Obduction ®

First of all, this game is gorgeous and has some great sound design. A lot of little details everywhere, and the places tell a story. Obduction follows the Myst formula pretty well: You're let lose inside an unknown and mysterious world with no idea of what to do. You explore and come across buttons and levers and seemingly weird contraptions. What do they do? Well, that's for you to figure out, and you will start figuring things out and understand how this and that work. Then you'll build upon that knowledge and get further and try new things. Then you'll remember that one thing you saw over there... maybe this new idea can be used there somehow? You start out knowing nothing and must put in work to figure out what to do yourself, most of the time. Figuring things out on your own is a pretty amazing feeling. But beware that this game is not JUST about figuring things out - it's a lot about patience and commitment as well. Some puzzles require almost silly amounts of it. You'll not fast travel around - you're on foot. You have to leg it from place to place. Sometimes you'll open up shortcuts between places though and avoid some of the long treks around the world.

This game is a perfect spiritual successor to the Myst franchise. You'll never get the same feeling as you did the first time you played Myst back in 1993. Gaming is not new anymore. That feeling is long gone to history, but you will get hints of it playing Obduction. The puzzles in this game are similar to what you would find in Myst, albeit quite a bit less complex. As with it's predecessors, Obduction has no inventory system. You don't fill your pockets with everything you can pick up just so you can rub them against everything else to make things happen. This game is about picking up clues along the way and then configuring various elements in the world in the correct way to make things happen. Sometimes the things that happen won't help. Sometimes you'll have created a hindrance to yourself that you have to undo. It's the classic Myst formula for puzzles. As for difficulty, I mentioned that these puzzles are not as complex as the ones from the Myst series. I would say the difficulty was in the sweet spot for me. Challenging, but not enough to stump me for hours or making me consult a walkthrough. Most of the story is told through various notes left by the game's characters (of which there are only three that you'll ever hear from). Almost all of the notes are quite short. In the early part of the game, there are a couple of 4-5 page "books" that cover large amounts of the story, but all of these are pretty much entirely skippable if you are an uncultured swine with an aversion to words. Only a select few have puzzle clues in them and those that do usually stand out in some way (different colored text, etc). By game's end you'll have spent less than 30 minutes of the 10 hour playtime reading. One big complaint that actually holds true is the loading. There are some sections of the game where you are loading rapidly and repeatedly between the different "worlds" triggering loading screens each time. INSTALL THE GAME ON AN SSD IF YOU HAVE ONE.

Despite the intriguing setup and fairly nice visuals (at max settings), the game has been very buggy for me at launch. Various issues such as game loading getting stuck, camera function broken, documents being covered by black bars, etc.. same things reported by others around the Internet as well. I stopped playing it and waited and waited for a patch to come, and the patch is a multi-gigabyte full game download once again instead of an incremental patch.. I was looking forward to this game and was excited to start cracking its secrets but right now I've almost lost interest in the game due to all these technical issues.

Ok, so I purchased this title from a different vendor - but I feel there needs to be this negative review HERE - so others will not be swept away by the great ratings. This IS a decent title - but frustrating - is an understatment. If you are not strong in memory capacity or math, for that matter - or if you hate riddles and mazes - don't purchase this - you will hate it. I think it misrepresents itself in that aspect and is an exercise in patience. It is beautiful to look at and and a marvel of ingenuity for those that LOVE PUZZLES. I can say that I figured most things out quickly - but that my wife almost broke the screen - hence, another reason, for this review. Games are supposed to be fun - not an exercise in anger or frustration. Keep a notebook - screenshot certain areas and, fianlly, use YoutTube to look things up when you are absolutely stuck - and you may just have a decent time. Not reccomended for casual gamers. The negatives - imho - far outweigh the pros- I cannot advise this purchase. I give 2 stars because while I was able to finish it I cannot say i felt anything - but relief - that it was over. Convoluted clues - and simply irritating mazes abound. Overall? - Bleh.

Bringing back the feeling of loneliness, the drive to explore and the awe of navigating different worlds that the Myst series provided (with some lesser achievents in later titles) is tough. Obduction manages to provide all that and is a wonderful experience. I will mention only two tolerable defects: I expected puzzles to be tougher, but they were not bad, and I experienced some motion sickness (PC, not VR - never happened to me before!) that I could control using a large field of view and (counterintuitively) 50% motion blur.