Obduction ®

First, let me say that fans of Myst, Riven, and other adventure/puzzle games of the sort will not be disappointed with Obduction. It's a difficult game, but there's an internal logic to it and it never feels like it's being unfair or asking you to make absurd leaps to solve problems. Now, getting to the "slightly flawed" part... I'd have to say that the plot is paper thin here. That means the ending, once you hit it, lacks any kind of emotional impact. If a player is just looking to reach an "end point" in the game, there's nothing to complain about there, but if you want a sense of closure, there's not a lot to go on here. I may be alone in that. Beyond that, the game seems to want for some optimization as of version 1.5.2. I'm running an AMD system at 4.0 ghz with 16gb of RAM and an R9 390 w/ 8gb of video RAM and it required a LOT of tweaking to the page files to keep from crashing. Even with that handled, there were a lot of frame rate drops and instances of texture popping while moving through the various areas of the game world. Were I barely scraping the bottom of the system requirements, that would make sense. As it is, I'd call it functional, but a little broken. Apparently, this can be fixed if you roll back to version 1.4 using GOG Galaxy, but I was too far in the game to want to risk losing my save when I found that out. Bottom line: even for these flaws, I played through to the end, had some fun and don't consider the time wasted. The environments are beautiful, the sound design and music are great (was there ever a doubt?), and the puzzles are challenging, but never feel unfair. Just do yourself a favor and poke around the environments. If you're stuck, chances are you overlooked a path, a note with a critical bit of information, or something along those lines.

"Obduction", in case you were wondering, is a technical term in geology, and refers to the emplacement of oceanic crust on top of continental crust. The UAE is a good example. Reportedly Cyan wanted to call the game "Abduction", but the name was already trademarked. But given the surreal character of the game, "Obduction" is weirdly appropriate. This is a great game, and I feel bereft now that I've finished it. The graphics and atmosphere are wonderful, and the puzzles are integrated into the world and are very satisfying to solve (with a little lateral thinking). However, some of them do require quite a bit of walking over the same paths; but then the landscapes are so gorgeous to look at it's not too much of a pain. The story is good, though a little confusing towards the end (probably I was going too quickly). Highly recommended.

If Obduction ® used an open-world game engine it could have moved alot faster. I didn't feel like checking out side paths anymore unless I really had to because they usually didn't seem to have purpose, causing me to backtrack and waste more time. I will give it an extra star for have dx9 looking scenery, but not alot to interact with. The point and click interface makes (movement?) so boring. It's just not fun when you spend most of the game waiting to get to the next artifact. GOG gave me this for free so I wanna say "thanks", but I don't think I can continue playing this. I may not live long enough to finish it.

I got Obduction for free from a GOG.com giveaway. I had never played a adventure game like Myst, so when I loaded it up I was a bit unsure of it. There seemed to be nothing to interact with. So I kept pushing forward. I eventually got to Hunrath and was blown away by the visuals. Obduction is a pretty game. I explored Hunrath for a bit until I met C.W. He gave me an objective: turn the power on. From this point, the game just clicked with me. I kept playing through it until the credits rolled. I didn't really understand the nuances of the story, so when we made it back to Earth I was confused why everything was dead. Overall it was a fun game.

The story is not-at-all engaging, first and foremost. You get to a place, nothing is explained, and somehow you're supposed to fix everything. Question: out of the 127 interactable, which do you start with? Good luck figuring it out while you search for the plothook in the first two hours. Controls feel shabby and amateurish, it's like sliding on butter while occationally hitting invisible walls. In what i presume would be the first act, I encountered a gamebraking bug,that can only be fixed by restarting the game, or constantly keeping separate backup saves on your computer, as the game uses an autosave feature that doesn't even let you reload checkpoints. Also after walking 2 hours in circles, you get tired of the music, but at least it's atmospheric. The only thing this game has going for it is it's looks. I was amazed by the graphics the first time I started playing. Coloration and models look just the way they're supposed to look in this cartoon-ish enviroment. Imagine Firewatch, but with RTX turned on. You can capture a player without giving too much of the story, like Talos Principle did. I just don't find the motivation to go around once again the entire town just to see if anything changed after i moved a stick slightly to the left. This game could be fun if you had someone next to you recyting the complete guide, because then the two of you could see all the spectacles without frustration. My advice would be to hire some more testers next time.