After finishing up both Myst and Riven: The Sequel To Myst (actual name), I was curious what else developer Cyan had worked on. Of course there's a number of Myst sequels following Riven, but 2016's Obduction is what really caught my eye.
Much like Myst, you play a nameless, faceless protagonist whisked away from their ordinary life to a strange alien world. The opening narration clues you in to what's going on: you - and others before and after you - have been abducted by an extraterrestrial seed, plucked away from various points in time and transposed to Hunrath, a human settlement that was once a part of Arizona. The world you find yourself in is an amalgamation, the landscape shifting from one alien plain to the next. There are four species being collected for some unknown reason, and it seems a war has broken out between them. The human faction has battened down Hunrath, and under the instruction of a survivor named C.W., it's up to you to reverse Hunrath's defenses and send everyone home... Or you can follow Farley's trail, trust in her research, and send Hunrath and the other cells someplace different...
As with Myst and Riven, the atmosphere and art design is incredible. Letters, recordings, and NPCs are scattered about, but the aftermath of the war and systematic freezing of the human populace leaves the world barren and lonely. As C.W. tells you near the end of the game, it's perhaps fortuitous that you didn't spend as much time here as the others. Of course, I have no intention of spoiling the story. Its twists and turns were genuinely enjoyable, and I found the history of Hunrath and the other alien species to be just as fascinating as anything in Myst. If you like the writing and world building of Rand and Robyn Miller, then you're going to sink into Obduction like a warm bath.
Unfortunately, as you may have assumed from my score, I didn't have a very good time playing this! I'd like to take a moment to apologize to the Miller's and ask that they consider sparing me. I've seen how they build puzzles in their games, they're smart people and I'm sure if they really wanted they could find me. So let me preface my complaints by making it 100% clear that I played the PlayStation 4 version of the game on a PlayStation 5, and uh, maybe this caused some problems!
The performance is dire. I cannot think of any game I've played on the PS5 (as of this writing) that has been this lousy with stutters or hanging. Load into a new area? The game is gonna seize up. Turn a corner? You're droppin frames. Walking in a straight line with a minor amount of particle effects on screen? Ha ha ha... yikes! Load times are atrocious and frequent, owed in no small part to the level of Link to the Past-style world-hopping you have to do to solve puzzles. You'll also get reoriented after jumping between worlds, so sometimes you'll need to rotate a portion of one level by jumping into another only to find you rotated it too much or too little or in the wrong direction, requiring you to constantly jump back and forth until everything is perfectly aligned. There's a maze puzzle near the end of the game that requires you to do this so much that the constant load times nearly made me bail. I resorted to just looking at a guide to keep everything to an absolute minimum, and most videos explaining how to navigate the puzzle take anywhere from 25 to 40+ minutes, so just imagine bumbling your way through and screwing up sections of that. In my case, I had twisted around portions of the maze so much that I had to painstakingly realign everything to become simpatico with the video I pulled up just to ground myself enough to follow along. Look, I'm a very stupid person, if you get to this puzzle you might find it laughably easy. I am writing this review from my corner with my pointy "dunce" cap on, there is nothing you can accuse me of that I haven't already internalized.
The controls are also a lot more clumsy than they ought to be when playing with a gamepad. Some objects have very precise points that need to be clicked in order to interact with them, and the mine cart (which you need to ferry around Hunrath frequently in the early parts of the game) kept causing an issue where I could no longer toggle between interact and free roam modes, which required me to pause the game and move the analog stick in the direction I wanted to face as the game was fading out of the menu in order to orient myself correctly. Myst on the Sega Saturn controls better than Obduction does, and that's insane.
Again, to be fair, I played the PS4 version on the PS5. There could be some compatibility issues when playing the game cross-gen. It's also a point-and-click puzzle game, which is inherently going to feel better when played with a mouse and keyboard, and presumably the load times are going to be much smoother if you've got it installed on your PC's SSD. If you're curious about Obduction, then I implore you to play it on PC and not on console. It will probably help to know that the PlayStation version rarely goes on sale. The only reason I picked it up was because it did for the first time in years, and because I still lacked the money to upgrade my GPU at that point in time.
It's a shame that the structure of Obduction's puzzles conflicts with its performance to such a grotesque degree, because I otherwise find it to be a pretty competent successor to Myst. Sure there's a lot of Myst-ass Myst puzzles, meaning you'll be screwing around with base 4 a lot, and you'll probably hit a few brick walls along the way... Some of which you might phase through and go "oh that's what I was supposed to do," but hey, that's just the nature of the beast. Either you're into this sort of thing or you're not. Anyway, Cyan is working on another game called Firmament that is (supposedly) due out in May, and assuming the brothers Miller don't lock me away in a nightmare world that can only be escaped using advanced mathematics, I'll maybe check that out.
