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CzarChasm
Mar 14, 2009

I don't like it when you're watching me eat.

Nidoking posted:

Like I said in the video, I was perhaps a bit TOO prepared to be misled, having approached the game from an Ace Attorney mindset. There's a vast gulf between games where you have to find truth among lies and this game, where the challenge is in finding the information at all, and interpreting it at face value is the +C on the integral. There are some details where I'll never be completely convinced, but once I understood that the game was trying to lead me to the right answers, I stopped questioning everything as much. It's a bit like switching from the competitive version of a hidden information game to the co-op version. It's hard to get used to trusting the information you get.

Yeah, the game is not trying to trick you. There's not a point where you are on the defensive like the Ace Attorney games. There is no competing Insurance Adjuster trying to "What If?" you into making a mistake. Your character is not trying to prove innocence or assign guilt exactly. That's not really the goal. Your job is to figure out what happened - Guilt is for someone else to worry about.

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Shogeton
Apr 26, 2007

"Little by little the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him"

Man, when you got a few left, it gets very tempting to start making guesses. Does anyone have a place where one might acquire hints, rather than just a walkthrough?

And well, when you have something, even pretty tenuous, and you get it right, you half feel clever, half feel like you cheated.

Shogeton fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Nov 30, 2021

Nidoking
Jan 27, 2009

I fought the lava, and the lava won.
I still stand by these as being the biggest hints you're likely to get without spoilers:

Nidoking posted:

These are things like "If you see a name, occupation, or relationship in the dialogue, write it down before doing anything else" and "Make a good attempt to locate all of the people listed as 'present' in the scene before moving on - even if you can't identify all of them, keeping count of them means that you haven't missed anyone, and the ones who are harder to find usually mark where useful clues can be found."

Rocket Baby Dolls
Mar 3, 2006

Normally I don't make aesthetic criticisms in other peoples' homes, but that rug looks like a beaver exploded. If meat is murder, then that rug is at least a severe beating.
I'd just like to confirm, as a British person, that it is illegal for us to lean over the railings of a ship. It was banned after Henry VI dropped his scone over the side of a ship while enroute to France. Every year, we hold a minutes silence as a mark of respect on National Scone Day.

benjoyce
Aug 3, 2007
Swashbuckler from Meleé island
Watching this LP is very fascinating when you compare it to CrackingTheCryptic's... shall we say, less game-savvy but otherwise brilliantly inductive playthrough, which is livestreamed.

Nidoking
Jan 27, 2009

I fought the lava, and the lava won.
Watching the CtC stream, I really understood why this LP was necessary. I'm discovering the immense disappointment that can come from the words "Wait, I have two fates correct, and there are only a few possibilities for this one..." or worse, "I'll just fill this in here and if it's wrong, I'll come back to it." I also came up with what's probably one of my best jokes ever, which was good enough to be read aloud despite not being a superchat. Unfortunately, I won't be able to share it here until next week.

TheMcD
May 4, 2013

Monaca / Subject N 2024
---------
Despair will never let you down.
Malice will never disappoint you.

New video!



Back from technical difficulties, we continue onwards, exploring the mysteries of the Obra Dinn and getting our bearings.

fractalairduct
Sep 26, 2015

I, Giorno Giovanna, have a dream!

As McD mentioned, one other thing that the game doesn't tell you is that there can potentially be multiple correct solutions to a death. In Abigail's case, for instance, it's certainly accurate to say that she was "clubbed by a terrible beast", but you could also correctly say that she was "crushed by falling rigging", and the game will accept either. Of course, as an insurance agent, your job is to determine exactly who is responsible for what.

Speaking of going above and beyond for dedication to insurance, you can actually just climb down to your rowboat and leave at any time, regardless of how complete the book is.

Nidoking
Jan 27, 2009

I fought the lava, and the lava won.

fractalairduct posted:

Speaking of going above and beyond for dedication to insurance, you can actually just climb down to your rowboat and leave at any time, regardless of how complete the book is.

