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  • How did Nichols' group manage to steal both the passengers and the chest without confronting the second bodyguard?
    • Presumably the way Nichols nearly stole the Shell in the first place: knock him out so he's not able to stop the kidnapping.
    • It might even be the bodyguard's spear that wound up in the helmsman's leg, if they snatched the guard's weapon after incapacitating him.
    • As 2nd Mate, Nichols may have been the officer tasked with command of the Obra Dinn during the night watch. In which case, he could station his co-conspirators in positions for the night that would better advance his plan.
    • If Beng suspected that Pasqua's real killer had been after the shell, he probably ordered Chioh to stand guard over it in Hok-Seng's place. Perhaps Nichols had his accomplices seize the two undefended royals first, then forced Chioh to yield by threatening to have the bodyguard's charges killed if he didn't give up without a fight.
  • Shouldn't the First Mate object to Brennan killing the Fourth Mate without hearing him out or attempting to to subdue him first? Especially considering that a common sailor like Brennan struck an officer. Seems strange that they would go together to force open the captain's cabin after an incident like that.
    • One can only assume that the murder of another crewmate automatically strips an officer of privilege, so Brennan wouldn't be punished for the (accidental?) murder. It's why Nichols tried to bribe his way back on, despite getting multiple people killed, including one directly on deck.
    • Also consider that, after this latest whirlwind of murder, only four people are left on the ruined ship with no lifeboats left (and three of those staged a mutiny possibly only a few hours later). I imagine that the feeling amongst those left was less "who is responsible for what" and more "what the hell do we do now"?
    • Hoscut was also looking away from Brennan when the Fourth Mate was clubbed. Brennan could've easily claimed to have been defending himself from a "crazed gunman" if the First Mate raised a fuss about it.
  • So the end of chapter IX clearly takes place shortly before the beginning of X. Yet for some reason the Captain is suddenly topless when he wore his jacket and a shirt underneath earlier. The First Mate also seems to be shirtless underneath his jacket in the first part of X, even though he was fully dressed in IX. What caused him to lose his shirt?
    • Some duellists at the time would remove clothing before a fight because a wound could turn septic if a weapon pushed pieces of cloth into it. It's possible that both men were anticipating a fight (the Captain expecting the mutiny, the First Mate expecting resistance) and took some preparations to prevent any injuries they took from getting any worse.
    • Clearly some time has passed between chapters IX and X, considering that the former takes place at night and the latter takes place during the day.
    • With only four men left on board, the officers probably had no choice but to get their own hands dirty and help throw bodies over the side. Both of them would've stripped off their uniform coats and shirts to avoid fouling them with blood. The First Mate re-donned his coat to regain some dignity for the final confrontation, but Witterel didn't do so, because he'd failed in his leadership and didn't think he deserved to wear its trappings any longer.
  • The ship returned to Falmouth in 1807, two years after a stagecoach took 38 hours to deliver the message about victory in the battle of Trafalgar from Falmouth to London, where the Inspector is based. This means that it would've taken at least three days between the ship drifting into Falmouth and the Inspector boarding the vessel, during which it was left adrift. Why did nobody tow it to the docks in the meantime?
    • The boat puller says 'nobody eager for that job', implying that more than the Inspector were unwilling to board the ship. All it would take is all the captains of the available tug vessels being superstitious and/or unwilling enough to tie a line to the Obra Dinn for it to go unattended. Assuming that it's the mermaid keeping the ship in place, this is also a ship that's maintaining its position on the sea unaided by anchor and unmoved by weather, increasing the chance that superstitious rumors and theories would develop about it.
    • Not to mention the ship is still EIC property, and the investigation into its disappearance is just now getting started. The company and/or the Crown probably declared the vessel off-limits to everybody until the Inspector could carry out an evaluation, to ensure there'd be no looting or tampering with evidence.
  • How did Henry Evans know that the ship would return to Falmouth in time to ship the items to the inspector before they went to the ship? Considering the shipping times from Morocco to Britain in 1807, he must have sent it weeks or months in advance, yet the inspector apparently didn't even look at it before reaching the ship.
