Obduction

Certainly a difficult game to review. It contains about as many strength as it's flaws. What at times felt like a very enjoyable and immersive world was also tedious and frustrating. Maybe I just didn't have enough patience and got caught up on some of the puzzles.
The necessity to physically have to backtrack made the narrative pace glacial and I would end up losing my train of thought during a an attempted solve.
The main game play mechanic involves swapping back in forth between worlds, often bringing and utilizing some of that physical environment with you. An interesting mechanic indeed, but was predicated on load times between worlds, which again slows the pace down and removes me from the world. That in addition to backtracking left me just wanting to get through and finish the game as the puzzle resolution and sense of progression didn't feel very satisfying. Which is a bummer as the worlds, story and characters are engaging. I didn't feel like I was able to interact with the world as much as I would like. It felt light on puzzles and overall content. I'd be solving and progressing but I didn't truly understand how or why which ultimately made me apathetic.
PROS+
1) Beautiful worlds that are both eerie and familiar.
2) Striking story with callbacks to old 1950's UFO tropes.
CONS-
1) SLOW pace, with lots of backtracking and aimlessly wandering. This could've been fixed with a faster sprint,
2) Limited world interactivity with objects and characters.
3)Have to sit through a myriad of load screens which is necessary to progress. Even with newer SSDs, these loads can take up to 15+ seconds. Do that about a 100 times and that's Obduction.
I ending up finishing the game feeling hollow. All of this build-up ending up falling flat. Which is a shame considering Cyan's heights with previous titles, even though I did have significant issues with Riven. I just imagine this game could've been so much more and brought the genre into the modern era, but instead felt mostly middling. Maybe I just wanted it to be a game that it was never going to be.
However, if you enjoyed previous Cyan titles like Myst and Riven you will most likely get some enjoyment out of Obduction. Despite it's flaw it's worth an experience. Without hints it will probably take you between 20-30hrs depending on how observant and quick you are. With clues and a walk through it can be done in about 10.

The ingredient that made the Ages from Myst particularly compelling despite their disjointed and minimalistic presentation was their strangeness, the promise of an enigma wrapped in a thin film of abstract puzzles. The family drama narrative at the core of it all was basically locked away behind a series of mechanical epiphanies, sometimes delayed by a lot of walking in circles. And yet, you could lose yourself for hours in its beautiful vistas and exotic worlds, taking in the setting and admiring the work of long-gone civilizations.
In Obduction, as per usual in a Cyan Worlds jam, you’re a nameless protagonist transported to some faraway world that needs your intervention to survive. You wake up in what seems to be a 19th-century mining town named Hunrath, except there’s this purple alien sky and rock formations in the background that make Iceland seem like a minigolf course.
It’s eerie and confusing at first, before you gain an understanding of where you are and what exactly is going on. This was one of the core strengths of the Myst series: you were thrown into these crazy settings with very little information as to how things work and you had to figure it out as you explored, sometimes forcing you to understand worldbuilding elements to gain insight into how to solve a puzzle. For example, it helps to know that one of the species counts in base four to help decipher the way their technology works. However, getting stuck or missing a symbol, you’d have to backtrack for what seemed to be hours just to find that one missing hint that would unlock your progression.
As a spiritual successor to that, Obduction does very little to reduce either the magic or the tedium. It’s a gorgeous game, to be sure, worthy of the Cyan standard, but it can also be very obtuse and lean into the walking simulator aspect excessively.
Shortly after entering Hunrath proper for the first time, you meet the local population via heavily 90s-flavored FMVs. Other than that, the majority of the exposition will be relayed through a series of apocalyptic logs. Visits to other “spheres” will uncover a complicated relationship between multiple alien species and bizarre technologies you will have to master to advance. It becomes clear that you’re too late to prevent the initial conflict, but perhaps not too late to save any survivors you might come across.
In a post-Portal world, the narrative devices Obduction employs feel somewhat outdated and campy, but if you’re looking for that soapy flavored mildly hammy performances, the minimalistic cast in Obduction might just scratch your itch. In any case, you’re tasked by a guy named Cecil with connecting four spheres that you later find out make up the different worlds in the game.
Thus, the pretext for your exploration and puzzle-solving is set. And while walking and teleportation will make up the majority of your playtime (with sometimes unreasonably long loading screens) most of the puzzles in the game are juicy enough to be worth the boredom of not making much progress for a while.
Teleportation is woven into many solutions and missing elements, and once you understand how the worlds warp when you use various devices, you’ll have mastered the fundamentals for many subsequent challenges. And to the developers’ credit, moving around Hunrath and doing the necessary backpedaling is a lot more intuitive and logical than it used to be in Myst or Riven, but there still are portions in which you’ll feel that you’re making no progress and probably have to walk about five minutes back to where your last obstacle made sense. Thankfully, it’s times like these where you notice subtle backstory elements winking at you and there’s enough density in easter eggs and secrets that you don’t feel abandoned in some wasteland but rather a tourist in a lived-in world.
On the other hand, the dubiously long loading times will cause some frustration, alongside a handful of technical bugs that persist even in the game’s current build. Back in the day, you’d have to swap out Riven CDs every time you went to a new island — but imagine the same disengagement about four times per minute, all while solving a puzzle.
Furthermore, some puzzles, like the maze in the second half of the game, are overly complicated and slow in their execution. Long after you’ve figured out HOW to do something, you still have to do the actual steps, which involve multiple loading screens and permutations and will take more than a few minutes to complete.
In that sense, Obduction is a bit of a vestige of a bygone era: at times it seems a bit rigid as it employs a structure and form that isn’t nearly as streamlined as other narrative puzzle games of the modern era. Which is a pity, because these hitches stand in the way of a promising plot, one that explores the consequences of selfishness and tribalism through not only the inciting conflict, but also the way you go about solving the final puzzle.
If you accept a healthy dose of backtracking and uneven progression as being integral aspects of this particular adventure subgenre, Obduction delivers a relatively successful modernization of everything that made Myst a must-have in the 90s.
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According to howlongtobeat.com I suck at these games because I am the slowest on the planet, but I love these hard puzzles. Nowhere near the end yet when writing this review.
The only downside of this game is there are no baguettes in the game
:iambaguette:

