Obduction ®

I played all the Myst series and was happy to see Cyan was publishing Obduction. I actually had to get a new desktop to play it as my old one didn't have enough power and would hang up at the onset of the game. All in all, I enjoyed the game as I love first person adventures. The graphics were good, controls pretty good. Story line was OK. I admit that I am don't pay attention to directions I receive so often do a lot of wandering around aimlessly so that explains my 24+ hours of playtime. The good: Graphics. Pretty worlds except for Mofang. Well done. Various worlds to explore. I enjoyed exploring and finding shortcuts. One world is harsh and thankfully you don't spend too much time there. Lots of puzzles that require thinking as there are no inventory items. Very open and fun to explore. The less than good: 1) Lots of transporting from one world to another. My system handled it pretty quickly so that wasn't too bad. But frankly, I do not like a lot of backtracking and revisiting as you figure out your next move. Many time, because I was unsure of the next action, I transported repeatedly in a short period of time. This caused me to play in short spurts because I would get frustrated and quit. 2) Murky objectives. This might be my fault as I didn't listen to CW (or whatever his name was) and I played only on weekends so I would forget objectives. 3) No map. So many transport machines and dimensional walls and no way to document them except by your own hand. 4) Very open. Many areas I would revisit thinking I could now gain access only to find they were "end of game" locations. That's real world, but still frustrating. Enjoyable game. Many hours. Glad I played it.

My first Myst game was the 1993 original, and I've since gone on to play Riven and Uru. Those are my 3 favorites in the series, and Obduction easily stands shoulder to shoulder with them. It stumbles a little towards the end, but makes up for it with the best ending, giving a rather satisfying feeling. You start off in a hiking trail in the middle of nowhere before stumbling across the first "seed," which transports you to Hunrath, a small community also in the middle of nowhere but the world around you is clearly alien. Like the original Myst, you will get the same sense of wondering just where you are and what you've landed in, as the game's story is very much "in medias res" (in the middle of things) and you need to piece together what happened and how you fit into things. The XBox 360 controller has some issues - even though I refuse to have the Y axis inverted, during times where I needed to hold A (the "interact" button) I'd have to hold down on the control stick to make the cursor/thing I was using go up and up to go down. (tried inverting the Y axis to test and see if this would fix the problem. No.) The game also defaults to walk every time you load it up. The music is enchanting, albeit short lived in most cases. I've always loved the ambient sound and music in Cyan Games' games and Obduction doesn't fall short here. The puzzles are typically straight forward and you probably won't need a walkthrough for most of them. There is one section towards the end where the path to your objective is suddenly opened. You have the barricade there the entire game, then suddenly gone. I understand why the path is closed so you don't go there early, but give us some context, guys! Finally, unless I'm missing something, the ending you get is determined by one thing that shouldn't matter one way or the other. There was one point where I needed to restart my game completely because of a glitch that blocked me. Hopefully this gets patched. Buy this game. Period.

I got the game for free during the gog giveaway. - First thing : no menu for key rebinding, which is quite annoying for people like me who do not have a qwerty keyboard. You can rebind your keys by manually modifying some input.ini file, but we are in 2019 now, games from two decades ago already had such menus. - Second thing : for some reason i cannot rotate any object in the game, that means the lamp at the beginning but also all levers, which is quite the progress killer (stuck right at the beginning with no way to go up the very first elevator). I tried nudging my mouse in every way possible but nothing happens, and I have not found anything online to help fix that.

I have tryed to play this game in two different ocasions and the result was motion sickness in both. I suppose something is wrong with the camera movement...

Myst was a super game. Obduction is Myst on steroids! The only thing is that there are some things that you need to do that have absolutely no clues. Without some hints from previous game players, I might never have finished it. I never liked using hints, but had to with this game.