Overall: 7/10 - Strongly Recommend.
Kinda like playing murder sudoku. TL;DR at bottom.

I was gifted this game and wanted to write a review for it because Return of the Obra Dinn really struck me with how interesting and unique it was. It's been a long while since a game mechanic like this really grabbed me and kept me interested for so long. Without any further ado, let's get into it.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a puzzle game that at first I assumed was just a really convoluted interactive movie wherein your job is to witness a bunch of death scenes and piece together a tragic story from them. I wasn't even that mad about it because it's a really neat mechanic and the story alone is enough to hold your interest. But there's more.

Your goal in Return of the Obra Dinn is to find out exactly what fates befell each of the ship's 60 passengers, along with who was who. (You are given a list of names and faces, but no detail as to which name matches which face - the gameplay mostly revolves around figuring that part out.) Armed with nothing more than a magical pocketwatch and a huge journal, you must traverse the ship, observing death after death and paying attention to tiny details in order to puzzle out the identity of the ship's many occupants, and sometimes, their fates. The pocketwatch shows you the last 10 seconds or so of a person's life and then freezes frame at the moment of their death, allowing you to walk around a time-frozen scene and take in all the detail of the scene at your own pace. It's a hugely interesting mechanic and so much fun to use. Once you think you know who a person is and exactly how they died, you can record it in your journal. Once you get three people's details right, the game will lock those details in for you, thereby affirming your guesswork. Using this method, you will work your way through the crew manifest, ticking off person by person until you've either solved everything or managed to brute-force guess your way to completion.

The awesome mechanic of the moment-of-death panorama that the pocketwatch creates is used by the developers to full effect in this game. Not only do they tell a complex and detailed story with just a handful of sound-effects and scenes without animation, they have created a very fun way of gathering clues. Very often the developers cleverly hide clues in the background of a scene, like a crew member taking refuge in a specific room, or a unique item or feature which helps identify a person later on down the track. At first, I was really annoyed to have to revisit the same scenes over and over, but that annoyance faded when I realised just how much detail they hid in each scene that I had completely missed the first few times I'd viewed it. Sometimes, you even need to walk away from the focal point of the scene onto a different deck or into another room to catch parts of other stories that happen to be occurring at the same time. It becomes very satisfying to revisit a scene and have an "aha!" moment when you notice that clue that unlocks another identity for you.

I would be remiss to not mention the art style as well. They've gone for a very unique, grainy-CRT-monitor look as though you're playing the game on a computer or TV from the 80s/90s. This creates a very interesting aesthetic that lends itself well to the atmosphere of the game. The art style also allows the developers to use lower-res models with limited or no textures without it seeming out of place. Despite this, it still manages to deliver all of the detail necessary to allow you to pick up key visual clues (mostly - more on that later). Only in a few circumstances did I find myself having to really squint to figure out what I was looking at.

There are a few negatives to this experience, of course. My chief complaint would be that although the game requires you to revisit memories over and over, it doesn't allow you to "quick-jump" to them, meaning you often have to walk all over the ship multiple times just to review several scenes to look for all the instances of a different character. This can get really annoying and tiresome, particularly when you don't know where that one crucial clue will be for a character with 14+ different scenes to look at. Another complaint is that some details are really hard to make out visually with the grainy art style. One character has a particular feature that is shown clearly in one scene and never again with that level of detail in any other scene. You know you need to look for that feature, but thanks to the art style you're stuck with squinting at every similar character wondering if you're looking at the wrong character or if you just can't see the detail because of the graininess. Lastly, the game could really use a sort of hint system for the characters whose identity can't be deduced directly. Several characters in the game require you to eliminate the other possibilities of who they could be rather than use any specific clues. It's not really possible to know who they are until you hit a dead-end with them it's very frustrating to have your time wasted because of it. This is doubly annoying because there are some characters who you CAN deduce the identity of directly of, but have cleverly-hidden clues about themselves. You cannot determine which is which without a huge amount of time investment, which actually detracts from the pacing of the (really intriguing) story.

Oh, and one more semi-spoilery-complaint is that three of the hidden achievements involve beating the entire game in a slightly different way - meaning 2 hours of grinding through "cutscenes" and then making some different journal choices at the end. In my opinion that's is just way too much padding for a game that shouldn't need it. A good game doesn't need to be 60 hours long - padding it out just ruins a perfectly good experience.

All in all, Return of the Obra Dinn is a very worthwhile experience. It reminds me of those "art" games which are more "interactive experience" than game, except the developers here chose to actually have decent gameplay as well, so you get the best of both worlds. I thoroughly enjoyed the vast majority of the game and spent several hours after I finished playing just digesting all the stuff I'd experienced while playing, which in my books is a sign of a very engaging game. If you're looking for a new and engaging experience and don't mind it being slow-paced, I highly recommend this game.

TL;DR: Very unique "whodunnit" game with a huge amount of care and thought put into the mysteries, atmosphere and storytelling. Some mildly infuriating time-gating but nothing so bad as to make the experience not worthwhile. If you've got 8 hours to kill and like to think then give this game a shot.