As a huge fan of the Myst series, this game ended up satisfying my craving for another sequel to Myst. I must admit, I tried playing this game when it first came out, and I was not a fan. The beginning is certainly a slow start and it was not nearly as "clean" as Myst was in terms of the progression of the story line. However, once you get into it, the feeling of solving the puzzles is the exact same as Myst. If Myst is a 10, this game is a solid 6.5, but the more you play it, the better it gets. I would definitely recommend playing it (just after you've finished the other Myst sequels).

I really enjoyed Obduction's world building and plot, and most of the puzzles. If you like Myst-like games you're almost certain to like Obduction.

It does have some issues: The swapping mechanic can lead to a lot of waiting and made one puzzle I otherwise found pretty clever feel very tedious. Similarly I was sometimes was frustrated by how long it took to navigate around. Another problem, as I saw it, is that the game sometimes unblocks or blocks areas in response to events without giving any indication that it has done so, which ultimately caused me have to look up how to get to an end game location. You will also probably get the bad ending at first, not because you can't tell you're headed into the bad ending, but because it has been so long since you interacted with the thing that would lead to the good ending that you've probably forgot all about it.

It's like 95% really good though.

I have, for a VERY long time, been a fan of Cyan games, Myst, Riven etc... all great games, so I expected a lot from this game and I was not disappointed. As expected, a beautifully imagined world with some very complex and obscure puzzles to solve, and as we come to expect from Cyan games, very little in the way of hand-holding... there are hints... kind of, but nothing to actually give away exactly how a puzzle is to be solved, you have to actually think about it, and I love that about Cyan's games. All the clues are there, you just have to look and read everything to find the answers.
The only real problems with this game come in the VR implementation. For the most part it works fine, but it has its problems. Certain controls don't work properly, for example: There is a small cart you have to drive about, sometimes when you get in the cart, you are seated 45 degrees off from the direction you were facing, you can rotate 180 degrees to drive it backwards, but then the movement controls don't work by VR interaction, you have to use the thumbsticks, which kind of defeats the object of the VR implementation. Also, when starting a NEW GAME in VR, setting the options before starting does nothing, and all the options reset, so you then have to pause and change your options again.
There are some issues when playing with gamepad also, but not nearly as many: Some of the controls don't work unless you are standing in a very specific orientation to whatever it is you are interacting with, but it is still playable.
It is an excellent game with an excellent story and it is well worth playing, it's just a shame the VR aspect is so poorly implemented. So I would suggest just simply playing with mouse and keyboard, as using a gamepad does also have some minor issues.

Even though I was a bit too young to play Myst when it first went huge, I watched my dad play it on our Windows 98 when I was little. Flash forward to 2008, and I asked for a DVD-ROM drive for Christmas so that I could play Myst IV: Revelation on our Windows 2001. I was late to the game, but I was obsessed. I was also a teenager and kinda stupid, so a lot of the puzzles were way over my head, but luckily there were websites that had text walkthroughs (YouTube was an infant and Let's Plays hadn't even been conceived).
Obduction was a lot of fun. I know it has mixed reviews, but it was great to play a game that FELT like Myst after so long of only having the same 5.5 games to occasionally revisit. The worldbuilding here was so beautiful, and it was cool seeing mo-cap characters like Myst used to have, now that we're in an age of CGI realistic NPC models. I also really enjoyed this because it was kind of easier than any of the Myst games, and even though I'm older and smarter, I'm also busier and tireder.
Obduction gets two thumbs up from me. I hope the team at Cyan keeps making new games again, instead of another from-the-ground-up remake of a Myst game (as of writing this, the Riven remake came out a few months ago, and I had replayed it on Steam just last year).