I own but have never played the first game in the series, so I had nothing to compare this to but other adventure/puzzle games. In short, the game is pretty good with clues, but there is a LOT of back-tracking and trial and error to get solutions to some puzzles. The frustration comes when it's not immediately clear that there was something else to do in a given section. Even with the "ping" feature, it's not always obvious other than through clicking everywhere and using even implausible things on everything else how to proceed. Luckily, that's not universal, but might be about 33% of the puzzles here. Enough to be frustrating at times. Luckily, there IS a sort of internal logic here, so usually there's just a lot of forehead smacking and "You've gotta be ****ing kidding me..." once you nail the right combination. In terms of the story and setting, it's a solid game, but I did struggle at points with character motivations. The character arcs are good and - without going into spoilers - the ending felt earned, but there were a few head scratchers. Even with the motivations we're given, sometimes the actions feel a little wonky. Might just be me. There's a definite thrill in trying to figure out what was going on at the facility. As with most things, my theory was a little more interesting than the ultimate reveal, but only by a bit. Ultimately, any frustration I felt with this game didn't stop me from playing it through to the conclusion. That alone means I have to recommend it, even if I was swearing at my screen for a decent portion of my playthrough. Also, props to the dev team for some insane environment and creature designs. That might be the highlight of the whole experience.
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.
