Obduction ®

My first Myst game was the 1993 original, and I've since gone on to play Riven and Uru. Those are my 3 favorites in the series, and Obduction easily stands shoulder to shoulder with them. It stumbles a little towards the end, but makes up for it with the best ending, giving a rather satisfying feeling. You start off in a hiking trail in the middle of nowhere before stumbling across the first "seed," which transports you to Hunrath, a small community also in the middle of nowhere but the world around you is clearly alien. Like the original Myst, you will get the same sense of wondering just where you are and what you've landed in, as the game's story is very much "in medias res" (in the middle of things) and you need to piece together what happened and how you fit into things. The XBox 360 controller has some issues - even though I refuse to have the Y axis inverted, during times where I needed to hold A (the "interact" button) I'd have to hold down on the control stick to make the cursor/thing I was using go up and up to go down. (tried inverting the Y axis to test and see if this would fix the problem. No.) The game also defaults to walk every time you load it up. The music is enchanting, albeit short lived in most cases. I've always loved the ambient sound and music in Cyan Games' games and Obduction doesn't fall short here. The puzzles are typically straight forward and you probably won't need a walkthrough for most of them. There is one section towards the end where the path to your objective is suddenly opened. You have the barricade there the entire game, then suddenly gone. I understand why the path is closed so you don't go there early, but give us some context, guys! Finally, unless I'm missing something, the ending you get is determined by one thing that shouldn't matter one way or the other. There was one point where I needed to restart my game completely because of a glitch that blocked me. Hopefully this gets patched. Buy this game. Period.

I got the game for free during the gog giveaway. - First thing : no menu for key rebinding, which is quite annoying for people like me who do not have a qwerty keyboard. You can rebind your keys by manually modifying some input.ini file, but we are in 2019 now, games from two decades ago already had such menus. - Second thing : for some reason i cannot rotate any object in the game, that means the lamp at the beginning but also all levers, which is quite the progress killer (stuck right at the beginning with no way to go up the very first elevator). I tried nudging my mouse in every way possible but nothing happens, and I have not found anything online to help fix that.

I have tryed to play this game in two different ocasions and the result was motion sickness in both. I suppose something is wrong with the camera movement...

Myst was a super game. Obduction is Myst on steroids! The only thing is that there are some things that you need to do that have absolutely no clues. Without some hints from previous game players, I might never have finished it. I never liked using hints, but had to with this game.

First of all, this game is gorgeous and has some great sound design. A lot of little details everywhere, and the places tell a story. Obduction follows the Myst formula pretty well: You're let lose inside an unknown and mysterious world with no idea of what to do. You explore and come across buttons and levers and seemingly weird contraptions. What do they do? Well, that's for you to figure out, and you will start figuring things out and understand how this and that work. Then you'll build upon that knowledge and get further and try new things. Then you'll remember that one thing you saw over there... maybe this new idea can be used there somehow? You start out knowing nothing and must put in work to figure out what to do yourself, most of the time. Figuring things out on your own is a pretty amazing feeling. But beware that this game is not JUST about figuring things out - it's a lot about patience and commitment as well. Some puzzles require almost silly amounts of it. You'll not fast travel around - you're on foot. You have to leg it from place to place. Sometimes you'll open up shortcuts between places though and avoid some of the long treks around the world.