I'm pretty sure you have to at least witness all of the available memories before you can leave. You don't have to fill in any of the book, but you do at least have to see what there is to see.

ChaosStar0
Apr 6, 2021

Pretty sure you need to see all the scenes to do that.

I brought my Drake
Jul 10, 2014

These high-G injections have some serious side effects after pulling so many jumps.

I'm loving Nidoking's complete lack of surprise. The video starts with one of my favorite reveals in the game and I gasped out loud the first time I saw it. Nidoking just taking it in stride is hilarious.

fractalairduct
Sep 26, 2015

I, Giorno Giovanna, have a dream!

ChaosStar0 posted:

Pretty sure you need to see all the scenes to do that.

I may have been misremembering, yeah. It's been a while since I played the game myself.

Mikl
Nov 8, 2009

Vote shit sandwich or the shit sandwich gets it!
In an example of the sometimes byzantine thought process this game has, it thinks you should be able to identify Hat Guy because (spoiler contains Hat Guy's identity) in one of the scenes you've seen, the First Mate calls "Brennan! Bring the surgeon's kit!" and Hat Guy (i.e. Brennan) has his hand to his ear, meaning he heard someone call his name.

Hwurmp
May 20, 2005

spoiled by a terrible beast

Nidoking
Jan 27, 2009

I fought the lava, and the lava won.

Hwurmp posted:

spoiled by a terrible beast

It conforms with the spoiler policy. I don't mind, but something I really liked about the first recording session is that there's a lot of information here, and a lot that the home audience can potentially figure out just from the videos. It's kind of an Obra Dinn: The Home Game. See how much you can spot, and prepare to have twice as many reasons to be disappointed in two weeks' time!

Hwurmp
May 20, 2005

fair enough

cant cook creole bream
Aug 15, 2011
I think Fahrenheit is better for weather

Mikl posted:

In an example of the sometimes byzantine thought process this game has, it thinks you should be able to identify Hat Guy because (spoiler contains Hat Guy's identity) in one of the scenes you've seen, the First Mate calls "Brennan! Bring the surgeon's kit!" and Hat Guy (i.e. Brennan) has his hand to his ear, meaning he heard someone call his name.

It's not quite the only way you can figure that out. For one, he's the only alive one in hearing distance. But he and Hoscut also hung went down the staircase a few seconds earlier, so it would make sense that he'd call out to him.
That whole chapter is so fast. All these deaths happen within a minute or so.

fractalairduct
Sep 26, 2015

I, Giorno Giovanna, have a dream!

cant cook creole bream posted:

That whole chapter is so fast. All these deaths happen within a minute or so.

If I'm remembering correctly, it may be the only time when there are two entirely unrelated events - the attempted mutiny and the escape on the lifeboat - happening simultaneously.

cant cook creole bream
Aug 15, 2011
I think Fahrenheit is better for weather

fractalairduct posted:

If I'm remembering correctly, it may be the only time when there are two entirely unrelated events - the attempted mutiny and the escape on the lifeboat - happening simultaneously.

I think I could give s counterexample. oddly enough it also involves an escape with a lifeboat.

stryth
Apr 7, 2018

Got bread?
GIVE BREADS!
I just finished this game myself 10 minutes ago, my brain feels stretched. Are there any other games like this? Like, mysteries you have to ACTUALLY solve?

Tenebrais
Sep 2, 2011

stryth posted:

I just finished this game myself 10 minutes ago, my brain feels stretched. Are there any other games like this? Like, mysteries you have to ACTUALLY solve?

Outer Wilds is the best I can think of off the top of my head. Being a mystery game about exploring, you're best off looking up as little about it as possible; just trust me and play it.

Crazy Achmed
Mar 13, 2001

Well, that escalated quickly. Not just going from a spot of murder abovedecks to a freakin' giant squad attacking the ship, but also from having a couple of memories that can be completely or mostly solved in a self-contained manner to having you take a whirlwind tour through about, what, five or ten different scenes and several time periods without being able to jot down much more than a handful of obvious causes of death.
Like, I don't want to rag on the game without actually playing it myself, but my feeble mind is having a really hard time keeping up with what's going on. It feels like we go into a memory, then before we're even done looking at everyone in it, let alone speculating much as to who everyone is, we get dragged into another one.

