I note that there are many positive reviews from people who are still playing the game, and there's a reason for this. Obduction is an excellent game for the first two-thirds of the experience. The combination of exploring new areas and figuring out mind-bending puzzles is addictive, and the environment and its mysteries just suck you in. The graphics are good without being fantastic, and the world-building has obviously been done with a lot of care. Everything about the worlds of Obduction has been well thought out, and every little piece of the environment has a reason for being. Many of the puzzles are about understanding the environment and how the inhabitants of the world used the mechanisms that you are now tasked with fixing/changing/manipulating in order to make progress. Unfortunately towards the end that starts to change. Large parts of the environment become unlocked, and the puzzles turn away from logic and more into roadblocks. There are frustrating moments where the answer is completely obvious but the game forces you to trudge across one world, swap to another world, and then trudge across that one before progress can be made. Towards the end the game feels like it becomes largely about backtracking, together with trying to remember which path took you to the place you need to. Unfortunately the lack of optimization lends to this. The ability to swap between worlds is clever, but the loading times start to make this incredibly frustrating. I was running the game on a year old PC with an SSD, so I'd hate to be playing it on anything slower. One puzzle in particular involves repetitive swapping between worlds, where although the solution is obvious within 5 minutes, the necessity to keep swapping, waiting through the loading screen, then making a change and swapping back, means that it ended up taking more than an hour. The graphics are good but unexceptional, yet my R9 290 could not run the game on highest settings. Obduction is good, but not great
