Outside Your Heaven

How Return of the Obra Dinn Pushes Environmental Storytelling Forward

Posted: 07 Nov 2018 07:14 AM PST

Obra Dinn is fabulous. The way it uses mechanics to tell a story is ingenious. It's probably the most original take on the "everyone's dead, find out what happened" spatial narrative trope since the first System Shock. That was 25 years ago.

Almost no game -- including Bioshock and The Last of Us -- has really done much to improve upon the forensic environmental storytelling of System Shock. You could maybe argue they did it better, by making it more polished and more directed, but the techniques are the same. They were all present in System Shock. Even the AR recordings you can manipulate in Tacoma are a highly fleshed out variant of the "ghosts" from System Shock 2. There have been great environmental stories since System Shock, but none that make me say "Wow... I've never seen it done this way before".

Except Obra Dinn. It's a masterpiece of forensic minimalism in a 3D space, and it's more original and weird than something like Tacoma. In particular the way it uses lack of animation -- stillness -- in a 3D space is brilliant in how naturally it engages your powers of forensic deduction.

When I play back an AR scene in Tacoma it's essentially a 3D movie I can walk around in. This is what the game intends and it works, but personally I always felt like there was a great detective mechanic lurking in there somewhere. Obra Dinn shows you the same sort of things, but showing them only as a frozen moment in time -- the exact moment of a person's death -- suddenly makes them narrative puzzles to unravel. Is that guy who is outstretching his hands to a rifle floating in the air throwing the rifle away or is he catching it? Is there anyone who could be throwing it too him? I don't see anyone. What does the expression on his face suggest? Surprise? Wait, more like concentration. If he's throwing it away, why would he be doing that, given the murder happening right next to him?

This is all marvelously, effortlessly engaging. And the fact that the only narrative propulsion is my own cataloging of these details in a notebook -- a linear story I am compiling by hand, at my own pace, as I go -- makes these acts of deduction more than window dressing. They are part of the core mechanic, a mechanic that is about putting all these 3D time travel snapshots together like a temporal jigsaw. That's the only thing the game is about: reassembling this story.

To me this is a much more exciting update to the environmental narrative concepts originally explored in System Shock. The games that came after System Shock tended to make its convoluted forensic tangle more accessible by streamlining it, by eliminating complexity and forefronting environmental details the way a theme park would. Gone Home and Tacoma, as well as stuff like Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, are more open, but their information is still controlled so as not to cause forensic anxiety. They aren't games where you have to take notes to remember who relates to who and why and when.

While undoubtedly more accessible, it does lose something in the long run. One of my best memories of playing a game was staying up one night to write down all the logs in System Shock, to create a timeline so I could paint a clear picture in my head of how the story happened. Obra Dinn understands this kind of pleasure, the pleasure of un-watered down detective work. Rather than reducing the forensic expectation put on the player, it makes the game openly, unabashedly about forensic collection of information. Except, unlike System Shock, it makes the note-taking the core mechanic.

That core mechanic has been carefully designed for elegance and simplicity interface-wise. It's far more elegant and simple than Bioshock or even Gone Home. It trusts that the thrill of an environmental story is in the forensic tangle, in the complexity, and instead focuses its accessibility efforts in the realm of interface and presentation, leaving the story itself a richly convoluted puzzle that would have had you filling up your paper notepad in 1994.

Brilliant stuff, and a towering argument for not skimping on real deduction and non-linearity in adventure game design. In a lot of ways it's the same sort of mechanics-driven narrative approach the game's designer, Lucas Pope, applied to his last effort, Paper's Please. So not only is it an argument for a certain type of adventure game design, it's an argument for an entire conceptual approach to narrative design: mechanics-driven, minimalist, where engaging in the core loop requires our storytelling skills.

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