Or am I overthinking it and is this how we're meant to play the game? Just go with the flow, start wide and shallow and activate as many memories/scenes as possible early on, so we can sit down and revisit them later via the book in a more planned and systematic manner?

GilliamYaeger
Jan 10, 2012

Call Gespenst!

Crazy Achmed posted:

Well, that escalated quickly. Not just going from a spot of murder abovedecks to a freakin' giant squad attacking the ship, but also from having a couple of memories that can be completely or mostly solved in a self-contained manner to having you take a whirlwind tour through about, what, five or ten different scenes and several time periods without being able to jot down much more than a handful of obvious causes of death.
Like, I don't want to rag on the game without actually playing it myself, but my feeble mind is having a really hard time keeping up with what's going on. It feels like we go into a memory, then before we're even done looking at everyone in it, let alone speculating much as to who everyone is, we get dragged into another one.

Or am I overthinking it and is this how we're meant to play the game? Just go with the flow, start wide and shallow and activate as many memories/scenes as possible early on, so we can sit down and revisit them later via the book in a more planned and systematic manner?
You're overthinking it. The opening segment is basically the game showing you the level select - it gives you immediate access to a bunch of the time periods and lets you explore each of them at your leisure.

vetinari100
Nov 8, 2009

> Make her pay.

Crazy Achmed posted:

Like, I don't want to rag on the game without actually playing it myself, but my feeble mind is having a really hard time keeping up with what's going on. It feels like we go into a memory, then before we're even done looking at everyone in it, let alone speculating much as to who everyone is, we get dragged into another one.

That's on the LPer, not the game. There's nothing stopping you from slowing down and going over every memory carefully.

Mikl
Nov 8, 2009

Vote shit sandwich or the shit sandwich gets it!
Yeah. Also, as an addendum to the "general rules" to get through this game:

Make a good effort to locate all the people listed as 'present' in the scene and take note of what they are doing.

This especially useful to both identify people (spoiler contains how) (note that different ranks and roles have different duties, and these are explained in the book, so if you see someone doing X you might know they're, e.g., a topman instead of a seaman or something), and sometimes to find out how they died (because you can reconstruct the events leading up to a death, which helps paint a clearer picture).

Nidoking did this very well during The End: "Oh, this dude is jumping off the railing, is he trying to get into the cabin from above?"

Stuff like that.

Mikl fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Dec 7, 2021

Crazy Achmed
Mar 13, 2001

Oh, OK, I thought the shaky watch mechanic was forcing you to skip to new scenes.
The lo-fi rendering makes the whole thing feel strangely peaceful to me, although I'm half expecting there to be some twist later on where we have a segment with a time limit or something unpleasant stalking us.

On the subject of notes, how are the LPers approaching this? If there is a pad of paper that you're writing stuff down on, it'd be neat to see pictures of how this develops throughout the playthrough. I got into playing sid meier's covert action a while back, and it's strangely satisfying to look at the mad conspiracy charts that I ended up scrawling throughout each game.

Crazy Achmed fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Dec 7, 2021

Tenebrais
Sep 2, 2011

Crazy Achmed posted:

Well, that escalated quickly. Not just going from a spot of murder abovedecks to a freakin' giant squad attacking the ship, but also from having a couple of memories that can be completely or mostly solved in a self-contained manner to having you take a whirlwind tour through about, what, five or ten different scenes and several time periods without being able to jot down much more than a handful of obvious causes of death.
Like, I don't want to rag on the game without actually playing it myself, but my feeble mind is having a really hard time keeping up with what's going on. It feels like we go into a memory, then before we're even done looking at everyone in it, let alone speculating much as to who everyone is, we get dragged into another one.

