Obduction

I'm 68 and the only games I was ever interested in were the Cyan games. I found MYST a few years after it's release, but all the others I literally had to get when they were actually first released. I have to admit I had to have hint help on all of them, being old and no computer experience previously. I have to give kudos to the gamers that actually beat these games on their own, my guess they started as young children.

On my first attempt at Obduction I was pretty lost, as basically a novice at critical game thinking. I barely made it halfway before I got so stuck back in 2016, that I couldn't fine the hint/answer to a puzzle, so I quit the game. then this year we decided to go through all the games again for brain training to keep sharp. We did pretty well, but still needed some help, but not as bad as the first time around. With Obduction it really kicked out butts, and it was disheartening to see some had gotten through in 8 to 12 hours. Even with help we were at it for 95 hours! Yes, 95! but most of it was my tenacity in trying to figure things out, and being hampered by missing many small details, that real gamers learned to look for long ago.

I highly recommend Obduction! Totally a thinking game, one does need a lot of patience if you aren't a big gamer.

Absolute tour de force. This is absolutely Myst+++.
Breathtaking environments, brilliant puzzles and really interesting storyline. Cyan really outdid themselves with Obduction. It was everything I'd hoped it would be. I just couldn't get to sleep until I'd finished it. So much to do, and so much to figure out.
Enjoyed (almost) every minute, and managed to figure everything out without cheating except for 1 puzzle which I think the devs may have made a slightly misstep in designing (see gripe #2).
Everyone who loves Myst and puzzles should play this game, it's awesome.
I only have 3 gripes and 3 pieces of advice:-
1. There's one puzzle that uses a "viewfinder", and the thing should have a handle or something, but on my screen the 'hit point' to use the viewfinder properly was so small I ended up looking up a solution.
Advice: When you get to a puzzle with a circle 'viewfinder', and you're thinking "there's 4 things to point at but I can't point at them", just.,, stick with it.... don't walk away.
2. I'd say the method to get the 'good ending' isn't quite telegraphed enough. You spend the entire game following instructions, and every single hypothesis and result by party "A" leads to success, Nothing from party "B" seems worthwhile. And yet, we're to intuit that from a few pieces of writing by party "B" that we're not to do one thing 'X'.... That needed a smidge more telegraphing I think.
Advice: Pay VERY close attention to all the notes you find scattered about talking about the 'trees' and what they do, and keep an open mind about what they mean, even if it seems like it's just worldbuilding background and pointless.
3. The time it takes to move between 'worlds' is really long. For me, I would just Alt-tab and go read a web page or watch something on streaming TV until the sparkles died down in the background. For two of the puzzles, I managed to get through several episodes of Futurama waiting for the screen changes. This is on a 13th gen i7 with 16 Gb RAM and a 4060 with an nvme SSD... So no slouch!.
Advice: Settle in and be patient. Opinions are mixed, but in general, it's a total crapshoot whether it'll be fast or slow. My bet is that it's down to how much VRAM you have in your GPU.
Enjoy!

Look, you might need to use a walkthrough on a point or two, especially if taking long breaks between playing. Some clues and paths are... not obvious. But this game is beautiful and worth the effort.

I completed Obduction and enjoyed it, Cyan continues to deliver a solid, Myst-like experience. However, the game is bogged down by a few issues that take away from the enjoyment:
The movement speed is SLOW. Extremely slow. Even on "run" mode it's painful to get around. It feels like you're walking through jelly. This is coupled with painfully slow loading screens that take a good 15-30 seconds even on a top-spec machine in 2025.
The first area has several different "connecting" points that are extremely difficult to keep track of. You'll need to draw a map (none of the ones I found online are helpful in this area) which isn't bad per se, but after 12 hours I still never knew where I'd end up. Although some cross-map paths do eventually open up, it's still frustrating to get around that first area.
There are at least three puzzles that are just *tedious*, notably a frustrating pair towards the end of the game. You'll definitely need a guide for one, and the other you'll just have to do a bunch of running back and forth to get right (the online solver did *not* work for me), and since your run speed is so slow and you're having to sit through those loading screens it takes *ages* to complete. I almost ragequit right there.
They reused the dang door-behind-a-door thing from Riven. Ugh.
There's a solid 12 hours of play here, but the game feels unfinished. Notably the fourth "area" has nothing in it whatsoever - that might have been a design choice, but it really just feels like they ran out of time and slapped something together without an entire area of the game complete.
Overall, I'd say this is worth a play if you loved the Myst games - but a lot of it feels like a literal slog as you meander your way up and down staircases at a glacial pace, seeing the same view of nothing over and over. Be prepared to be very very patient.

Obduction is a quintessential Cyan puzzle game. There's some world hopping (similar to visiting different ages in Myst), FMV sequences, and a science fiction narrative that strings the whole game together.

Towards the end, the game mechanics to jump between worlds get a little repetitive, but it's in service of solving the puzzles. If you liked the Myst games, I wholeheartedly recommend Obduction.

An amazing game! Definitely lives up to all my expectations of Cyan. The worlds is gorgeous and immersive as any from the Myst games. For me it was the puzzles that made this game stand out. They were significantly more challenging than those I remember in other Cyan games, but challenging in a good way. You really have to think outside the box and figure out how to use the world itself to help you. Even at 80% complete, after I had explored all the realms available, there were still new secrets about how the world of Obduction worked that I had to figure out. Unfortunately the ending of the story line left me feeling a little disappointed, but that is my only complaint. Overall this was an incredibly satisfying adventure puzzle game that I would recommend to anyone who enjoyed the Myst series!

Pretty, superbly engaging and well-advised to any puzzle-adventure fan, especially those leaning towards the latter part of that description.
Very unfortunately, near the end of the game, the end of Maray, you first deal with a fatiguing maze (please don't miss that you can in fact rotate also the individual parts of that puzzle...) and almost immediately after that end up at the final door puzzle, the hint for which was moved to a more obscure location due to a bug with the original hint -- said hint making little logical sense already but now then certainly -- and said hint being in fact absent completely when the game language is set to some non-English language(s), as a now new & improved bug. Ugh.
This happening near the end of the game leaves one with little time to recover the spirit, but spirit this game still has. Recommended.