Obduction

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!

A unique story, played out in absolutely gorgeous, immersive environments with organically developed puzzles that are part of the story, not just contrived obstacles. What you'd expect from Cyan after all the Myst titles, a great addition to the collection. I've played it several times (with plenty of time in between to forget the details) and still love it every time. The whole thing makes me smile, go "hmmm...." and "say what?!?!?" Truly entertaining in every way.

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.

This review contains spoilers!

I'd recommend this game with a few caveats. The first is that, if you don't enjoy the classics that Cyan Worlds developed (Myst and Riven), then you probably won't immediately see the appeal of Obduction. So, if you haven't played Myst or Riven, I highly recommend doing so. In addition to both of those games being classics in their own right, they also give helpful points of comparison for Obduction.

Obduction immediately captured my imagination in a fashion similar to Myst and Riven. In those two classic games, you're transported into a strange fantasy universe by something called a linking book. The premise of Obduction really isn't that different: you're transported into a strange fantasy universe by some kind of alien seed. The atmosphere of an Arizona desert home (complete with white picket fence) contrasted with the purple alien landscape is captivating.

The level design feels very well thought-out with respect to realism. Obviously, the idea of a sphere of the Arizona desert being transported to another world is fiction, but once you accept that premise, everything else feels like it belongs. Objects work as you'd expect them to, and you see things where you'd expect to see them. It would have been really tempting for the developers to place all of Farley's notes all around the world, sort of drip-feeding the lore of this world as you progress through things, but they're all in Farley's house instead. And, even though it breaks up the pace of the gameplay to have the player read through books of text all at once, it's worth the tradeoff because it makes the most sense for Farley's personal notes to be in her house - the internal consistency makes the world feel real.

While the level design feels well thought-out from a realism perspective, there's a bit of a problem when it comes to backtracking. Many of Obduction's puzzles are rooted spatial awareness. Once you've mapped out what the area you're working in looks like and how things are connected, you've basically solved the puzzle. However, the gap between knowing how to solve the puzzle and actually executing your solution is often enormous. You often have to backtrack over several levels to circumvent small areas in the middle of a puzzle, and this wouldn't normally be a huge issue for me, but there's nothing interesting to do during that transit time (other than enjoy the backgrounds and set pieces), and the player's movement speed is painfully slow (even while running). Indeed, if the player just ran at a sprint instead of a light jog, I probably would have completed the game in 9 hours instead of 13. I don't think a faster run speed would have broken the immersion of the game at all, and it would have made things feel more fluid.

I imagine a lot of people will leverage complaints about load times and performance. And, indeed, there are some performance issues here. There are rather long load times, especially when swapping between parallel worlds. I'm not terribly frustrated with it, personally, because as time goes on, there will be optimizations that will likely fix this issue (there have already been some in patches of the game since its release). The only time it became irritating was in the Villein world, where a few of the puzzles involve swapping between worlds in short succession. It killed the pacing. And, while the visuals of the game look nice, it's not really worth the performance cost, in my opinion.

The puzzles themselves are generally quite good. As I mentioned, spatial awareness is key for most of the puzzles, but Obduction takes this concept to the next level with the concept of the interlinking worlds. It's not enough for you to have spatial awareness of the level you're standing in. You also sometimes have to have awareness of how the space you're standing in relates to the parallel worlds you swap between. The fact that you spend the game not only in Hunrath, but in the other three linked worlds was a very pleasant surprise that I'll likely never forget.

I was a bit disappointed that the Mofang world was devoid of any puzzle solving or mechanical content, but it makes sense logically for that world to be barren as you uncover the story of Obduction, so it's not really a major complaint of mine.

The biggest disappointment for me were the puzzles that relied on logic rather than spatial awareness. When I discovered that the Villein use a base-4 number system, I was excited to learn all about it. Indeed, it brought me back to my first time playing through Riven. Learning the Rivenese number system was one of my favorite experiences in my time playing video games. It's a captivating moment where everything just kind of clicks and the entire world of Riven starts to make sense. There wasn't really any analog with the Villein number system.

The problem with the Villein number system is that the player is given a tool for brute-forcing the puzzles in the garage in Hunrath. The cash register takes all the fun out of learning the Villein number system and using it in the various solution panels across the game. It's especially disappointing because, if you explore the basement in the Mayor's office, you can find a worksheet where he was learning the Villein number system. It would have been a lot more rewarding for the player to learn these numbers on their own instead of having a tool that translates everything for them (overreliance on the tool also led to a lot of backtracking, which I already explained was an issue in this game).

The best example of a puzzle which disappointed me was one of the last ones the player is likely to solve: the pod vault in the Villein world. The goal is to find Farley's pod. There's actually a very interesting system for organizing the pods. You need to take the pod position (which can be 0-15), multiply it by sixteen, and then add the floor number you want to access. I actually took the time to figure this out by experimenting with the number panel and observing the results, and it was a joy to figure that out. It would have been so cool if the log book had just given the floor number and pod position for each entry. But, the logbook unfortunately reveals the exact number as well (which wasn't necessary information to solve the puzzle). The player can easily figure out which pod is Farley's by plugging the pod number into the register in the garage in Hunrath, even if they don't understand the Villein number system at all.

It was really disappointing to find that learning the Villein number system wasn't really required to solve any of the puzzles in the Villein world. But, I suppose the counterpoint is that you can learn how the number system works entirely within the game's logic, which is pretty cool. And, if you're looking for a good challenge, I recommend learning it!

One could argue that the register in the garage makes the game's progression more accessible to players who don't want to learn a base-4 number system. But, I have a counterargument: The story and progression really isn't anything that special. It's fine, and I don't have any complaints about it, but it doesn't justify handicapping the puzzles - and, if you ask me, the puzzles are what we're really here for. Cyan Worlds' strengths are in the world-building and puzzle construction, not the story and plot.

Overall, I would recommend Obduction. It makes for a memorable experience, and the world-building is fantastic. This is especially so if you're already a fan of Myst and Riven, and if you don't mind some of the clunkiness that comes with those games. Even though this game was made with more modern software development tools, it still feels reminiscent of the point-and-click era (many who are already interested in Obduction will see this as a positive).

However, if you're looking for an immersive first-person puzzler game that takes place in an alien world that feels more modern, play Outer Wilds.

Really good and really immersive! I really enjoyed playing this game and look forward to a sequel if one is planned!

Obduction is a great game. The world is fascinating and beautiful, the story is good, and the puzzle mechanics are complex and interesting without being overwhelming. I played this as my first Cyan game, so it was a little jarring to get used to their style, but once I settled in, I loved it. My only gripes are that some puzzles are a little obtuse and that it takes forever to travel anywhere because the walking speed is so slow. I did not need a guide to complete the game.

Great puzzles, with enough hints for you to figure it out if you take a second to think and explore the world