Or am I overthinking it and is this how we're meant to play the game? Just go with the flow, start wide and shallow and activate as many memories/scenes as possible early on, so we can sit down and revisit them later via the book in a more planned and systematic manner?

This is definitely the part where the game opens up and shows you the true scope of the mystery you're dealing with. The End is essentially the tutorial chapter and holds your hand through identifying enough people to get your first "three fates correct" checkpoint, but then you're taken through this whole sequence where you're going to seriously struggle to identify anyone with just the information laid out in front of you.

The shaky watch bit won't force you to go to the next scene until you activate it, but it does encourage you to do so, and it's probably better that you do. Most of the information you can get out of these scenes comes from comparing what people are doing from scene to scene, to see if you can track down who the few names that are said outright are referring to.

Nidoking
Jan 27, 2009

I fought the lava, and the lava won.

Crazy Achmed posted:

Or am I overthinking it and is this how we're meant to play the game? Just go with the flow, start wide and shallow and activate as many memories/scenes as possible early on, so we can sit down and revisit them later via the book in a more planned and systematic manner?

I don't think this is a bad idea, honestly. There are a lot of possible ways to approach the game, and a lot will depend on how you, personally, approach complicated stories. I'll be talking about that when we start the second session. Part of the difficulty is that you're seeing most of the scenes within each chapter in reverse chronological order, so you quite literally don't know what led to any of what you're seeing and need to guess to make any sense of what's going on. Once you have all of the scenes available, it becomes possible (mostly) to visit them in a more sensible order, follow the complete plot, and both see and understand what it is that's happening. That makes the details more apparent, because you can describe what you're seeing in terms of an overall sequence, and the importance of some of the details makes a lot more sense. In the course of this playthrough, you'll see a bit of each approach and how well they work for me.

In the case of this particular video, things were very chaotic, and I couldn't make much sense of them at the time, so I didn't spend a lot of time trying. How much sense I make of them later will become apparent.

GilliamYaeger posted:

You're overthinking it. The opening segment is basically the game showing you the level select - it gives you immediate access to a bunch of the time periods and lets you explore each of them at your leisure.

I would disagree with this. There's not much flexibility in the availability of scenes early on. They open up a few at a time, and you often have to walk over one newly-available corpse to get to the others. I'm not sure that there's a single intended flow through the game, but it's not until about this point that we have much choice at all. For example, I could have skipped a couple of the scenes in The End if I had any reason to, and I could have skipped the scenes on the gun deck to go straight to Escape. That's as much access as I have at this point. When we're done with Escape, three more scenes will be available, plus one that I missed along the way.

Crazy Achmed posted:

Oh, OK, I thought the shaky watch mechanic was forcing you to skip to new scenes.

It does feel like that, and the lack of in-game explanation doesn't help at all. The Doom 8 is probably one of the more important scenes to look at thoroughly, and it's also the first time you'll ever encounter this mechanic. The game will prompt you to press Action, and nothing will suggest that you might want to wait, especially since you have no idea what's going to happen when you do. Once you hit the button, you are locked in until you expose the next corpse in the present, at which point you can go back to where you were, but again, it's unlikely that someone would choose to do that and possibly forget where they need to go next. The map in the book will mark the new corpse with a question mark until you view its scene, but again, nothing in the game tells you this. And if you do want to explore a scene while the watch vibrates at you, you have to listen to the tense ten second loop the entire time, which isn't the most pleasant experience. While I understand the "force the player to spend one minute inspecting the scene" idea, I would very much prefer a more deliberate way to indicate that you've seen what you want to see and are ready to update the book and move on. Some scenes merit a lot more time spent, and some honestly have nothing worthwhile to see and way too much time to see it.

Crazy Achmed posted:

On the subject of notes, how are the LPers approaching this? If there is a pad of paper that you're writing stuff down on, it'd be neat to see pictures of how this develops throughout the playthrough. I got into playing sid meier's covert action a while back, and it's strangely satisfying to look at the mad conspiracy charts that I ended up scrawling throughout each game.

