Obduction ®

Again, here we have a dev team that don't care about whether you'll be able to play their game or not. WASD for moving is entirely unplyable on a non qwerty keyboard and this issue could easily be fixed by allowing key rebinds in the option screen. That one just has a wonderful screen with images telling that you need to use WASD to move. This dev even adds insult to injury by supporting all kinds of different gamepads AND VR controls. Oh the humanity. They don't want players to play their game? Fine, I won't.

Does get a bit tedious at times but overall a very good puzzle game. I liked it better than Myst and Firmament. The puzzles are challenging but not too hard. Performance is not great, you need a really good GPU to play on max settings and high resolution.

I wanted so much to love this game and there is possibly plenty to love about it. However, after several attempts to delete and reinstall the game I have given up with it. It's full of bugs. Sometimes you can move and sometimes not. Sometimes you can move through portals and sometimes not. the swap machines may or may not work. The rotating button at the dome often stops at a wall. The list of glitches goes on and on and often changes with each try. I got fed up trying and finally threw in the towel and deleted it. In the end I watched the parts I couldn't play (due to being unable to progress) on YouTube and, frankly, the endings were lacking in any kind of fulfilment. How disappointing. What a shame because this game could have been so much more.

I didn't exactly hate it. I even thought it was interesting for a Myst-like game. Some of the puzzles were weird but even when I had to resort to looking up the solution to the Myst style vague nonsense I wasn't mad about it. I wasn't even particularly bored. I mean it's a solo adventure where nothing much happens and you only run around solving nonsensical puzzles, but exploring the admittedly nice looking environments was interesting enough. But then the reason why I abandoned the game came up. I'm pretty tolerant to game nonsense, even when it's sort of annoying, but the puzzle that made me quit was simply intentionally made to annoy people and waste their time. You have to operate a machine that controls this little maze and you have to figure out how to configure the maze machine so you could pass through. But it's a time wasting nonsense that has you running around half the entire game area to solve this. I was told by someone who played the game that even if you know the exact solution right from the start, it would still take about an hour to get through. Figuring it out on your own would take even more time, because you can't see what you did unless you go back and see from a different area of the game. I don't want to play games that are deliberately stalling the gameplay only for the sake of wasting time. Whoever came up with that puzzle (and potentially other similarly bad puzzles after this) really needs to get a grip. I thought 2/5 stars might be more fair, because it's not like effort was not put into this game. It looks good and it has some interesting bits. But the performance is not great at times and then the whole thing with the time waster puzzle. Pointless stalling, extreme level stalling even, is reason enough to rate this game just 1/5. It's worse than a game that's sort of boring but at least it's going forward and not completely stopping just to waste the player's time.

I quickly quitted because the first-time player experience is not up to standards, even for at the time it was released (2016). To sum up, the game designers definitely had a big love for the old classics (Myst first coming into mind), but didn't understand what made their universe enticing to explore. First, the control schemes are torn up between the now very outdated position-to-position movement and the free-roam "FPS" camera you have in the Witness, Quern, The Thalos Principle and so on. It's advised to use the first one because you have a clearer view of what are the puzzle elements... But you feel unpleasantly stuck in a cell. A bit like the main character in this game, in fact ^^. On top of that in both movement modes the game is extremely slow : Running feels like you're a tortoise with asthma. Add in to this that lots of areas are dead-ends or "to-be-unlocked later" doors and you already spent 1 hour jogging sluggishly through the first puzzle. But the main reason you're not enticed to explore are just the lack of mid-term objectives behind the short-term ones. Indeed, early on you'll meet a man who hides in a house. Besides being a flat image on a door's window (another hint they didn't update from Myst's formula), this man tells you to do something without explaining why or what's happening. At all. Worse, they will tell you to buzz off if you knock back on their door in hope for more hints. Sure, I could read the notes scattered around to understand what that blue and red beam does, or ponder where the power generator I need to turn on is... But why doesn't he "want" to tell me all that while I need to understand to help them? Why should I -me and my character- care if they -both the characters and developpers- don't bring me the elements for that? I mean, they don't even want to tell the very basics, just the current objective. This quickly turned me off despite a graphically promising universe, and I fear it will turn off most players, too.