The game is visually stunning. If only that was enough to carry it.
The puzzles are the worst part. The guy you're helping provides criticism rather than help when you're stuck. Some of the solutions seem random. With hindsight they make some sense, but leading up to that point is hair pulling frustration.
My other main gripe is padding. This game forces you to go back and forth, back and forth, to solve a puzzle. It's tedious. Time consuming. Frustrating. And adds zero value to the game. It's only there to bulk out the play time. Yes, the world is pretty, but by the eighth time I'm trotting up that path, I want to see that world burn.
This comes pretty close to scratching my Riven itch, which shouldn't be a surprise considering who made it.
The puzzles here are... fine. I think the difficulty is just right. They are all incorporated in a diagenic way into this game world which helps make the story at least somewhat believable. However, as a result of them needing to be narratively incorporated into the game world, a lot of them end up feeling kind of the same. A majority of the puzzles are based on teleportation (the game's main gimmick) and its combination with rotating rooms, rotating pathways, etc. In general they all seem to fall into the same realm of spacial awareness and reasoning, as well as needing to thoroughly explore the world to find clues. I personally would have liked to see more variety with logic, math, language puzzles, etc.
One aspect of the design I appreciated was how the scope of the exploration was carefully limited. Rarely are you faced with a dozen new paths and puzzles to explore. Rather, the game does a pretty good job of limiting the branches that are made available to you at once - solving one puzzle might open up 3 new routes, one of which is a dead end with a clue, one is a path looping backwards, and the last is a new puzzle. This design makes it easy to keep a mental checklist of where you should be going next.
I'm happy to see that there are lots of different options for interactivity (traditional point and click, VR, etc.) though I didn't really find they added to the experience a whole lot.
There is a lot of backtracking to the game and lots of times where you are just walking from one side of the world to the other. My other main gripe is the load times, which happen on each teleport. Game developers: I know my machine has enough memory. Can't you just... keep both areas loaded at once? Because some of these puzzles involve teleporting back and forth 10+ times, and it is much more frustrating to do when there's a 20 second loading screen each time.
As someone who fondly remembers grinding through Myst as a kid -- writing down information tidbits, creating maps, etc (as there was no internet/walkthroughs to lookup), and then Riven, I was extremely happy to see Cyan coming back to make Obduction in that older style. I wanted that nostalgic feeling of being alone in a "safe" empty world and free to explore and unravel the mysteries.
I'll just be direct, this game is quite bad... and it disappointms me greatly to say that.
The Good:
There are derelict worlds for you to explore, and the game includes the janky live action recordings of people talking to you -- a nice touch. The environments are scattered with strange things for you to consider. The game generally looks nice.
The Bad:
The performance of the game is absolutely awful. You will notice the loading times when you jump between worlds. The carts you have to ride around in the Myst games is generally tedious and frustrating, and this game relies heavily on a cart. Moreover, the cart's controls, are frustrating and slow... the game in general feels slow to navigate. Sometimes you know what you have to do, but you have to waste a ton of time just walking around.
What about the puzzles? There are too few of interest that require critical thinking, and too many that are simply "connect the pipe, and hit the switch". Unlocking curious baubles and thinking outside the box to open ancient sealed doors is what makes myst great, but there's not much of it here.
Conclusion:
The game is slow and frustrating to play through -- not because it's too obtuse to solve the puzzles, but because of the performance/controls, and planning of the overall world. I didn't get any "WOW" or "AHA" moments like I did from Myst/Riven. Other people really like the game, so maybe I just wasn't in the mindset for it to click, but I'd recommend you skip this and just play Myst or Riven if you haven't already. Or try the Witness, Talos Principle, Baba is You, Stephen's Sausage Rolls...
The game has a fantastic artstyle and I love the Sci-Fi setting. At the beginning I was motivated to explore this strange world, but it became apparent quickly that the gameplay doesn't quite match the aesthetics.
The first and one of the biggest issue is the walking/running speed. The character walks at a snails pace and this is way to slow. There is running and you can turn it always on. The running speed feels more like normal walking speed in other games but it is still too slow. This is a big issue because the puzzles are spread out all over the world, i.e. one button there, a panel here etc., meaning you will walk A LOT. And the world isn't even that big, but the walking speed pads the game time unnecessarily. About 95% of the time you will be walking from puzzle to puzzle even if you just want to try something. Maybe superbrains will know where to walk next without detours, but most people won't.
Another really aggravating technical reason that will increase the play time unneccessarily is the loading. There is a mechanic where you travel from one area to another back and forth because puzzles are spread over these areas. Since they are completely different, the game loads the other area and this feels like it takes ages. It seriously disrupts puzzle solving. And I have a fast SSD and all game load fast. This is extremely bad game design.
Overall I didn't feel it was worth my time walking around and loading areas in the game while occasionally trying to solve puzzles. I used a walkthrough after about 1/3 of the game and don't regret it. Even with the walkthrough, the game felt tedious and too drawn out due to the problems above.
I also didn't care too much about the story,
Other issues:
The game doesn't remember the language setting. It has to be set again every start of the game.
The inverted y-axis works only in free roam mode and is otherwise not handled correctly. Once you are in a vehicle or in a puzzle, it is the wrong way.
The game is beautiful and the universe is original. However the scenario is very linear and fairly short and shallow, and the puzzles were more tedious than clever and felt like they had been artificially placed in the storyline.
