I had such a wonderful time with this game! It's been years since I enjoyed a puzzle adventure game. Much less one of this scale, beauty and puzzle quality. I was hardly able to stop playing. Blasted through the whole thing in two days.
The story, the graphics, the puzzles... it was all awesome!
I'm only taking one star away because a couple of late-game puzzles require a lot of quick jumps between worlds, which means loading screens. Many, MANY loading screens with only a few seconds between them! So don't do my mistake. Install this game on an SSD and save yourself a whole lot of unnecessary waiting.
The first half hour of obduction starts off fairly strong, a strange new world with great visuals and detail littered around liberally, a sense of mystery and potential depth. Unfortunately after this it suffers from the old adventure game weakness of puzzles tying cement boots to the pacing and tossing it into the ocean.
Puzzles require scrounging every last scrap of ground to look for what's interactable, it sighnposts where you can go poorly (in several areas, you have to solve multiple puzzles in order to acces a space that any healthy human could climb up and down.). And combine all this with an intolerably slow movement speed and lack of any hint system has left me bored after several hour long attempts to progress.
Better signposting, a journel and at least double the runspeed might make this game worth playing, but at present it's a cool world bogged down in tedium.
Obduction starts off great - so much potential. It has all the elements from Myst and Riven that made them classics: intriguing story slowly revealed over the course of the game, mysterious atmosphere and immersive soundtrack, puzzles that integrate the game environment, several moments of "Ah ha!" where you know exactly what to do to unlock the next part of the game. The pacing is slow, but it's deliberate and fits the nature of the game.
But Cyan also brought back (with a vengeance) the only bad element from their excellent earlier games: tedious, obtuse puzzle design. For the most part, you don't see this show up in the first hours of the game. The main hub level is designed excellently, with areas that become interconnected as you progress.
After you progress enough in the main hub world, you start to run into teleporting puzzles, which require a lot of backtracking, a lot of trial and error, and a metric ton of patience. Remember that godawful "underground maze and you can only navigate by sound" puzzle from Myst? Those puzzles where you flip one switch, and know it must have changed something, but there's no logical clue to tell you what? They're back with huge levels where to even try some puzzles will require backtracking that takes minimum of 5 minutes for each attempt using fast walk, probably double that if you're using point and click or are not using a SSD. You start to realize you'll need to not only switch teleports, but make sure everything is rotated correctly before doing so, all while taking a circuitous route each time, going back through the entire game over and over. Riven cut this down by interconnecting all the areas, and slowly allowed you to realize the solution to the final puzzle through understanding the environment. Obduction throws nothing but tedious and lazy puzzles at you instead.
It's quite a shame, this could've been a really great experience if the puzzle & level design was tightened up in the final half of the game.
The good:
- Amazing visual design, world design, and ambient story telling. I lost track of how many times I turned a corner and went "Wow!" There is a huge variety of different cultures and places put together in a way that makes sense and carries the story forward. This is by far the game's strongest point: the sheer artistry of it.
- I found most puzzles in this one more fair than the classics like Myst and Riven. Most of the time there was a pretty clear goal in mind and it was more "how do I accomplish this" rather than wondering what the heck I was supposed to be doing.
- Addition of in-game camera for quick snapshots means I don't have to play with a pen and paper next to my keyboard the whole time trying to copy maps and diagrams.
The bad:
- Many times puzzles will require you to "swap" between different worlds. Even on my reasonably powerful CPU with plenty of memory and loading from a solid state disk, this process is not instant. Some puzzles that involve multiple swaps become a test of patience because even though you can clearly see what you need to do, each step involves a loading screen. There is also a great deal of walking and backtracking because sometimes you will need to swap, then get back to that point by another route to avoid re-swapping.
- The curse of the point and click adventure game lives on: two of the puzzles left me stuck because I failed to make an intutive leap based on some tiny detail.
- Some parts of the game seem rushed, like there's very little background sound, and one of the main characters is a 2D video despite other characters being 3D models.
- The ending made me very angry. There's actually two ways the game can end: one is very much better for you than the other. The deciding factor between them is, as far as I could tell, hinted at very early in the game when you have no idea what's going on or what anything means. Such an utterly essential detail needs to be underlined.
