I like puzzles. I don't even mind backtracking. But the teleportation and its wind up and animations just kill the forward momentum. I've finally given up after getting to a particular planet because there's so much teleportation. I know how to solve the puzzle that's in front of me, but I just don't want to wait for these sequences.
To elaborate, the teleportation involves pulling a level, waiting for it to show the teleportation range, hitting a button, and then waiting for what is a pretty novel and attractive sequence. It's fun to watch the first and second time and interesting to play with a few times after that. But after watching it what I feel is a couple dozen times I can't stand to see it even one more time.
I don't think this will turn everyone off. If you really enjoy the walking simulator types of games, loved Myst, and are very patient then you'll have no problem here. The scenery is great, the puzzles can be pretty clever, and the story is engaging if sparse.
I just completed the game (total playing time of 13 hours or so with a few needed hints and pointers) and needed to vent my frustation...
It definitely was a Cyan game and I liked it quite a lot. It didn't feel as good as OG Myst or Riven (my absolute favourite) but still, the worldbuilding was exactly on point. I was completly drawn in, from first arriving in Hunrath to slowly figuring out the mystery and traveling to different worlds.
Most puzzles were easy and fair enough I think and build upon each other. The only part I found annoying were the extremely large chunks of backtracking one has to do. Sure, if you always know were exactly you need to go next this is minimal, but I would argue that most people need to do a lot of exploring to progress any further in this style of game. And I think the free-roam system contributes to this feeling, as the node based system of the older games does not feel as 'large' perhaps? I know that you can also choose this system in Obduction but the worlds feel much larger I think.
But Oh Boy...
I was not prepared for what would come.
The final hard puzzle of the game (after that its all easy stuff thats left), the infamous Maze, almost made me quit completing the game and not come back. The gauntlet was quite cool I think but already went overboard with the amount of swapping and loading times one had to endure. Hah, how silly it seems now...
Of my 13 hours of playtime 3 or 4 went into the maze. I spent the better part of last Sunday to solve it. It was such a chore to do. The constant backtracking, elevator up and downs and loading screens were insane.
I can not remember any puzzle in any adventure game ever that was this unfun. The player should not be wasting extreme amount of time and clicking after he has figured out the puzzle.
If it wasn't for the completion of the game and being invested in the story I would have given up. Not even glad I pushed through, it kind of left a bitter aftertaste even now.
I more than met the minimum system requirements, and the game was a brutal headache to play, on two fronts: bugs and performance. I also have some issues with the puzzle design, but that's somewhat subjective.
BUGS -- So many bugs. I'm sure many bugs will be fixed in due time. But they still sucked. I was irritated to take photos through my first 4 hours of play, only to go back and find them unusable, though I can work around that with screen shots and a little backtracking. I was irritated to get soft-locked in so many spots in the game (like forcing a save at the wrong time, or navigating to certain locations where you get stuck, etc.), but I figured out how to work around them. Some bugs are more brutal. Falling through a platform floor while you're moving is unrecoverable, and since the game made the awful design choice of forbidding manual saves, this means that you're forced to replay the whole game. What a bad design choice. There are many more bugs (of varying severity), but I digress. I'm sure this aspect will get better as patches are released.
PERFORMANCE -- I meet the minimum system requirements, and the game is borderline unplayable. I quickly realized that to avoid constant freezing and sticking and stalling I'd have to run the game on the lowest graphics settings (including resolution). Guess what? There are important environmental clues you can't even read on the lowest settings. You read that correctly -- they have a graphics setting which renders the game impossible to beat. You can't play the whole game in low res mode. Without giving spoilers, there are several locations in the game where crucial information is illegible or not visible on low resolution. Combined with the awkwardness of the controls when manipulating objects, this led to one puzzle (the tower elevator) being essentially impossible for me. Hell, you can't fully read most of the books or papers on low res settings. So every time I had to read something, I'd have to switch the graphics settings, then switch back. This crashed the game a few times, and made it kind of awkward to play.
But by far the worst part was the loading screens. Again, I meet the minimum system requirements (including the GPU memory). Using a non-SSD, the loading screens between locations lasted between 45 seconds and 7 minutes, with an average of around 3 minutes (depending on the complexity of the place you're swapping to). Early on this was annoying, but I was so eager to play the game that I looked past it. But soon you realize that swapping locations is the CENTRAL MECHANIC in most of the game's puzzles. I'm guessing typical players will need to swap something like between 75 and 150 times while playing. I got as far as the maze puzzle, realized what would be involved (probably 30 or so loading screens as I was poking around with the solution), and I just gave up. Spending hours and hours looking at a loading screen while solving a single puzzle?
At first I thought maybe something was haywire with my machine. But nope. A quick survey of internet forums shows that my experiences were extremely common. So what happened in development? Did the people at CYAN simply not realize that the loading would take so long, and by the time they realized it they were too far into the development to change course? Or did they realize from the beginning that it would be horrible for slower systems and they simply didn't care? Something else? I really don't know.
CONCLUSION -- The game is so poorly optimized in terms of performance that CYAN should have been more honest about the ACTUAL minimum system requirements. In it's current state I suspect the game is going to be very tedious and unpleasant for most people with minimum systems. In 3 years or so, when today's top-end GPUs are affordable, and when the game has been properly patched, I'm sure it will be a fun game for those without high-end gaming rigs. Had I known any of this, I would have simply waited a few years to play the game.
Out of a love for the old Myst games, I bought and played this and I almost could not have been more disappointed. The visual aspects of this game are very interesting, however, that's where my fun ended.
The puzzles are either trivially easy or extremely difficult while adding MASSIVE amounts of game-time to each puzzle because you're forced to make long, arbitrary marches to places to solve things, all the while having level loading in between.
I'm being extremely serious, there are a few puzzles in this game that require you load back and forth between maps in excess of 8 times in both directions. It's completely inexcusable for a puzzle game...
I try to support indie developers whenever I can, but these folks really tanked my belief in unproven studios, even if they are some of the same folks who worked on some of the earlier iterations of Myst, Riven, etc. that I loved so much.
I obtained this game during one of GOG's giveaways, and after completing it, I feel a little bad for getting it for free. I have been playing Myst games since the first one originally came out, and I have missed this style of game so much. Started playing it, got sucked into its world, and my girlfriend sat down to see what I was playing, got sucked in, and we both spent the next ~6-8 hours playing this game, figuring out its secrets, and learning its lore. Absolutely loved it, and I will cherish those memories we made figuring out those puzzles. I loved it.
There is unfortunately one significant flaw for me with this game. The ending. I will not spoil it, but I felt the ending was very disappointing and abrupt, as well as the final 20-30 minutes leading up to that ending. Not to mention that nightmare of a maze puzzle (AAAAH!) This is why I cannot give it higher than a 4/5.
Despite that, I loved the journey my girlfriend and I took into this very strange and alien world, and despite the ending, we wanted to know more about this world, its people, and what happened after the credits rolled. I wouldn't trade that experience we shared for anything.
