Obduction ®

I've already put in about 8 hours of gameplay within 24 hours of launching, and holy crap, this game is good. It's like Zork meets Mad Max. It gives me the same feeling I had playing the original Myst for the first time. My late 2012 Macbook Pro is struggling only slightly with all the game settings at minimum and that's with an i7 processor, 8gigs of ram and running off a LaCie external SSD. I really wish I could play this in its full glory because I can tell they really put a soul into this game. All I have to say is, I hope Cyan continues to put out games like these well into the next decade as I will continue playing them. Great job guys :)

Obduction starts off weakly. There's a house with a white picket fence and a junk yard. Apart from some holographic recorded greetings, nothing is magical. After a while, the genius starts to show: how it plays with space and location and orientation. You will find more worlds to discover and they are both pretty and intriguing at first. You encounter puzzles that must be solved. They are all fairly easy and do not present a barrier to enjoyment. You learn about a few characters and some alien civilisations that seem interesting. The satisfaction of stumbling upon something new is grand. Then, as you approach the late-game, everything falls apart. The extents of the worlds that once seemed vast and sprawling become blatantly apparent. Gone are the hope and excitement that you once felt upon finding a book or written note, expecting new tasty revelations about lore and plot - there simply aren't any more to find and even a lot of them are identical duplicates of ones you have read already. The realisation that the game is ending and nothing will be explained or resolved sinks into your gut and it certainly is not pleasant. Technical problems start to really grate on your nerves. The unbelievably long loading times and slow animations and particle effects which once added flavour become untenable in some of the later puzzles which are both stupidly easy - they re-use the same tired mechanic as earlier ones - and obtusely laborious. It feels like some of them were included deliberately to slow the player down. The ending is a final kick in the teeth. There are more than one. Neither explains or resolves anything. One is intensely unsatisfying and the other requires you to neglect to do something that the game has demanded for basically its entire length, based on pretty much no reason at all. In summary: the game is short, the premise and lore is vague and the result feels shallow because the promise of mystical worlds, lore and stories is not realised.

I was a fan of Myst, and I consider Riven to be one of the finest adventure games I've ever played, so I had high hopes for Obduction. I wouldn't say it's a bad game by any means; it features some lovely visuals and some interesting world-building, but coming almost two decades after Riven it feels like a disappointment. A lot of the puzzles feel like retreads of that game's puzzles, but lacking the same artful deftness. Riven, for example, had a great puzzle where you slowly came to the realization that Rivenese people's number system was based around the number five, and that helped you to solve greater puzzles and understand the world as a whole better. It was a very organic puzzle, and made me feel smart, like I was roleplaying an anthropologist. Obduction has a very similar puzzle, wherein an alien race has a number system in base 4, and...the game literally gives you a worksheet which tells you this, and how the numbers work. Obduction isn't an easy game, by any means, but it still feels like the developers don't have the same faith in the player that the first two Myst games did. And that's to say nothing of the load times. Every time you enter a new world, the game takes about 20-30 seconds to load, which wouldn't be so bad on its own, except for the puzzles that involve switching back and forth between worlds. Remember the 90s, when you had to swap 5 CD-ROMs to play Riven? Well, now it's a game mechanic. I really wanted to like this game, and the story was compelling enough that I managed to finish it, but I found its resolution confusing and unsatisfying, and it was an exhausting experience overall. If you're starved for a new Myst-esque experience, this is about as good as it's gonna get, but if you haven't played Riven before, I'd recommend that a million times before this.

I wanted to like it, and in some ways I do. The graphics are beautiful, the puzzles are challenging, the story is intriguing. But I've never seen a puzzle game that punishes you so harshly for trying out solutions to puzzles. It's good that the puzzles are non-obvious (and in some cases, unintuitive). But if that's the case, the designers shouldn't structure the environment such that the player needs to spend an eternity walking, setting up the next possible solution, teleporting, walking some more, only to find out if the proposed solution will work or not. Maybe you'll have more patience for that than I did. Ultimately, I chose to uninstall and move on.

I note that there are many positive reviews from people who are still playing the game, and there's a reason for this. Obduction is an excellent game for the first two-thirds of the experience. The combination of exploring new areas and figuring out mind-bending puzzles is addictive, and the environment and its mysteries just suck you in. The graphics are good without being fantastic, and the world-building has obviously been done with a lot of care. Everything about the worlds of Obduction has been well thought out, and every little piece of the environment has a reason for being. Many of the puzzles are about understanding the environment and how the inhabitants of the world used the mechanisms that you are now tasked with fixing/changing/manipulating in order to make progress. Unfortunately towards the end that starts to change. Large parts of the environment become unlocked, and the puzzles turn away from logic and more into roadblocks. There are frustrating moments where the answer is completely obvious but the game forces you to trudge across one world, swap to another world, and then trudge across that one before progress can be made. Towards the end the game feels like it becomes largely about backtracking, together with trying to remember which path took you to the place you need to. Unfortunately the lack of optimization lends to this. The ability to swap between worlds is clever, but the loading times start to make this incredibly frustrating. I was running the game on a year old PC with an SSD, so I'd hate to be playing it on anything slower. One puzzle in particular involves repetitive swapping between worlds, where although the solution is obvious within 5 minutes, the necessity to keep swapping, waiting through the loading screen, then making a change and swapping back, means that it ended up taking more than an hour. The graphics are good but unexceptional, yet my R9 290 could not run the game on highest settings. Obduction is good, but not great