Obduction ®

I quickly quitted because the first-time player experience is not up to standards, even for at the time it was released (2016). To sum up, the game designers definitely had a big love for the old classics (Myst first coming into mind), but didn't understand what made their universe enticing to explore. First, the control schemes are torn up between the now very outdated position-to-position movement and the free-roam "FPS" camera you have in the Witness, Quern, The Thalos Principle and so on. It's advised to use the first one because you have a clearer view of what are the puzzle elements... But you feel unpleasantly stuck in a cell. A bit like the main character in this game, in fact ^^. On top of that in both movement modes the game is extremely slow : Running feels like you're a tortoise with asthma. Add in to this that lots of areas are dead-ends or "to-be-unlocked later" doors and you already spent 1 hour jogging sluggishly through the first puzzle. But the main reason you're not enticed to explore are just the lack of mid-term objectives behind the short-term ones. Indeed, early on you'll meet a man who hides in a house. Besides being a flat image on a door's window (another hint they didn't update from Myst's formula), this man tells you to do something without explaining why or what's happening. At all. Worse, they will tell you to buzz off if you knock back on their door in hope for more hints. Sure, I could read the notes scattered around to understand what that blue and red beam does, or ponder where the power generator I need to turn on is... But why doesn't he "want" to tell me all that while I need to understand to help them? Why should I -me and my character- care if they -both the characters and developpers- don't bring me the elements for that? I mean, they don't even want to tell the very basics, just the current objective. This quickly turned me off despite a graphically promising universe, and I fear it will turn off most players, too.

A clunky, boring, over-long, and frankly quite bad take on Riven. I am confused by how many fans of Cyan's previous games had a positive reaction to this one; It's a bizarrely bad interpretation of the originals where almost every single element of them is present and yet none of the magic or wonder is captured. This game spends the majority of it's time wallowing in undirected frustrations without providing the narrative or world believability that made the world a joy to inhabit in Cyan's previous games. The world is also needlessly scaled up to the point of wasting your time; 90% of my playtime was spent holding Shift + W. To test any theory or possible solution to a puzzle will most of the time require you to walk for multiple minutes before being able to actually interact with anything. I would not recommend this game even to die-hard fans of Myst and Riven.

exactly

It let me relive the feelings I had during playing Myst ...

Good