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.

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.

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!

Obduction sticks to its roots. You need to put away fast gratification, level up sounds, making your numbers go up - you need to actually think. And, more importantly, look at things.

Obduction balances its old school longform attention span demands with gorgeous visuals and a storyline that needs to be actively thought about to be understood. These aspects balance well, giving you time to digest what you've learned as you wander the world and marvel at its excellently realised alien environments.

This game should be approached with solemn patience. It hasn't updated its demands since the days of Myst, and if you're unfamiliar, you will need to put yourself in mind of a game space for you to think within. Where you might idle around simply mapping the routes available, inching forward afternoon by afternoon in a less online, more organic past. I commend the developers for bringing back the exact feel of an environmental puzzler and for demanding the player get to work to earn every increment of progress.

I will say I had some trouble organising my controls. The keyboard cannot be remapped, and is slightly misleading in that WASD and the arrow keys actually function differently, plus there's some fiddling with the method of world interaction that fits your hardware. After settling that, however, one can get immersed.

Some of the environmental storytelling on display contains just as shocking a plot twist as a great movie. The backstory and worldbuilding is world-class and shows an exceptional level of care. What elevates this above any other puzzle game is the unique mechanic of warping within the dome you're trapped inside, and then the seed-swap puzzles that involve taking a chunk of the environment in your teleport, manipulating it to one side, and teleporting it back, however this incurs a loading screen *every time* you teleport. This detracts from the puzzle and lengthens the mental workload of remembering your own solutions as you wait, and wait, and wait some more. However I've been told these loading times have improved with better hardware since release, and I found it mildly annoying but manageable.

There aren't many games out there that develop alien languages, explain the basis of using one, and then expect you to recall and use that information at a critical plot point. There aren't many games like Obduction. It's something special, and I absolutely recommend it if you enjoy a mental challenge, or if you want to step away from rewards and lootboxes and dialogue trees and just breathe for a moment of steady, beautiful isolation.

Just remember to relax and be 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.