Every time a new game starts, the player character will be randomly assigned to be male or female. The protagonist's gender, however, will not influence the story in any way: in fact, the only difference will be whether the few lines of dialogue spoken at the beginning will be delivered by a male or female voice.
The Obra Dinn is modeled on the HMS Leopard, a British vessel employed by the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. The Obra Dinn is, however, significantly smaller (and with a less numerous crew) than its real-life counterpart.
Nikita Ordynskiy voices Russian sailor Aleksei Toporov. Ordynskiy was the director of Papers, Please: The Short Film (2018), an adaptation of Papers, Please (2013), the previous game by Return of the Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope.
James McCreadie and Debbie May, who play brother and sister in the game, are real-life husband and wife.
Like in Lucas Pope's previous game Papers, Please (2013), the starting point of Return of the Obra Dinn involves bureaucratic paperwork. In Papers, Please, the player is an immigration officer of a totalitarian state trying to spot falsified and incomplete documents at a border checkpoint; in Return of the Obra Dinn, he is an insurance investigator of the East India Company attempting to find the cause of death of crew members and passengers of an abandoned ship.