Comment by croissants
5 years ago
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).