Papers, Please creator's next game, Return of the Obra Dinn, out this autumn

Black-and-white nautical mystery Return of the Obra Dinn—the next game from the creator of Papers, Please—will be out this autumn/fall, developer Lucas Pope has announced.

The Obra Dinn is the name of a ship that's bobbed back into port having been lost at sea. All the crew are dead, and you're an insurance adjuster tasked with going aboard and working out how everybody died so that the families of the victims can receive any owed salaries.

"Insurance adjuster" immediately conjures up images of a paper-pushing game in the same vein of Papers, Please, but this looks to be much more interactive. You'll explore the ship, find corpses, and watch moment-of-death flashbacks. Shaun found that there was plenty of cross-checking and unguided detective work in an early version he played, which is encouraging, while Austin wrote about its cool time manipulation last year.

I can't wait for it. I love the art style, as well as the idea of being given free reign over the detective work. Whether it can step out from the shadow of Papers, Please remains to be seen—but we don't have long to wait to find out.

The Steam page is live here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.