My notepad was thoroughly unimpressive most of the way through, for reasons that will again become apparent when I explain them. There are things I should be writing down but don't, and things I write down in the book and therefore don't need notes for. When I got to the point where I actually had useful notes to take, I found my pen to be very unfriendly while trying to write on the specific notepad that I had, so writing things was enough of a hassle I'd forget what I was trying to write before getting it down. And when I actually started solving some things, the notepad was way too small, and I had to switch to something more like a spreadsheet, but really just a bunch of text files with cross-referenced lists of everything I knew. Which was another hassle, because Obra Dinn won't let you task-switch while it's full-screened, which is how I captured it. All of the information I wrote down will be making it into the videos, and you won't have to try to read my handwriting or the rips in the paper from when I ended up tearing it before managing to make a mark.

fractalairduct
Sep 26, 2015

I, Giorno Giovanna, have a dream!

Tenebrais posted:

Outer Wilds is the best I can think of off the top of my head. Being a mystery game about exploring, you're best off looking up as little about it as possible; just trust me and play it.

Seconding this. To give a very non-spoilery explanation, Outer Wilds is a game where you play as an astronaut exploring a small solar system. It's a lot like Obra Dinn in that you'll be spending most of your time exploring and discovering new things, and your only real resource is information - the only thing limiting your ability to progress is, for the most part, whether you've collected and put together enough information to understand how.

Gwyneth Palpate
Jun 7, 2010

Do you want your breadcrumbs highlighted?

~SMcD

This thread inspired me to play through Obra Dinn again, and while I did forget enough of the details that I was actually able to enjoy the playthrough, damned if I didn't remember some of the big sources of information in some scenes. This cut down my time considerably.

TheMcD
May 4, 2013

Monaca / Subject N 2024
---------
Despair will never let you down.
Malice will never disappoint you.

New video!



Nidoking is starting to get into the swing of things somewhat, now that I've explained a fair bit of the UI trappings and all. Still not a lot of solving going on, but we're just gathering info.

Tenebrais
Sep 2, 2011

Nice, you've now seen the most important chapter in the game!

Not in terms of the plot, obviously. But seeing the ship in normal operation has a lot of valuable information for figuring out who everyone is.

stryth
Apr 7, 2018

Got bread?
GIVE BREADS!
Ah, Syed, your death was sad and tragic, but it helped me Identify at least a dozen people. *salutes*

Also, in the video did you really not know what "Bow" meant? or were you just being vague for the sack of not giving away hints?

stryth fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Dec 12, 2021

Nidoking
Jan 27, 2009

I fought the lava, and the lava won.
I'm familiar with "Bow" being "the front part of a ship what is the part most in the direction the ship goes when it's going in the direction it should". I've never heard a distinction between "the frontmost part of the ship as mentioned earlier" and the actual location of the body being referenced by the phrase "On the Bow".

Gnoman
Feb 12, 2014

Come, all you fair and tender maids
Who flourish in your pri-ime
Beware, take care, keep your garden fair
Let Gnoman steal your thy-y-me
Le-et Gnoman steal your thyme




This episode highlights the most frustrating bit of this game, which is thankfully quite rare - the times when you know exactly what happened, but you don't know what the game wants you to tell it. It is very close to a "guess the verb" puzzle.

When I played, I solved the "Justice At Sea" section by waiting until I had two solids and then plugged in killers until I found one that the game would accept.

Fedule
Mar 27, 2010


No one left uncured.
I got you.
A thing I really wish this game would let you do is temporarily submit a picture as an answer, or perhaps link answers together, such that you can at least have a note saying "this guy was killed by that guy but I don't know who he is yet", kind of like a reverse bookmark, and when you later identify that guy have it prompt you to update those bookmarked entries (I'd say have them update automatically, but this then raises further questions like how in the deep internals does the game handle changing multiple entries in the book at once, and does this not introduce potential for disastrous logic backfires if you get something wrong, so having the player manage those manually is probably the best way).

