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.

Great game if you like slow paced puzzle solving adventure games. Great story, great acting, with replay value. I've always liked Cyan's games, this is one of their best!

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).

It's certainly challenging, and there may be long periods where you feel a little lost... but super rewarding when you do start to unlock things. The only thing is that I would highly recommend playing on high resolution -- my first time around, I played on an old laptop and never finished. Now that I'm playing with a good GPU and 4k monitor, I realize how many clues I just totally missed because of grainy resolution. At "Epic" graphics settings, the scenery is absolutely breathtaking!

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.

TLDR: Obduction manages to evoke the same kind of fun as Myst. It opens a bit slow but quickly provides a satisfying puzzle/adventure game experience. Movement speed can make cross-world travel tedious at times, and the ending half-hour is a bit weak, providing some baffling gameplay decisions and leaving the story a bit more incomplete than I'd have liked. I still had a blast with 90% of the experience, however, and would definitely recommend to fans of the genre.
I played a very small portion of Obduction many years ago, but technical issues - in part due to the game and in part due to my computer - caused me to drop it. Since then, I've become equipped with a significantly more powerful computer and the game has received updates that have polished the experience, so I decided it was worth a revisit.
Obduction was the first major new adventure game title from Cyan since Myst V nine years prior. As with their previous works, Obduction presents a mysterious world with two main components: some fundamentally perspective-altering technology or circumstances, and tons of machines/devices that require experimentation or information to use properly. Those devices are sometimes designed as explicit puzzles, while other times they are merely undocumented and thus act as de facto puzzles. There is also no inventory, meaning no need to worry about bringing the right items to the right places.
All the elements of the special sauce found in the Myst games are present, and as you might expect from that, the game generally delivers the same kind of fun. Though the opening half-hour is perhaps a bit slow compared to earlier titles, it successfully manages to acquaint the player with the - compared to Myst - very large and dense space they've been introduced to. After that, the pace picks up, and I started really enjoying myself as I read more into the mysteries of the world, saw firsthand the interconnectedness of different elements, and utilized the previously mentioned perspective-altering technology and circumstances to my advantage. It really did elicit most of the same kinds of enjoyment as the Myst games have for me in the past.
The game also manages to hold up extremely well from a visual perspective for a Kickstarter project from eight years ago. You'll find obvious texture seams on occasion, and plants don't look fantastic in close proximity, but if those are my only complaints? This game is genuinely stunning. There were more than a few moments where I would enter a new area and just look around me to take in the view. The art direction is fantastic and the UE4 tech does a great job bringing it to life. The FMVs are also well integrated into the fully 3D environment, which adds a nice touch of character in a world where FMVs in games are largely a thing of the past.
Where I feel the game struggled the most was in its final 30ish minutes. One puzzle that players can begin to solve quite early in the game finally resolves itself near the end, only it does so in a surprisingly artificial manner for a Cyan product. To keep the spoilers as light as I can, a puzzle involving learning to decipher alien input devices resolves itself by having players operate a machine that reveals story info. That info should be completely redundant to anyone paying even somewhat close attention, but revealing that info arbitrarily unlocks an unrelated door to allow for more progress to be made, meaning that the need to solve said puzzle is entirely artificial. The story also doesn't quite tie up its loose ends as I feel it should for a self-contained game like this one, which is especially problematic since tying together some of those loose ends would've probably made it easier to decide on which of the multiple endings I should trigger.
Beyond the ending section of the game, my only complaints are minor. The movement speed should have been faster. The Myst games (outside of IV) benefited from either small worlds, the ability to move at a blistering pace due to their point-and-click nature, or both. Obduction presents large spaces with slow movement speeds, even in point-and-click mode, which can make the frequent cross-world travel a tad more frustrating than it needs to be. Performance and stability are much better than they were years ago, but they're imperfect. I ran into one crash upon hitting a loading zone at the same time as I triggered an achievement, and while I never managed to break anything in the world, a friend of mine playing at the same time did run into a significant bug that required a reboot of the game to solve. There are also still noticeable stutters when entering certain areas despite my extremely high-end specs, though I would imagine given the pace of this game that VR players are the only ones who should be concerned by this.
Still, these minor complaints were hardly enough to spoil the 90% of the game that I truly enjoyed playing. Nearly the whole experience manages to evoke Myst's magic while being distinct and unique, and that absolutely makes it worth playing. Just be prepared for the ending to be a bit messy.