Watch the building of the Obra Dinn in this time-lapse video

Watching Return Of The Obra Dinn's creator build the game's levels is like watching the work of a serial killer who's obsessed with the detective chasing them, artfully laying out corpses and tweaking gruesome scenes for maximum surprise and mystery. A torso here, a pair of shoes there, and oh the detective will kick themself when they realise what they actually happened here. Lucas Pope has released a time-lapse of modelling the ship, see, condensing three years of work into an hour of video. I do like a good time lapse video, and this is one.

"This is a linear playback of all my edits in Maya and was generated using a set of custom tools to capture the data, process it, and replay it in a marginally coherent way," Pope explains in the video description. "If you haven't played the game, this video will be confusing and boring. If you have played the game, same problem."

Tush and fie! I enjoyed seeing it all come together. My favourite part is watching him adjust the many legs of Chapter 6. The video contains spoilers for some surprises that are best unspoiled, obvs, though it's not like seeing a murder in this will help you solve it.

"As an avid reader of classic crime fiction I was well prepared to play Obra Dinn as a sixty-corpse whodunnit; to my surprise it's as much a whatwasdun and whowasitdunto," Matthew Castle said in our glowing Return Of The Obra Dinn review.

For more on the game's making, do check out The Mechanic's chat with Lucas Pope, which focuses on the book. "This game was a juggling of restrictions: 1bit, story only told when someone dies, just layer upon layer of things that I could not do," he said. Oh, and Andreas Inderwildi's bit on how Obra Dinn repurposes nautical disaster stories is good too.

As a tidy bonus, Return Of The Obra Dinn is half-price on Steam, GOG, and Humble for another few hours, down to £7.74/€8.39/$9.99. I strongly recommend it.