Obduction ®

Its always a joy playing a Cyan game and this was no different. Great first impression. Wandering a new strange world is always a joy. The core concept is interesting, but the mistery of who the "antagonists" are and why all the events happen still remain unknown. Visually impressive, nice ambient sound and music. The puzzles will not get you stuck, but the navigation will. Pogression will often depend on some hidden door or passage. Negatives: - Buttons hitboxes are too small - Phot mode mostly useless, as most photos taken become too dark. No zoom function. Navigation with controller awful and scrolling not working. - HDR option alters color and ambient tone too much resulting in a oversaturated mess. Notes on white paper become unreadable. - Labyrinth puzzle artificially complicated, out of logic placement and lore wise badly designed - Some puzzles dont give audio-visual feedback on correct completition and require even more backtracking - random stutters, some heavy ones, even on high end machines - Finale too quickly thrown together - Miller acting as redneck - Short

Every other game I've downloaded so far on gog.com has played beautifully on my 2yo iMac, but not Obduction. Game was pixelated, lagging and reminded one of playing computer games 25 years ago for all the wrong reasons. Love what you're doing, reviving games from decades gone by and giving them new life, but this title was a fail unfortunately.

The game would have been great if it didn't take up to a minute and a half to load new areas, and I have a low end gaming PC. I maybe could have tolerated that if it wasn't for the fact that some puzzles require multiple moving from one area to another, another words, loads of loading time, or loads of time sitting doing nothing waiting for next screen to load. While I played most of the Myst games over & over I only played this one a couple of times because it's just too tedious spending half an hour waiting while the game loads over and over. If you have a high end gaming PC it's probably ok, but for regular users it's going to take a while & that's just not fun. It is possible to make a game like this look as good but not require such high hardware specs and run fine with shorter load times. There's also a catch 22 problem with one of the puzzles. When I got there I knew where to look for the answer, the problem is, it's impossible to get back there without completing the puzzle first. So you've got 3 options. 1) Start the game over from scratch and look up the answer you now know you need before you get there. 2) Exit the game and look up the answer on the internet or 3) Use trial and error and hope you stumble upon the right answer by chance. None of those options are good. Normally I find games like this fun to play once I know what I'm doing, but in this case it just isn't fun to play, it's just plain tedious.

I got this in the free offer recently. I thought I'd surprise my mom with it so she could play. She loves Myst, Riven and even tried to like Uru... So, I downloaded the game this morning, moved it to my USB disk, and then to her Macbook Air. After extracting the zip into Applications and starting the game I was told the game is from an "unidentified developer" and could not be opened. Fine, run anyway... (There is a override) Then it got stuck on "verifying obduction" which took 10-20 minutes, only for macOS to again tell me the game could not run because the dev is unknown. And what's up with the zip file saying (in the file name) I have version 1.7.2 but then the actual downloaded file claims 1.7.0. C'mon Cyan, get you shit together... Or is this one of the games puzzles, get a perk if you get the game to run :(

And I swore to myself I would not let myself get dragged into another Myst-like maze runner, no matter how beautiful. Life is too short.