    • The people pulling out the mermaid who heard the third mate's deal to return the ship. Presumably, the mermaids informed them when the ship would be returned (obviously not immediately, after the chaos had been done).
    • The case was probably delivered to the EIC department that the Inspector works for, not to the Inspector personally. It was held by the office until an insurance investigator was assigned to the job, then delivered to Falmouth and loaded into the rowboat just before it set out for the Obra Dinn.
  • Why didn't Dr. Henry Evans just use the Memento Mortem to see who killed Nunzio Pasqua, thus preventing Edward Nichols from taking the shells and dooming the ship? The obvious explanation is that if he did, the game wouldn't exist, but what would be the in-game explanation? One explanation is that Dr. Evans simply couldn't fully examine the body, or if he did, couldn't convince the captain that one of his mates was a murderer, thief, and mutineer. It's not known how common the use of the Memento Mortem is in the game's universe. Its existence is probably an oddity and isn't admissible as evidence. But even if that is the case, Dr. Evans could've just given the watch to Captain Witterel so he could see it for himself.
    • The fact that the Inspector's report was accepted and the insurance presumably paid out suggests the experiences provided by the watch are admissible as evidence in-universe.
      • Alternately, the Inspector may have had such a high reputation that their accounting of the fates was taken at face value, without any inquiry into how they obtained the recorded information.
    • He didn't think he needed to - after all, as far as he knew, the murderer had already been caught and confessed, not knowing that the Chinese crewman tasked with translating for him was in cahoots with Nichols and lied about what he said so they could cover their tracks. Evans probably didn't begin to doubt Nichols until after his treachery failed and he tried to bargain his way back with the shells and unconscious mermaids.
    • Does Dr. Evans even have the watch on him while on the ship?
      • The watch's carrying case is visible in his quarters in A Bitter Cold, as well as on the lifeboat in The Escape. Additionally, Evans's shooting of his pet monkey makes no sense unless he already knew about the watch's power and, realizing he couldn't enter the locked lazarette to scan the dead bodies inside, quickly concocted a plan to use his monkey's death and paw to provide a window into the past and learn what happened during the events of The Bargain.
    • It's possible that Evans didn't actually believe in the Memento's power until the sudden appearance of mermaids, crab-riders and a kraken convinced him that the supernatural was real. He may have inherited it or purchased it as a conversation piece - something with a silly story about "seeing death" attached to it - and never actually experimented with the device until the voyage turned weird. By the time Evans did accept the paranormal was for real, it was too late to save Hok-Seng Lau from a wrongful execution. Come to think of it, finding out for sure whether Hok-Seng was innocent may be part of the reason why Evans decided to entrust the pocket watch to an insurance investigator he'd neve met, in the first place.
  • Why doesn't the book include the fates of the crew members Evans knew about before he left the ship? There is no sensible (in-game) reason to leave everything to the inspector.
    • In his preface, Evans explicitly says that "failing health" prevented him from writing any more than the bare outline. In addition, it was set up for the Inspector, the inheritor of the Momento Mortem, to discover ALL the crew's fates.
  • Why is it that Miss Jane Bird, a passenger and therefore not part of the crew, is held accountable for "abandonment of crew and vessel"? Why would a passenger be expected to act as a crewmember would in times of crisis? Shouldn't a passenger be free to abandon ship whenever they please without consequence?
    • She was still an English citizen under the Crown and was part of a party with a murderess and several abandoning crewmembers on board; the fact that she chose to remain in Morocco instead of returning to England probably didn't endear her either.
    • Also, considering how the accidental manslaughter and self-defense are still fined as "murder of crewmate," it's likely that the Inspector's report omits any context of the fates. Therefore, it's possible that Miss Jane Bird was only reported as "alive in Africa," along with several others, which includes one crewmate and one "murderer", and the Crown saw it as her facilitating abandonment, fining her for it.
    • And, let's face it: the Inspector works for the Company, so is bound to favor them at least slightly in his/her judgements. Charging Miss Bird's family a fine recoups a bit, albeit a tiny bit, of their financial loss in the Obra Dinn affair, while discouraging future desertion of EIC vessels.
