Return of the Obra Dinn
An extraordinary game. Even more so because it was able to keep me trying despite being a bit tedious. Most games these days are afraid to make anything inconvenient for the player. All quests have map markers etc., and as a result it feels like it’s dumbed down for you.
This dude Lucas Pope in on another level — solo creator published exactly two games (at least on Steam) and both are acclaimed masterpieces (“Papers, Please” is the other one). Too bad it took him 5 years to make this game after the first one, and there hasn’t been a game in 6 years now.
Recently playing Obra Dinn, this thought made me stop: The game is set in early 1800s, but sailing boats of that type were used already in the 1400s. That’s hundreds of years! Everyone knows the “middle ages” were “slow”, but it seems to me like maybe everything before 1850 was slow.
[3pYqXrFx6S8] “How a 16th Century Explorer’s Sailing Ship Works”.
Looks incredibly complex (and interesting!), and this is from 1577 when the ships were still much simpler! “Learning their ropes was something sailors took years to master.”
It seems to me like there should be a ton of material to make stories about sailors, and for sure much has been made, but somehow all that has stuck with me is very generic pirate fantasy. Playing Obra Dinn I thought it fascinating that people lived and worked in a ship like that. With strict hierarchies and weird job titles like Bosun and Surgeon.
Googling a bit for games about the topic, I understood the most interesting thing for me is indeed the people and the “microcosmos” of living on a ship like that. I think it’s actually similar to why cyberpunk is interesting — it’s about humans put in an extreme environment, surviving only due to engineering and social order, which are subject to catastrophic failure.
Ok, this video did a pretty good job at describing everything bad about living on such a ship. Maybe I don’t need a game to do it for me.
No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.