It was Pope's second commercial game, following 2013's Papers, Please, and was first released for macOS and Windows before being ported to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One a year later.

Return of the Obra Dinn was praised for its gameplay, art style, and narrative; it won several awards including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

The player is dispatched to the ghost ship to perform an appraisal, reconstruct the events of the voyage, and determine the fates of all sixty souls aboard, providing a cause of death for those deceased or a probable current location for those presumed living.

[5] The Obra Dinn, an East Indiaman trade ship under the command of Captain Robert Witterel, departs with 52 crewmen and 8 passengers from Falmouth, Cornwall, to the Orient in 1802.

The inspector receives a copy of the Obra Dinn's logbook, drawings of the passengers and crew, and the Memento Mortem from Henry Evans, the ship's naval surgeon.

The Obra Dinn carried a number of passengers, including a traveling musician, a wealthy Englishwoman and her companion, and two Formosan nobles and their guards transporting an exquisite treasure chest.

Initial calamity struck only a few days in, with one crew member crushed to death by unsecured cargo, and two others dying of pneumonia despite Evans' best attempts to save them.

Nichols ties the boats together and returns to the Obra Dinn along with the captured mermaids, only to be fatally shot by the surviving Formosan guard as he approaches.

The mermaids use magic to summon a terrible storm, allowing a pair of sea demons mounted on giant spider crabs to attempt to rescue them.

The surviving passengers and some of the crew decide to abandon the Obra Dinn and make for the western coast of Africa, but only Evans and his boat reach safety.

Witterel manages to kill them all in hand-to-hand combat, but with his wife already dead from injuries sustained during the kraken attack, he commits suicide with a pistol.

The inspector eventually catalogues the fates of 58 of the 60 souls aboard, leaving shortly before a sudden storm sinks the damaged Obra Dinn.

The completed logbook is mailed back to Evans, and an insurance report is written, compensating or fining the estates of lost crewmen, depending on their conduct.

The inspector uses the Mortem on the monkey's paw in order to deduce what happened in the lazarette and catalogue the last two fates, thereby completing the whole story of the Obra Dinn for their personal collection.

Separately, he found that while the 1-bit graphics worked fine when displayed in an on-screen window, at full screen resolution, players suffered from motion sickness.

Internally, Pope created spreadsheets to link all the various characters and their fates, and to ensure that players would be able to logically follow chains of deaths.

[10] This ended with him writing the necessary dialog for some scenes and hiring voice actors, provided by locals Pope auditioned, who could mimic the accents of the time period.

He found a solution by having ten events in the narrative serve as a catalyst for deaths, breaking the story into sections and allowing the plot to be more digestible to the player.

[15] Polygon's Colin Campbell recommended the game, saying "Return of the Obra Dinn takes the whodunit's conventions and twists them into kaleidoscopic narratives that are perplexing and delightful.

Andreas Inderwildi of Rock Paper Shotgun commented that the game was more than just about logical reasoning, but that players were supposed to take into account how humans would act in an emergency.