Obduction ®

Like Myst, the story tells itself through the inferred and the implied. And like all good stories, even then some of it is never fully revealed leaving you eager for more. The puzzles are mostly not trite or gimicky. The world building does a good job of justifying them so they never break the immersion. There was only one puzzle that I could not solve except through blind trial and error. An area previously unreachable became accessible after I solved a different puzzle but I had no way of knowing that it had so I spent a good while exploring the entire world again. A few other puzzles caused me problems but only that one puzzle was not my own fault. The visuals are beautiful. The game relies on myst-like mechanics so they can focus on the static scenery rather than the complexity of game mechanics required for real time interaction with NPCs and such. On those rare moments where there are other lifeforms present, the game does a good job of hiding them off screen. The sounds have an almost tactile quality.

I love that there is no real description and you just get thrown into the world. It looks beautiful and the exploring is so much fun. I have not played Myst or Riven (yes, shame on me) but I can imagine they are great games like this one.

The game stopped working about halfway through. I tried all the fixes I could find to no avail. My opinion is based on the game play up to that point. If the game gets updated I may reinstall and try again. So the game is fun in parts, but has a few problems: The game world is too large, resulting in a lot of running around. Given that moving around is a bit of a chore it gets tiresome. You often have to jump back and forth between realms to progress and each jump involves load times. Basically, many puzzles are designed around a level transition mechanism. (At a certain point it gets ridiculous, where you are just walking back and forth between the teleports. Each triggering a reloading of the game world.) The most challenging 'puzzle' is always to figure out what to focus on. Because of the large world and no apparent critical path, you will at times have things that are unfinished (like interactions you don't know what they do) in three different worlds. Once you figure out where the next thing is you actually have to solve to progress it's kind of fun and not too difficult. But all in all I'd say it's more a test of your patience vis-a-vis SSD transfer rate than it is a brain teaser.

Obduction is a beautiful puzzle game that mostly focuses on exploration. I would not really say that Obduction is a Myst-like game, especially in term of the puzzles. You start the game as the last “arriver“ in an apparent dead town on an alien world, after having been abducted for an unknown reason from your home world. And so you will have to explore this strange world to figure out where you are and what happened to all the other arrivers through any diaries, notes, videos and recordings you find. I absolutely loved the exploration part of the game. While uncovering the story and learn about the life of the arrivers, there are 4 different worlds to discover, with 3 different alien species to learn about. But if you do not like walking simulators, you might not enjoy the game much, because in Obduction, you walk a lot, going many times back and forth between places. At the end of the game, you will definitely have the whole map of the different worlds in your head. There are two main types of puzzles in the game. First, you have to figure out some code that will unlock some door or bridge, by piecing together the clues you find while exploring around. Then, there are the teleportation puzzles which consist of teleporting between worlds and switching the spherical area around teleporters to modify the environment. I found them quite interesting as they make you juggle with the surroundings between worlds. The downside is that they may take a long time given the necessary walking back and forth between teleporters and the long loading time for teleportations that can take 30 secondes to 2 minutes... Obduction might not be for everyone given the long loading times and the huge amount of walking required, but if you like exploration games, are curious and patient enough, you should try it out!

This is a puzzle solitary game. no shooting, no fighting (not that I can see). just a `place` that`s eerily silent and you`re plonked in it without a clue. It`s basically another version of Myst. You see almost no living sentient being except maybe one guy. And he`s not much use. What i don`t like about games like these is the rare NPC that refuses to divulge information for `gameplay` even though it would help them to. They really kill immersion. If it was real they`d explain a lot more about what`s happening. However, if you put the time into exploring and figuring how to get things working, there are some amazing sights to see and interact with, especially in VR. One such sight had me gawking like a small kid. VR as well as Normal mode works. VR is a bit hit and miss sometimes and always needs resetting. Some settings don`t stick if you prefer to `walk` rather than `hop` around; you have to keep re-enabling them whenever you take the HMD off. also where you look moves your direction; again really annoying if you want to move `naturally`. you can`t switch it off. Other than that, pretty good, the game needs its people to act more like people and VR to actually stick to the control mode you select.