I am in the same boat as the author of having only recently played Return of the Obra Dinn between Christmas and new years. I cannot recommend it enough, if you haven't played it and like puzzlers you should pick it up.
It's an extremely engaging story, and a narrative tool I have not previously encountered. No spoilers as this is revealed immediately, but essentially you are navigating past events through frozen timepoints at the moments when people died, and have to determine the identities and fates of all the about 60 crew aboard the boat, which requires a bit of puzzling things together across the different events that lead to peoples deaths.
I doubt we'll see a similar follow up game from Lucas Pope, as he has commented this game grew much larger than he expected and he would scale back for his next projects. Also from papers-please to Obra Dinn he seems to be one to break the mold at each iteration, but I really wish there where more games like this, with different stories to investigated.
I share your love for Return of the Obra Dinn, truly a masterpiece and a game which shocked me out of my usual apathy towards recent videogames.
I have faith in Lucas Pope for whatever project he decides to tackle next. Two of his games are masterpieces, this one and Papers Please, and I also liked Helsing's Fire a lot. Whatever he does next, regardless of scope and theme, will surely please me.
This game was so freaking good, and I also agree, I'd become sort of bored of video games until this was recommended. I stayed glued to the game until I 100%ed it (didn't take me too long, maybe around 20 hours). I really really wish I could forget the game and replay it, or that there was a part 2, or something. Incredibly creative and well-made.
Not in the same boat as the author but in the past few weeks I've been getting into e-Ink displays and making gadgets and framed art with them, and most of the displays I can get a hold of are either 1-bit or 4-bit greyscale, so this is super relevant.
My "crude" dithering algorithm I wrote though seems not mentioned in the article. What I do is (in the case of 1-bit) just let the grey value (from 0.0=black to 1.0=white) determine the probability that the pixel is on or off, and render pseudorandom numbers according to those probabilities. In the case of 4-bit greyscale I do the same but within 16 bins.
I'm not sure how it compares to the methods in the article but maybe I can test this sometime.
You can actually combine error diffusion with your probability-based approach, which helps reduce patterns if I remember correctly (it's been a very long time).
May as well ask here, the ESRB rating at the bottom of the Obra Dinn page [1] highlights "intense violence". Is this accurate? I'm a big wimp about visceral violence, so I'd prefer to have some idea before paying up. If 1/4 of the crew got disemboweled or something, I'm probably out.
There definitely is violent scenes and sounds in the game. I would not recommend playing it with young children for instance. However I would myself not put in the same box as other games in the "intense violence" category.
Mostly because and this may sound silly, but it's not "violence in motion". You are viewing a murder scene, and someone died, and you might hear someone take the last breaths of their life. Which has a very high emotional impact which should not be ignored. But that to me is still fundamentally different from gory/bloody games with often fast visceral violence.
As mentioned by others, the scenes themselves are calmed a lot by the dithering art-style.
I would say about the emotional content though that this hits differently from other stories where characters die because of the narrative tool. You never have a Game of Thrones moment where a character you are heavily invested in suddenly dies, because even though you learn about the passengers and feel for them in their misery, you also realize up front even before you learn about them that they have died and you are just looking at memories before that event.
I have only played for a few hours, but all the violence (so far) has been communicated via sound effects during blacked out cut scenes (no visuals). The sound effects in the game are really well done and visceral, but otherwise you just see the low res frozen time ‘results’ of these cut scenes (e.g. a dead body under a cannon, a skeleton crushed and distorted, etc).
To be safe: There is some more graphic violence, but due to the dithering it’s not very offensive imo. However, pretty much the entire crew does die rather brutal deaths (and that’s what the plot of the game is centered around).
It's an extremely engaging story, and a narrative tool I have not previously encountered. No spoilers as this is revealed immediately, but essentially you are navigating past events through frozen timepoints at the moments when people died, and have to determine the identities and fates of all the about 60 crew aboard the boat, which requires a bit of puzzling things together across the different events that lead to peoples deaths.
I doubt we'll see a similar follow up game from Lucas Pope, as he has commented this game grew much larger than he expected and he would scale back for his next projects. Also from papers-please to Obra Dinn he seems to be one to break the mold at each iteration, but I really wish there where more games like this, with different stories to investigated.