Obduction ®

I believe Cyan's greatest ability is Worldbuilding. They're always giving us rich environments with so much story even if there are only a few or even no characters to interact with. Robyn Miller's soundtracks add an eerie, ambient mood that compound the strangeness of the worlds we're dropped into. If you're a fan of the Myst Series or Environmental Puzzle Games at all, Obduction is worth it.

A great looking game with some intriguing puzzles and backstory that shoots itself in the foor in the later half with an insanely tedious mechanic. The backstory is different enough to pull you in and have you scrounge the beautiful world for clues as to what's going on. The mechanisms you come across are of great design and it's very nice that often you can take a close look at the machanism, figure out how it works and solve the puzzle that way. This feels very organic and helps integrate the puzzles into the world. But why, oh why, did there have to be two puzzles that require you to jump between sections of the game for every step in the puzzle - each jump prompting a load screen. Even using an SSD this feels very tedious and in the second puzzle - which is quite large - mistakes and redoing the puzzle will come with a severe punishment regarding the time you need to get back to where you went wrong. So much so in fact that it will save a lot of time to make some sort of real life model of the puzzle, solve that, and then transfer the steps to the game so you don't make any mistakes. So all in all I had a great time with this game the first half but the seemingly unescessary frustration in later half somewhat killed it for me.

Great puzzles, hard enough to make it interesting but not too much that it would scare you. I wish they had more worlds to visit.

Was excited to finally try this one out only to be hit with horrible motion sickness/headaches. Spent a good bit of time fiddling with settings to try and reduce it without much luck. The text in the in-world notes is nearly illegible. With reviews mentioning how much backtracking is involved later, forcing myself to fight through the motion sickness and tiny text sounds like a nightmare and I'm going to have to drop it. Very sad because I want to play more Myst-likes.

Brilliant world and concept. All my intrigue goes out the window when I'm getting frustrated by movement and sluggishness. Run speed is molasses slow, .ini edits and control exploits got patched out. The patch notes say "sorry speedrunners" but all I felt was "F you, average player". Performance has classic Unreal Engine awful frametimes. If you lock the framerate with external tools, it tends to crash. You get stuck on geometry all over the place because some things aren't properly clipped. Despite having enough RAM to fit the entire game files, load times are insane even off an SSD. Slow and frequent loads are compounded by a very nice animation that loses its whimsy very quickly. The transporter devices have clunky mouse controls and don't let you buffer inputs, so every time you have to use these devices (that were designed to be in your way dozens and dozens of times), you stumble over a button not responding until the exact right frame. If you clicked too early, you might need to resposition and try again. There's a "puzzle" near the end that would be pleasant if all the controls were at your fingertips, but instead it sends you running across several areas, dealing with sloppy controls and geometry, to experiment blind, only to have to retrace steps and do it again. A puzzle where the logic would take you minutes, gets stretched into over an hour of tedium, giving you time to ponder what kind of sadist would greenlight the design. On top of all that, you can't remap the controls, which at best is annoying if you have the habit of hitting space in first-person games, and at worst is an accessibility fail. Beautiful game, very creative concept, wore out its welcome quickly. Myst fans are going to try this regardless of any review. Many technical faults could easily be overlooked if there wasn't so many player-hostile design choices. Can't recommend.