I think Obduction is a well developed world and worth the time spent playing it.
Pros:
Well developed environments.
No fear in "missing out" as the save system allows you to explore all of the story.
Lots of world building in text as well.
Good look and feel.
Cons:
I wish I could run just a bit faster.
Sometimes traversing each world can become tedious due to the size of the map. It is clear the developers attempted to mitigate this with some of the game elements but I didn't always know where to go so I retread a LOT of ground.
I've played this game to the point where the load times made it too frustrating to continue. I don't know why but on my machine it can take several minutes to load between levels and sometimes you have to go back and forth between levels quite frequently. Which means I'm spending more time waiting for the game to load than playing it. If it wasn't for this I'd probably give it 4-5 stars but the excruciating wait times make it unplayable after a certain point.
I really enjoyed this game, as a fan of Myst from the olden times.
It has that same spirit, with a good story that keeps you pushing forward and puzzles that do not hold your hand and let you really mess things up if you keep clicking and pressing buttons without knowing what they might do. This is a game where you need to take your time, read everything you find, consider your options before pressing buttons willy-nilly.
That said, I clicked furiously and really broke some puzzles before I knew what was happening. Human nature. Example: The sphere with the motorbike at the bottom. Don't click the button until you have an idea what it is for!
***SPOILERS***
There are some flaws. The dependence on the control pads with the Villein tech is a big one. Base-4 is a red herring. These puzzles suck. I hate them and you will too. Games that make you scramble for a real-life pen and paper annoy me in this day and age. Give me some kind of in-game log. Plus, the pixel-hunting to disengage the "connections" in these control pads is inane. Terrible, and should have been way more obvious and less pixel-hunty!
That said, I liked the "Gauntlet" maze near the end, it was not that hard. The stupid Base-4 puzzles can go to the abyss, however.
This game's biggest flaw is the running back and forth. As the AVGN would say, this is one of those "where TF do I go" kind of games. That's fine, but there should have been some more clues to prevent the player from getting frustrated. CW is a unhelpful jerk. Maybe that was the point?
Anyway, I really liked the story, the world(s) and the atmosphere. Worth grabbing on sale.
The closer you get to perfection, the more frustrating it is to experience the flaws.
Riven set the bar so high... Obduction is so close. I just finished the game, I had a very good experience. But the small flaws breaks the experience a little.
1) I just don't get why some area were out of place, like these references to prior games without helping the narrative.
2) Some puzzles are arguably good. Especially that door that opens by itself...
3) The concept of the these sphere mixing up environments is not completely explored. I expected the game to have more puzzles that solve bigger ones and so on, up to something fullscale. Riven did that very well. The sphere idea was a genius idea, it's sad they didn't went to bottom of it. It gives a feeling of an incomplete game, story or whatever.
4) I don't like to have easy clues in games like these... C.W. instructions broke my experience. I tried to not care about him until I noticed stuff moved around without any explanations... that was weird.
I'm very hard with the game while almost every games I play have more flaws than Obduction... Perfection has that problem that small flaws take big proportions. Like a small scratch on a perfect shiny ball.
On a good final note, the I appreciated a lot the details in the environment, the lore, the mechanisms of some puzzles, the graphics, the music, and the bad ending (it was frightening).
I recommend this game for those who loved Riven, it nearly as good... if it was for those damn small problems.
