hold.
  • Part Two of "Murder" is a wham shot when the player realizes that they're walking around inside one of the sketches they've been using to identify people. Stemming from this is that immediately after observing the execution of the convicted murderer, the player then witnesses the actual murder, proving an innocent man was framed.
  • The first scene you'll unlock for "Soldiers of the Sea" is the corpse found at the side of the ship, in a narrow passageway. The initial sight of the person moments from death seems fairly mundane (being punctured through the abdomen), up until you look into the next room through some slots in the wall and realize the rest of the crew is under violent attack by horrific crab-riding monsters.
  • Early in "Unholy Captives", you see a man killed when a team of four seamen loses control of a heavily-loaded cargo stretcher on the stairs. Tragic, but fairly mundane and mild compared to numerous death-scenes you've witnessed by that point. Then you step back a few seconds to the preceding memory, and realize that the load the four men had been hauling is yet another kind of deadly sea monster.
  • Even the very first memory you unlock has shades of this, both in the sudden shift into the unreal which the memory's very existence constitutes, and in how Captain Witterel is in the process of shooting you.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • The Memento Mortem can only show you a person's death if part of their corpse is available or if their corpse appeared in the death memory of someone else. For several crew members, both of these factors are missing. Several chapters end with a "conclusion" of crewmembers who are unaccounted for during the chapter—having simply disappeared without leaving a corpse. The trick to identifying these people is figuring out where they were last seen and extrapolating their deaths (or not, as the case may be) from that.
  • Of the 60 crew you need to identify, it's notable that two of them never show up in the journal, even after you've explored the entire ship. Both are still on the ship, in the one place you can't look, and you only get their entries once you've solved the rest.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Averted. The Memento Mortem treats the deaths of animals the same as it does for humans. In Chapter 2, a cow is slaughtered for its meat, which the player can see by using the pocket watch on its skull. This is also how Henry Evans shows the player the events of "The Bargain" by sending them his pet monkey's severed hand.
• You Can't Get Ye Flask: It can be infuriating choosing the exact right verb for how certain crewmates are killed by the various monsters. Fortunately, some of the more ambiguous deaths accept multiple options as true—for instance, Abigail Witterel, who dies in the kraken attack, is crushed by a mast that the beast pulls down. The game will accept "clubbed by a beast", "crushed by a beast" and "crushed by falling rigging". Another example is that two people get their arms melted by the quicksilver in the Formosan magic chest, so both their fates can be either "burned", "poisoned", or "electrocuted", whichever floats your boat. Finally, "fell overboard" and "drowned" are mostly interchangeable, being two parts of the same cause of death.
• You Killed My Father: Nathan Peters accuses Lars Linde of killing his brother and clubs him in the head.
• Your Head Asplode: It happens a few times. One of the crew is shot through the jaw into his skull, completely tearing his face off.