Student indie dev team making an Obra Dinn-inspired deduction game, DEAR SUSPECT — looking for feedback on our core mechanisms!
Hi everyone,
We are a small student indie dev team working on a detective deduction game called Dear Suspect. It is not a remake or fan game of Return of the Obra Dinn, but Obra Dinn is one of the clearest influences on how we think about deduction, player inference, and the pleasure of reconstructing truth from incomplete evidence.
We wanted to ask this community because Obra Dinn players tend to understand a very specific kind of design problem: how to make deduction feel genuinely earned rather than guided, random, or over-explained. We have our own take on this question because a lot of deduction game genuinely feels like a checklist: there are clicks to be done and the deduction is drawn out. feels more like another way to tell a story rather than an intellectual challenge.
In Dear Suspect, you write letters to living townsfolk to investigate a family massacre.
The player investigates a case by piecing together evidence, testimonies, contradictions, and relationships. The core design question we are struggling with is:
- How much structure should a deduction game give the player before it stops feeling like real reasoning?
For example, we are currently thinking about questions like these:
- Should the game confirm correct deductions immediately, or should confirmation only happen after the player commits to a larger theory?
- Should suspects, clues, and events be organized in a visible logic board, or should the player be forced to build more of that structure mentally?
- Right now we have an evidence-board-like system as the validator. Questions are organized in a tree-like structure, where you answer a question; it reveals the next or next set of questions that need to be answered to proceed. Some sets of questions are bundles; you have to select an answer for all three within the bundle to submit for validation.
- How much ambiguity is satisfying, and when does ambiguity become unfair?
- Obra Dinn ingeniously used a lot of new paradigms(not the most accurate word) for deduction, things like ethnic appearances, occupational title, cultural elements. We used similar stuff like motives, physical possibility, some ethical and cultural clues. Which one do YOU think was the most ingenious in Obra Dinn?
In Obra Dinn, one of the brilliant things is that the game rarely tells you exactly what to think. It gives you enough evidence, then trusts you to notice patterns. We are trying to learn from that without simply copying the Fate-book structure.
For those of you who love Obra Dinn,
- what mechanics made the deduction process feel fair, rigorous, and satisfying?
- And on the other hand, what kinds of mechanics in similar deduction games make the experience feel too hand-held, too arbitrary, or too dependent on guessing?
We are especially interested in feedback on deduction systems, clue validation, suspect identification, and how to preserve the feeling of “I figured this out myself.”
We are mainly looking for design criticism from people who understand why Obra Dinn works so well to help us build this game. Thanks so much for reading. Any thoughts would be genuinely useful to us:)))))!