  • The midsection of the gun deck is a mess as a result of the ship rocking violently from side to side during the kraken attack. Yet everywhere else on the ship, including in the cargo hold where there are crates of bottles, everything is neatly stacked and unbroken.
    • Cargo would have been secured in one manner or another to prevent it shifting like that. The kraken specifically attacked the cannons, resulting in the mess we see.
    • Those bottles are bound to be cushioned by straw inside the crates' compartments.
  • Thomas Lanke takes advantage of Leonid Volkov screaming outside to shout mutiny, at which point Olus Wiater starts chasing him to stab him, as heard in Wiater's scene. However, one scene earlier, two seconds after said scream, Wiater is already out of the officers' mess and chasing Lanke down.
    • From the panicked sound of his voice as he cries out about mutiny, Thomas wasn't actually "taking advantage" of the commotion above decks; he simply freaked out and started hollering as soon as he realized that Olus's words constituted treachery. The simultaneous trouble happening topside was just a coincidence.
  • The placement of physical remains seems very peculiar. For some reason, the bones of the ones killed in chapter X are still in place even though they should have been moved by the rocking of the ship. Their clothes are intact even though they are probably made of wool or other natural fibers and should have rotted away. Thomas Lanke was left in the midshipmen cabin, but the Bosun, Gunner's Mate and Fourth Mate are nowhere to be found, implying that the First Mate, Brennan and Walker took the time to throw them overboard before confronting the Captain. Nobody needed to use the head after the Kraken attacked, so the body of Edward Spratt remained undiscovered. Timothy Butement was left dangling from a rope right outside the First Mate's cabin even though Lewis Walker was shown to climb down there. Nobody dealt with the Ship's Steward's body even though there was a blood trail. Also, while the Third Mate's Steward's body being left could be called justified as it was underneath a cannon, Abraham Akbar's body was also underneath a cannon yet it is gone.
    • By the time "The Doom" ends, there are so few people left alive on board that class and rank distinctions were probably starting to fray. The few remaining officers most likely agreed to let the others use the head in the officers' lounge rather than the alcove where Spratt's body was, partly due to it being more sheltered from a potential third sea-monster attack and partly as a perk to compensate the surviving sailors for having to shoulder their dead colleagues' workload.
    • The bodies of Thomas and the ship's steward are each in enclosed spaces which the last four survivors didn't have the time, patience, and/or stamina to search. Yes, they'd both left blood trails, but there's blood all over the freaking ship by that stage.
    • Timothy's body was probably hanging a lot lower down when it was intact and heavy. Once the body decayed enough that its entangled leg's knee fell apart and only the foot and shin were left, the lighter weight didn't stretch the ropes as much, letting those remains hang just outside the Mate's window.
    • The cannon on top of Martin's steward was no longer on its carriage. The one on top of Akbar was tipped up but still attached to its carriage, so it may have been easier to rock that one aside long enough to pull the body out from under it.
  • In The Calling, part 5, Edward Nichols is seen pulling an unconscious mermaid onto his lifeboat, while the other lifeboat already has two mermaids on it and his three stabbed co-conspirators (Galligan, Hong, and O'Hagan) are nowhere to be found. The previous memory (The Calling, part 4) showed that all three mermaids were in the water when the magic beams hit them and the three dead men were still on the boats... so we conclude that A) Nichols dumped his co-conspirators' bodies into the water, but B) did not dump the Formosans' bodies, then C) retrieved all three stunned mermaids from the water, and D) was so determined to accomplish those tasks that he jumped in and out of the water multiple times in order to complete them. That's a radical departure from the helpless coward that Nichols had been just a few minutes prior. What motivated that extreme change in behavior? Why did he choose to keep the two dead Formosans on the lifeboats?
    • In the same part, we also heard him saying that he has treasures, so perhaps he's trying to buy his way back to the ship with some "exotic creatures"? He didn't know that the mermaids were simply knocked out and not dead yet.
    • Along the same line, he probably also dumped the bodies to make room for the mermaids, and the bodies of Formosan royalty would have been more valuable than the bodies of common crew members, so those were the ones he kept.
