On this week’s Kotaku Splitscreen, we implore you to not miss Return of the Obra Dinn, a phenomenal game and contender for 2018's greatest.

I've been slowly making my way through Return of the Obra Dinn, a moody concept piece (or if you prefer, flashy walking simulator) from Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope. It's a gorgeous game, a triumph of aesthetics over technical grunt, and built around a simple but endlessly pliable concept: investigating a flash-frame of each crew member's final moments, and working out how they died.

I'm roughly halfway through the investigation, by my reckoning, because I've seen the end for around 30 of the characters. After the first few you start to understand where the fun of Obra Dinn lies: this is a grand mystery, filled with unknown alliances and enmities and tragedy and base murder. Piecing it together will be a huge task.

“Realistically I think it’ll take me around half a year,” Lucas Pope wrote four and a half years ago about his game Return of the Obra Dinn, which he released today.

What’s four extra years when the results are this brilliant? Meticulously constructed, from the stippled black-and-white graphics to the intricate, devious logic puzzle at its core, Obra Dinn is a unique and fascinating tragedy.

It's not surprising that October is a busy period for video games. But in terms of weeks that grow the Pile of Shame, next week is looking absurd.

The monotonous world of passport checking made for a brilliant game in Papers, Please. Now you can check out the trailer for Dukope's upcoming game, Return of the Obra Dinn, which has you doing an insurance assessment of a ghost ship.

I'm really looking forward to Return of the Obra Dinn, the next game from Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope. The version at PAX West is much improved from the early demo you may have played, with a much more extensive "ship's log" interface that lets you keep track of all the murder mysteries you have to solve by reliving people's moments of death as you explore a ship in classic Macintosh-style monochrome. It shouldn't be long now before it's out.

The more you follow the development of the Return of the Obra Dinn, the more fascinating it gets.

Echoing Mark's thoughts, I've a good feeling that quite a few of the year's best titles will be the ones that we simply haven't heard of. Take the Nintendo Switch: nobody knows what's landing on that this year. And then every year has little indies that pop up out of nowhere, like Stardew Valley last year, or Her Story the year before that.

With that in mind, here's the games that we do know about - and the ones I'm most excited for.

One of the highlights of PAX Australia is, and always will be, the indies. There's plenty of games to play, from methodical singleplayer titles to frantic co-op couch shooters. I played a bunch over the course of the three day convention, and here's what I'll be keeping an eye on.

Briefly: You can now play a very, very early version of Return of the Obra Dinn, the upcoming first-person mystery adventure game from the creator of Papers, Please. You cannot save your game, and there are no menus at all, but you can at least check out the (pretty cool) visual style for yourself.