I am not entirey sure why this game gripped me by the guts and had me playing late nights. That's a rare occurrence these days, with me supposely being a grown-up and all, but I really liked the new, fundamentally optimist take on the apocalypse which is the foundation of so many games these days, and I enjoyed the way the backstory was told: revealed gradually as the main character dug into her background. You have a relative freedom to explore, where a linear overarcing story can be freely mixed with mostly fun and reasonably varied quests. Whether I took short or long sessions with the game, I always found things to do and places to visit. The visuals were beautiful, and my budget GTX1660 GPU had no problems with the highest quality settings. The animations for the main character and for the machine opponents are very nice, with a sometimes stunning attention to detail and lots of variation. Human opponents look and feel less alive and less intelligent, bizarrely enough, but the game is mostly about fights against machines, and they are really well done. Perhaps most notable, though, is the outstanding voice acting for the main character. Aloy is voiced with such passion (by Ashly Burch) that some moments in the dialog had me literally moved to tears or laughing out loud, and even her little comments on the environment and the actions you take are spot on for the character, all the way through. As a Swede being used to cold winters, I love the way the character interacts with deep snow in the DLC, both how she walks and runs in it, and how it deforms to her footsteps and dodge rolls (and, I must admit, the occasional downhill butt-slide I made just for fun). I hope the PS4/PS5 sequel, right now Sony-exclusive, will be ported to Windows as well. This was my most enjoyable gaming experience in years, perhaps in a decade. (FYI, I'm old enough -barely- to have played the original Pong when it was released.)
I would strongly recommend this game. By modern standards, Obduction is a fairly short game with about 12 to 20 hours of playtime, depending on how much you get stumped by the logic and math puzzles. Also, the replayability is not great. Once you finish the game, a full replay will take you only a few hours and offer mostly the same experience. This was the case for earlier Cyan games as well, and any other puzzle game for that matter. Once you figure out the puzzles, most of the challenge is simply gone. However, I found the 15-16 hours of my first playthrough to be an absolutely top notch experience, providing all the awe and amazement I remember from earlier Cyan titles. The puzzles are enjoyable, but not terribly difficult and, in my opinion, never frustrating. Obduction was not as difficult as I remember Myst and its descendants, but that might just be a side effect of me having a lot more gaming experience than what I had back then. In any case, I didn't need any hints for this game, but it was still difficult enough to be a nice challenge. Towards the end of the game, the loading times can become frustrating as you need to swap between levels quite a lot. If you don't install the game to an SSD, you might need quite a bit of patience during the last few hours. It's generally worth the wait, though. The attention to detail and the incredible amount of work that went into the level design is impressive, and it shows best if you have a beefy GPU. Even though this is a slow-paced puzzle game where all the focus is on exploration and taking in the great views, it's made in a first person 3D engine, and the graphics rendering requires quite a lot of horsepower. With all the sliders at maximum, it's a breathtakingly beautiful game, but it's not bad looking even if you bring the sliders down a notch or two.