    • Another possibility is that he was planning to spin the situation to his advantage; something along the lines of 'the beasts killed the others, but I was able to rescue the bodies of the royals'. Only three other crewmembers are shown knowing Nichols' involvement - Dalton, Milroy and Linde - and if Nichols claimed that one of the others was the mastermind and he was also a hostage, who would the Captain believe first? He might have thought he'd be rewarded for his supposed actions, rescuing the passengers and capturing strange beasts to boot.
      • Not likely; there were plenty of witnesses to Nichols' mutiny. Lars Linde, Peter Milroy and Finley Dalton were all present when Nichols personally shot Timothy Butement while holding Bun-Lan Lim hostage.
    • He wouldn't have to jump in and out of the water multiple times, just row the boats up alongside the stunned mermaids and haul them on board. Once he had the two lifeboats lashed together, he could step from one to another. At most, he might've had to take a swim once to retrieve a lost oar or two ... which was something he'd have to do whether he collected the mermaids or not, unless he wants to die of thirst adrift on the Atlantic.
  • Throughout the investigation, the Inspector comes across dialog in Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Swedish, and Danish. We, the players, get to see those lines in their original language and their English translation. Is the Inspector fluent in all those languages, or is the Memento Mortem bestowing some sort of supernatural linguistic ability on its user?
    • It's ambiguous, but the inspector is clearly very learned based on the personal library in their study, and it's reasonable that the reason they would be sent for a job like this is because they're familiar with a variety of cultures in a way that would let them more accurately determine what happened.
    • On that note, Miss Lim is never actually called Miss Lim in the Hokkien voicelines (the phrase used is akin to "my lady"). Which would mean that the game ends up giving the player a hint the inspector doesn't have.
      • Except apparently "Lan" is a feminine name component, enough so that the Chinese translation of the game shows Miss Lim's face as unblurred from the start. To those familiar with the language and its naming conventions, "Miss" isn't necessary to ID the only non-European woman on board as her.
  • How does Henry Evans know whether you've filled out the book "correctly" or not? Even assuming he Memento Mortem'd everyone he could himself, he left the ship while there were still several people on board and had no way of knowing what happened to them.
    • He may not know via hard evidence, but he knew everyone on the Obra Dinn well enough to evaluate their medical condition, and he probably fought off boredom during the journey's quiet early period by people-watching his fellow travelers. He could assess whether the others' behavior in the Inspector's report was consistent with what he knew about them.
  • In the present day, all of the ship's yards (spars supporting the sails) seem to be in place and mostly undamaged. Which one did the kraken use to kill Abigail?
    • Presumably the post-Doom survivors patched its cracked end and hauled it back into place, same as they'd reinforced the cracked mast. There were (barely) enough sailors still alive to handle that sort of a job, after the kraken left but before the squabble over the lifeboat. The fact that Martin only had the two surviving stewards' assistance during the Bargain, and that they'd carried out their task without being spotted by others, may be due to every trained seaman being fully occupied in rigging-repairs, or exhausted from that endeavor and too bleary to notice.
  • There are loads of shots of caged livestock and free-roaming poultry on board the Obra Dinn, yet the only animal dead to trigger the watch are a cow skull, a monkey hand, and a couple of dead crabs. Why weren't the bones or deaths of pigs, goats and chickens triggering readings? For that matter, why weren't there any other animal bones on board but the cow skull, and why/how did the butcher bother to clean it so thoroughly anyway?
  • Where, exactly, do the ship's mid-level crew sleep? The Captain has a suite and the four Mates have cabins of their own. The midshipmen and the stewards each have a shared cabin, and a few compartments are designated for passengers, but there don't seem to be individual berths for the warrant or petty officers except the Bosun and his underling. The few bunks designated "crew" aren't sufficient to accommodate all the ship's titled offices. The Surgeon's is the only workspace with a bed in it, and that's presumably meant for patients, not for himself. Surely people like the Purser and Gunner aren't expected to snooze in gun-deck hammocks with the ordinary sailors, are they?

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