Riven will always hold a special place in my heart as a pinnacle of puzzle and world design. Since then, every "myst-like" game has felt flat, until Obduction. Everything feels like it has it's place and it's own internal logic. None of the puzzles feel cheap, the art direction/design is amazing. It's near perfection. Playing on VR recaptured some of the old feeling of playing Myst on my first computer with a CD-ROM. My only (very mild) complaints involve bits of the story that feel like they take things out of the players hands, but these things happen toward the end of the game, so I'll avoid talking about them to avoid spoiling anyone. I hope this is the first of many more Cyan games.
First, the superficial stuff- the character models are ugly, and poorly animated. Its so bad its practically distracting. The puzzles are pretty straightforward, and some are kind of interesting (they attempt to puzzleify Sherlock style intuition/glances), but they often highlight, rather than hide, the games limited budget. Need a bottle of wine? Fly from DC to New York so you can visit the only bar in the entire game. During the game, you travel the world but spend all the time in apartments- nothing is done with the exotic locales. And finally the story (minor spoilers from here on)- the conceit of the story is interesting if somewhat silly, patterns in history cause certain key figure to repeat in history. Unfortunately it is used to little effect, the main plot threads involve helping a politician find a good wife, and the conceit does nothing to move it along. The story lacks the hidden history feeling that the Gabriel Knight games cultivated so well, or even the intrigue of Gray Matter.
The games setting and premise are great, but it suffers from pretty poor execution. The biggest hurdle to get past is the poor narration- lots of interesting turns to the the story, but almost everything interesting that will happen will happen off screen. Battles are fought, fleets wiped out, pirates sack cities,etc and you get to hear about it later in a few throw-away lines from some NPC. This fractured narration often means you have no idea what to do next. You succeed in some mission and are left high-and-dry, so you revisit every NPC in the game in the hopes something has changed somewhere. The combat ranges from decent to downright poor. Whole battles are fought against creatures that spend most of the fight limping toward you. The magic system starts off fairly worthless but mid-game becomes so powerful that difficulty goes away entirely.
