From Cyan, the indie studio that brought you Myst, comes a new sci-fi adventure.
As you walk beside the lake on a cloudy night, a curious, organic artifact falls from the starry sky and inexplicably, without asking permission, transports you across the universe. You’ve been abducted from your cozy...
From Cyan, the indie studio that brought you Myst, comes a new sci-fi adventure.
As you walk beside the lake on a cloudy night, a curious, organic artifact falls from the starry sky and inexplicably, without asking permission, transports you across the universe. You’ve been abducted from your cozy existence and added into an alien landscape with pieces of Earth from unexpected times and places.
The strange worlds of Obduction reveal their secrets only as you explore, discover, coax, and consider their clues. As you bask in the otherworldly beauty and explore the enigmatic landscapes, remember that the choices you make will have substantial consequences. This is your story now.
Make it home.
Obduction ® Copyright 2016 Cyan, Inc. All rights reserved. Obduction ® and Cyan are registered trademarks of Cyan, Inc.
This is indeed a "Myst-like" Adventure game. It has a similar style of wandering through unique landscapes, interacting with machinery and generally being confused about what's happening. With a little work it could have been pretty great but falls a bit flat as a whole package.
Like Myst games there is no inventory and the primary hurdle is usually getting from A to B
The latter part hurts this game some in that unlike it's predecessors Obduction is full roam 3D and often suffers from what I call "poor barriers" Many times you will do a load of puzzling or work simply because your character can't scramble over a small rock pile, scooch down a small cliff, climb up a small wall or reach through a gap to unlock a door from the other side. It can be a bit immersion breaking being blocked by such contrivances.
Story wise it starts pretty strong but leaves a bit too much out to make the end feel satisfying,
Overall what hurts the game the most is a handful of tedious puzzles and a few situations where the path forward seems arbitrarily blocked and unblocks for poor reasons. I will say there is indeed one puzzle near the end that is not terribly difficult to solve but is so abysmally designed that it might take you an hour to actually execute the damn solution. The mechanisms of the puzzle are far apart requiring walking, mechanical interaction, waiting for animations, and continuously sends you back and forth through loading zones making the whole thing a grindy slog.
The game has a fantastic artstyle and I love the Sci-Fi setting. At the beginning I was motivated to explore this strange world, but it became apparent quickly that the gameplay doesn't quite match the aesthetics.
The first and one of the biggest issue is the walking/running speed. The character walks at a snails pace and this is way to slow. There is running and you can turn it always on. The running speed feels more like normal walking speed in other games but it is still too slow. This is a big issue because the puzzles are spread out all over the world, i.e. one button there, a panel here etc., meaning you will walk A LOT. And the world isn't even that big, but the walking speed pads the game time unnecessarily. About 95% of the time you will be walking from puzzle to puzzle even if you just want to try something. Maybe superbrains will know where to walk next without detours, but most people won't.
Another really aggravating technical reason that will increase the play time unneccessarily is the loading. There is a mechanic where you travel from one area to another back and forth because puzzles are spread over these areas. Since they are completely different, the game loads the other area and this feels like it takes ages. It seriously disrupts puzzle solving. And I have a fast SSD and all game load fast. This is extremely bad game design.
Overall I didn't feel it was worth my time walking around and loading areas in the game while occasionally trying to solve puzzles. I used a walkthrough after about 1/3 of the game and don't regret it. Even with the walkthrough, the game felt tedious and too drawn out due to the problems above.
I also didn't care too much about the story,
Other issues:
The game doesn't remember the language setting. It has to be set again every start of the game.
The inverted y-axis works only in free roam mode and is otherwise not handled correctly. Once you are in a vehicle or in a puzzle, it is the wrong way.
The game is beautiful and the universe is original. However the scenario is very linear and fairly short and shallow, and the puzzles were more tedious than clever and felt like they had been artificially placed in the storyline.
I more than met the minimum system requirements, and the game was a brutal headache to play, on two fronts: bugs and performance. I also have some issues with the puzzle design, but that's somewhat subjective.
BUGS -- So many bugs. I'm sure many bugs will be fixed in due time. But they still sucked. I was irritated to take photos through my first 4 hours of play, only to go back and find them unusable, though I can work around that with screen shots and a little backtracking. I was irritated to get soft-locked in so many spots in the game (like forcing a save at the wrong time, or navigating to certain locations where you get stuck, etc.), but I figured out how to work around them. Some bugs are more brutal. Falling through a platform floor while you're moving is unrecoverable, and since the game made the awful design choice of forbidding manual saves, this means that you're forced to replay the whole game. What a bad design choice. There are many more bugs (of varying severity), but I digress. I'm sure this aspect will get better as patches are released.
PERFORMANCE -- I meet the minimum system requirements, and the game is borderline unplayable. I quickly realized that to avoid constant freezing and sticking and stalling I'd have to run the game on the lowest graphics settings (including resolution). Guess what? There are important environmental clues you can't even read on the lowest settings. You read that correctly -- they have a graphics setting which renders the game impossible to beat. You can't play the whole game in low res mode. Without giving spoilers, there are several locations in the game where crucial information is illegible or not visible on low resolution. Combined with the awkwardness of the controls when manipulating objects, this led to one puzzle (the tower elevator) being essentially impossible for me. Hell, you can't fully read most of the books or papers on low res settings. So every time I had to read something, I'd have to switch the graphics settings, then switch back. This crashed the game a few times, and made it kind of awkward to play.
But by far the worst part was the loading screens. Again, I meet the minimum system requirements (including the GPU memory). Using a non-SSD, the loading screens between locations lasted between 45 seconds and 7 minutes, with an average of around 3 minutes (depending on the complexity of the place you're swapping to). Early on this was annoying, but I was so eager to play the game that I looked past it. But soon you realize that swapping locations is the CENTRAL MECHANIC in most of the game's puzzles. I'm guessing typical players will need to swap something like between 75 and 150 times while playing. I got as far as the maze puzzle, realized what would be involved (probably 30 or so loading screens as I was poking around with the solution), and I just gave up. Spending hours and hours looking at a loading screen while solving a single puzzle?
At first I thought maybe something was haywire with my machine. But nope. A quick survey of internet forums shows that my experiences were extremely common. So what happened in development? Did the people at CYAN simply not realize that the loading would take so long, and by the time they realized it they were too far into the development to change course? Or did they realize from the beginning that it would be horrible for slower systems and they simply didn't care? Something else? I really don't know.
CONCLUSION -- The game is so poorly optimized in terms of performance that CYAN should have been more honest about the ACTUAL minimum system requirements. In it's current state I suspect the game is going to be very tedious and unpleasant for most people with minimum systems. In 3 years or so, when today's top-end GPUs are affordable, and when the game has been properly patched, I'm sure it will be a fun game for those without high-end gaming rigs. Had I known any of this, I would have simply waited a few years to play the game.
Out of a love for the old Myst games, I bought and played this and I almost could not have been more disappointed. The visual aspects of this game are very interesting, however, that's where my fun ended.
The puzzles are either trivially easy or extremely difficult while adding MASSIVE amounts of game-time to each puzzle because you're forced to make long, arbitrary marches to places to solve things, all the while having level loading in between.
I'm being extremely serious, there are a few puzzles in this game that require you load back and forth between maps in excess of 8 times in both directions. It's completely inexcusable for a puzzle game...
I try to support indie developers whenever I can, but these folks really tanked my belief in unproven studios, even if they are some of the same folks who worked on some of the earlier iterations of Myst, Riven, etc. that I loved so much.
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