Return of the Obra Dinn review – arduous but captivating

It's just you and an awful lot of paperwork in Lucas Pope's exquisitely realised seafaring mystery

When the Obra Dinn, a sizable merchant ship believed to be lost at sea, drifts into port one day in 1808, you, as a 19th-century insurance loss adjuster, are dispatched to figure out what happened. On board, you find rag-draped skeletons littered around, snapped rigging, and mysterious gashes in the deck. So begins the arduous but captivating task of reconstructing the ship's journey, identifying the remains of the 60-odd bodies and, most challenging of all, the precise fate of each man and woman for whom the Obra Dinn offered a final voyage and resting place.

As with Papers Please, the game for which designer Lucas Pope is best known - in which you play an eastern European border checkpoint agent deciding who to let into the country and who to turn away - the drama is viewed through an administrative lens. You must parse and document everything, ensuring the correct names are written into the appropriate blanks in the manuscript once you have deduced, for example, the identity of a sailor crushed by falling rigging, or a passenger who succumbed to disease. But unlike Papers Please, this grand puzzle is infused with a hint of the supernatural. Among the ship's artefacts, which include a manifest, a crew list and a couple of hand-drawn sketches (all essential clues in your detective work), you also find a magical pocket watch inside a casket, which can be used to trigger a flashback whenever you encounter a corpse.