Gnoman
Feb 12, 2014

Come, all you fair and tender maids
Who flourish in your pri-ime
Beware, take care, keep your garden fair
Let Gnoman steal your thy-y-me
Le-et Gnoman steal your thyme




That would be really handy, especially when you get scenes like one here where you can ID somebody in entirely divorced contexts.

Nidoking
Jan 27, 2009

I fought the lava, and the lava won.

Fedule posted:

A thing I really wish this game would let you do is temporarily submit a picture as an answer, or perhaps link answers together, such that you can at least have a note saying "this guy was killed by that guy but I don't know who he is yet", kind of like a reverse bookmark,

I found the inability to link pictures to causes of death as well as causes of death to names with no associated picture both to be very annoying. I've heard it said that there should be either an in-game notebook, or better yet, an area for writing notes associated with names or faces that don't count toward completion, but would be much more convenient than keeping written notes. When I finally started making progress in the game, I wrote a list of all of the pages in the book and labeled them with chapter and part (or D1, D2 etc. for disappearances) and also copied the roster page into a separate list so I could put what information I found where it would be most convenient. And I still had a third file for the notes that didn't fit anywhere else, although that was mainly just an extension of my handwritten notes after my paper stopped working.


Gnoman posted:

This episode highlights the most frustrating bit of this game, which is thankfully quite rare - the times when you know exactly what happened, but you don't know what the game wants you to tell it. It is very close to a "guess the verb" puzzle.

I will give it this much credit: I don't think I ever found a cause of death where the game didn't accept an answer that made sense to me when I understood what had happened. There's one group of people where most LPers seem to look at the pages, say "Well, this happened during this chapter, so anybody in these pages probably met this fate," and even where the game explicitly provides information that states a different fate for one of those people, the game accepts pretty much anything. I don't think most of those players ever actually found out what happened to those people, which is a bit sad, but probably falls on the right side of the balance between "making sure players aren't just guessing" and "making sure not to frustrate players by forcing them to deduce things that aren't apparent at all." Somehow.

I wonder whether the game would be better if it didn't confirm anything. Possibly not until you're done, but possibly not ever. You fill in the book, and you know how much information is needed, but the game just never tells you whether you got it all correct or not.

Gnoman
Feb 12, 2014

Come, all you fair and tender maids
Who flourish in your pri-ime
Beware, take care, keep your garden fair
Let Gnoman steal your thy-y-me
Le-et Gnoman steal your thyme




Nidoking posted:

I will give it this much credit: I don't think I ever found a cause of death where the game didn't accept an answer that made sense to me when I understood what had happened. There's one group of people where most LPers seem to look at the pages, say "Well, this happened during this chapter, so anybody in these pages probably met this fate," and even where the game explicitly provides information that states a different fate for one of those people, the game accepts pretty much anything. I don't think most of those players ever actually found out what happened to those people, which is a bit sad, but probably falls on the right side of the balance between "making sure players aren't just guessing" and "making sure not to frustrate players by forcing them to deduce things that aren't apparent at all." Somehow.

I wonder whether the game would be better if it didn't confirm anything. Possibly not until you're done, but possibly not ever. You fill in the book, and you know how much information is needed, but the game just never tells you whether you got it all correct or not.

The answer(s) the game accepts always make sense. That's a good thing. But not every answer that makes sense is one the game will accept. Or else you can't be sure that the answer that makes sense to you is acceptable.

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Nidoking
Jan 27, 2009

I fought the lava, and the lava won.

Gnoman posted:

But not every answer that makes sense is one the game will accept. Or else you can't be sure that the answer that makes sense to you is acceptable.

Knowing all of the answers, I'm confident in saying that if an answer makes sense to you and isn't accepted, it's because you don't understand what actually happened, or don't understand the choices for fates available to you. There are some very poor conclusions that will be very easy to draw, and I can't think of any that aren't based on assumptions that are clearly incorrect when you examine the evidence that led you to them. We can probably talk more clearly about this once I've actually revealed that information and drawn what conclusions I will from it.

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