Much like Myst, you play a nameless, faceless protagonist whisked away from their ordinary life to a strange alien world. The opening narration clues you in to what's going on: you - and others before and after you - have been abducted by an extraterrestrial seed, plucked away from various points in time and transposed to Hunrath, a human settlement that was once a part of Arizona. The world you find yourself in is an amalgamation, the landscape shifting from one alien plain to the next. There are four species being collected for some unknown reason, and it seems a war has broken out between them. The human faction has battened down Hunrath, and under the instruction of a survivor named C.W., it's up to you to reverse Hunrath's defenses and send everyone home... Or you can follow Farley's trail, trust in her research, and send Hunrath and the other cells someplace different...
As with Myst and Riven, the atmosphere and art design is incredible. Letters, recordings, and NPCs are scattered about, but the aftermath of the war and systematic freezing of the human populace leaves the world barren and lonely. As C.W. tells you near the end of the game, it's perhaps fortuitous that you didn't spend as much time here as the others. Of course, I have no intention of spoiling the story. Its twists and turns were genuinely enjoyable, and I found the history of Hunrath and the other alien species to be just as fascinating as anything in Myst. If you like the writing and world building of Rand and Robyn Miller, then you're going to sink into Obduction like a warm bath.
Unfortunately, as you may have assumed from my score, I didn't have a very good time playing this! I'd like to take a moment to apologize to the Miller's and ask that they consider sparing me. I've seen how they build puzzles in their games, they're smart people and I'm sure if they really wanted they could find me. So let me preface my complaints by making it 100% clear that I played the PlayStation 4 version of the game on a PlayStation 5, and uh, maybe this caused some problems!
The performance is dire. I cannot think of any game I've played on the PS5 (as of this writing) that has been this lousy with stutters or hanging. Load into a new area? The game is gonna seize up. Turn a corner? You're droppin frames. Walking in a straight line with a minor amount of particle effects on screen? Ha ha ha... yikes! Load times are atrocious and frequent, owed in no small part to the level of Link to the Past-style world-hopping you have to do to solve puzzles. You'll also get reoriented after jumping between worlds, so sometimes you'll need to rotate a portion of one level by jumping into another only to find you rotated it too much or too little or in the wrong direction, requiring you to constantly jump back and forth until everything is perfectly aligned. There's a maze puzzle near the end of the game that requires you to do this so much that the constant load times nearly made me bail. I resorted to just looking at a guide to keep everything to an absolute minimum, and most videos explaining how to navigate the puzzle take anywhere from 25 to 40+ minutes, so just imagine bumbling your way through and screwing up sections of that. In my case, I had twisted around portions of the maze so much that I had to painstakingly realign everything to become simpatico with the video I pulled up just to ground myself enough to follow along. Look, I'm a very stupid person, if you get to this puzzle you might find it laughably easy. I am writing this review from my corner with my pointy "dunce" cap on, there is nothing you can accuse me of that I haven't already internalized.
The controls are also a lot more clumsy than they ought to be when playing with a gamepad. Some objects have very precise points that need to be clicked in order to interact with them, and the mine cart (which you need to ferry around Hunrath frequently in the early parts of the game) kept causing an issue where I could no longer toggle between interact and free roam modes, which required me to pause the game and move the analog stick in the direction I wanted to face as the game was fading out of the menu in order to orient myself correctly. Myst on the Sega Saturn controls better than Obduction does, and that's insane.
Again, to be fair, I played the PS4 version on the PS5. There could be some compatibility issues when playing the game cross-gen. It's also a point-and-click puzzle game, which is inherently going to feel better when played with a mouse and keyboard, and presumably the load times are going to be much smoother if you've got it installed on your PC's SSD. If you're curious about Obduction, then I implore you to play it on PC and not on console. It will probably help to know that the PlayStation version rarely goes on sale. The only reason I picked it up was because it did for the first time in years, and because I still lacked the money to upgrade my GPU at that point in time.
It's a shame that the structure of Obduction's puzzles conflicts with its performance to such a grotesque degree, because I otherwise find it to be a pretty competent successor to Myst. Sure there's a lot of Myst-ass Myst puzzles, meaning you'll be screwing around with base 4 a lot, and you'll probably hit a few brick walls along the way... Some of which you might phase through and go "oh that's what I was supposed to do," but hey, that's just the nature of the beast. Either you're into this sort of thing or you're not. Anyway, Cyan is working on another game called Firmament that is (supposedly) due out in May, and assuming the brothers Miller don't lock me away in a nightmare world that can only be escaped using advanced mathematics, I'll maybe check that out.
3 Comments
@Pevsfreedom I think that's very likely the case then, and kind of suspected it might be. I think I'd still prefer playing it with a mouse and keyboard either way, though.
If I could play M&K I would :D There were definitely some times where trying to aim at little buttons was a severe pain. Just finished this last night after beating in 2 days - I really loved it, but can see your experience wasn't ideal!
Pevsfreedom
8 months ago