It's 1807. You're an insurance investigator. You have to go check out a damaged cargo ship and report back to your manager at work. Sounds like a masterclass in narrative-based deduction that blazed the trail for an entire new genre of video games, right?

It's Return of the Obra Dinn. It's tragic. It's spooky. It's rich. And, while it's not without its flaws, it is well worth your time.

Obra Dinn's tagline dubs it "An Insurance Adventure with Minimal Color." This marketing is a meme. It's Lucas Pope saying, "Hey. How boring can I make this thing you're about to play sound? How much can I shroud it in a vocabulary of drudgery? In a soggy veil of mundanity? Will it still blow you away?"

Yes, Lucas. You smug bastard. Yes.

In Obra Dinn, "insurance investigator" quickly becomes "time-traveling ace detective," and the setting of "damaged cargo ship" (the Obra Dinn) similarly transforms into a macabre stage playing host to a series of haunting vignettes.

After being rowed out to the Obra Dinn by a gruff piratey fellow, you're introduced to a mysterious book you've been tasked to fill in with the events that unfolded aboard the ship along with a pocket watch bearing the visage of a skull. The watch pops up in your hand whenever you come upon a corpse. Once activated, it takes you back in time to the moment the being associated with the corpse met their end.

These "back in time" moments wash over the player in four stages: dialogue and voiceover, initial review, note taking, and moving on. In the dialogue and voiceover stage, you encounter a beige-green screen of text and listen to the sounds that occur during the impending scene. Then, in the initial review stage, players move around a 3-D diorama depicting Obra Dinn's characters at the exact moment a being died. Reminiscent of immersive works of theater like Sleep No More, the player is able to move throughout a scene while its actors, who the player's just heard from during the voiceover stage, remain frozen in time. The player can enter and exit rooms within the frozen memory, view the scene from different angles, and notice important clues key to discovering the identity of the sixty passengers who once sailed aboard the Obra Dinn... and why they are no longer. The goal of the game is to correctly assign identities and fates to each person listed on the ship's manifest included in your book. In stage three, note taking, the scene fades out and the player is encouraged to attempt to name the victim of the scene and what happened to them. This is just an initial guess that the player can (and almost definitely will) go back and change. The more of the ship's story you encounter through these flashbacks, the easier it is to deduce what happened to each soul who once sailed upon it. In the fourth stage, players will either walk out a door in the memory to return to the present moment or access another memory and travel farther back in time. In this way, the game's story is often revealed nonlinearly, in a pattern that works its way backwards within chapters and jumps around based on the areas of the ship the player decides to explore.

As you can probably tell from my attempt to describe Obra Dinn's gameplay, this game is doing a lot of unique stuff. It's revolutionary, really. From its simple yet artistically excellent "1-bit" graphics to its central mechanics involving your book and pocket watch to its elegant system of verifying identities and fates in threes, it is in a class of its own

It scratched my interactive detective itch so hard I'm not sure I'll need it scratched again for a good long while. That said, when it does inevitably return, I'm not sure I'll have it scratched so dang good ever again. And it's my favorite genre.

Really what I'm trying to say here is that Lucas Pope has ruined detective games for all of us for ever and ever. So, thanks, Obra Dinn. Thanks for your details. Thanks for making me pay attention, reason and re-reason, crave an angle just beyond the reach of a memory's fleeting white pixels. Thanks for making me speculate. For being difficult but not too difficult. For ratcheting up your level of difficulty in a way that made solving you rewarding. I, somewhat miraculously, never felt cheated by you. And, most importantly, know more about early 19th century nautical politics than I ever thought possible before I got to know you.

Even so, you are not without your trouble spots.

Yes, my dear shipmate. There are a few things I'd like to point out that are - sigh - not quite perfect about this masterpiece. For one, when the player opens a door and enters the room into which it leads, the door closes behind the player if they linger for more than a few seconds. This design choice leads to - you guessed it - more door opening, which is fine but just not what I came to Obra Dinn thinking I'd spend any appreciable amount of time doing. My super secret workaround for this is to scan a room from its landing before entering. Then, if there's nothing of note, you can move on without being accosted by yet another L-shaped knob.

The dithering of the game's distinctive "1-bit" graphics is striking but sometimes made me feel sick, and I don't usually get motion sickness while playing video games.

I think the initial investigative time limit when you enter a memory (described above as "stage 2: initial review") could be done away with. This stage leads to more opening and closing of the book than is necessary and could be streamlined by prompting players to fill in narrative details after they've chosen to exit a memory.

Additionally, while I understand the need to preserve the game's open-endedness and mystery, Obra Dinn's central storyline is so inscrutable at times that, after I finished the game, it took me a separate session of reflection to land on what I think actually occurred. It could be argued that this mystery within a mystery is but an even larger testament to the game as an acclaimed indie triumph. However, I think it would be far more satisfying for the story to naturally click into place the second you finish identifying its final victim. (And maybe, for some people, it does.) Instead, I felt as if the game's focus on its individual characters obscured the meaning of its history.

Obra Dinn's setting and conceit also bring up some potentially uncomfortable deduction criteria based on certain characters' appearances and their association with racial and ethnic stereotypes. When I was playing the game, it felt strange to use characters' skin colors and/or facial features as a basis for guessing their identities. However, this was - for instance - the most obvious way to distinguish a ship's steward who hailed from India from his English counterparts. I'm not sure if this is a criticism of the game and its developer or of myself for not being honest enough about my internal prejudices and/or not giving enough credit to Pope's desire to reflect a realistic ship's crew circa 1800. Could be both. Could be neither.

That said, if playing detective is even remotely interesting to you, you're going to love this game. It's singular. It's smart. It makes your mind work in ways I think you'll not anticipate. I played through Obra Dinn in three sessions that totaled seven and a half hours. It's not a light game. Be ready to trust yourself. To seek details in the darkness. 8/10.

Where it shines:

• Deduction
• Uniqueness
• Style

Where it fades:

• Doors
• Dithering