Fridge Brilliance
- Why was the inspector not required to identify the stowaway? Because the investigator is an insurance adjustor for the shipping company. He/she is only required to identify liability for the company. The company would not be required to pay any liability for a stowaway.
- If Henry Evans knew what happens in "The Bargain" (which he must have, since he would have no reason to give the chapter that title otherwise) then he must have used the Memento Mortem on the monkey's paw himself. So why did he leave that chapter of the book blank rather than filling it out himself? Because he wanted to make sure he could trust the inspector and ensure they had thorough understanding of what happened before giving them the means to learn where the Formosan chest is located in present day.
- Note that a full year passes before Evans returns the book to you with the accompanying paw. Long enough for news of the vacant Obra Dinn having sunk in the storm to reach Morocco, reassuring the surgeon that the East India Company won't be getting its hands on the last shell even if the Inspector reports its presence to his/her bosses.
- The way the white tracer-cloud coils and meanders its way from one corpse to another, as if it can't plot a simple straight line from A to B, may seem as if it's deliberately trying to frustrate you. But its dawdling may be an unavoidable side effect of the Memento's having been designed as a pocket watch. How else can a mechanical watch indicate anything, if not by circling round and round?
- Speaking of the white mist, there's a practical reason why you have to be looking at it to keep it moving: it ensures you'll follow it from deck to deck if the next fatality was on a different level of the ship, so you won't get trapped behind an obstacle and unable to inspect the death site if the stairs were occupied.
- The damage to the gun and orlop decks' woodwork inflicted during the crab-rider and kraken attacks was never repaired or even patched, because by that point both of the ship's carpentry-workers are dead.
- Some of the deaths have definite elements of Fridge Irony:
- The Gunner and Gunner's Mate are both shot by firearms - one a cannon, the other a pistol - that slipped out of their control and into the control of another (a kraken, a shipmate).
- Both the ship's carpentry experts were nailed to wooden surfaces, one by spikes and one by a spear.
- If you earn the bad ending, the shelf of odd trinkets in the Inspector's study is empty of exotic mementos. Apparently, if you weren't diligent enough to puzzle out enough fates before leaving the ship, the game assumes that you're not diligent enough to have earned such souvenirs of other odd investigations, either.
- I had a thought today - this is either a plot hole accidentally fixing itself or the author being a genius.
Because they are Indians and there is a cow being slaughtered.
- Speaking of dead cow, the two plates carried by the Third Mate's steward at the start of "The Doom" have slices of meat on them, yet these chunks of animal tissue don't trigger the Memento. If they were beef from the same cow that had been slaughtered in "A Bitter Cold", then the device doesn't activate because it's already locked onto the same animal via its skull.
Fridge Horror:
- Just how common are morbid and/or cursed artifacts in the world of Obra Dinn, anyway? By apparent pure chance, not one but two such items - the Formosans' shell and the surgeon's Memento - wind up sharing this nondescript small cargo ship for the same voyage. Either that's the biggest coincidence ever, some higher force engineered their proximity, or creepy magic is a lot more common in the game's setting than it's comfortable to think about.
- The Inspector's bookcase back home has a shelf with various artifacts. What has the Inspector seen in their travels that the Obra Dinn doesn't even elicit a reaction from them?
- Seconds before Abigail is killed in the kraken attack, Martin tells her that the captain is below decks. This suggests that Witterel was threatening the mermaids at the exact moment she was struck down. Her death scene is the very last one shown for "The Doom", indicating it took place very shortly before the third (intimidated) mermaid called off the kraken's attack. Was Abigail's death a coincidence of timing, or did the second (defiant) mermaid somehow sense the woman's last words to Martin via her link to the terrible squid, realize that she was the captain's wife, and deliberately command the kraken to crush her in retaliation against the man who'd just shot her companion? If so, Witterel's furious effort to save what was left of his crew directly got the love of his life killed.
