Obduction ®

Mystery and intrigue quickly gives way to mundanity and aimless wandering in this odd adventure game. The game looks pretty and plays pretty well, although the control scheme is a bit rudimentary at times, but the lack of story/narrative, lack of direction, very few real puzzles and not much atmosphere makes it a bore to play rather than it being an involving and interesting adventure. It’s a very slow burner, with lots of exploration and teasing out the relevant information, and there are a number of poor design choices which spoil things. A few minor conveniences, like having a map, journey, objective list and not having to wait so long every time you swap worlds would have made it better.

This game's already annoyed me several times and I'm not even half an hour in. First of all, there's no way to remap the controls! I want to move with SDFE, not ASDW. That's how I always play and anyone who thinks I'm wrong can fight me about it. But this game thinks it knows better and forces me to use their way. It's such an easy change to implement. There's really no excuse for this. The performance isn't great either. In the intro alone it dipped down to 37fps. Other points where it's loading in new assets causes it to dip. I have an RTX-2080 and this is no Cyberpunk. No excuse for this either. And just now I alt-tabbed away to share the game on Discord with a friend and the game crashed. $30 is already a ridiculous price to pay for something that's only digital, but at least get it working. And while you're at it, fix the overview text; "it's" is a contraction, not a possessive.

The game is difficult and the story is not deep, however it gives good satisfaction when you start to connect the pieces

So there.

I'm an old fan of Myst and Riven and this is just what I was hoping it would be.