Obduction

Rich experience, but I won't play anything by this group again. A few puzzles are practically impossible. I want to be able to solve the game myself. The killer, though, was a horrible ending. Game developers assume you will think the way they do - critical clues can easily be interpreted differently. Why build a maze where the exit is a death trap?

An amazing story, very well told and incredibly fun to play. Some difficult puzzles (the Gauntlet Maze took me absolutely ages to work out) and some fantastic graphics. An exceptional game that I would definitely recommend.

i am stuck

Obduction isn't a *bad* game, especially if you enjoy challenging puzzles. I found figuring out the base 4 number system kind of fun, and something a bit more unique than the typical puzzle adventure game fare. But it really expects you to devour every detail and make some logical leaps at times that are just a bridge too far... and the cardinal sin that moves this to a "No" to me is this: Late in one biome, you are gated until you input a certain number to simply see a certain pod... apparently originally you were supposed to see the number presented so going and inputting it nearby makes sense. But it seems due to some players not being able to see it... they simply made it so the number is not displayed anymore and instead you have to make quite a logical leap, brute force it, or look up a hint/guide.

If I could give this a "so-so" I would, as there's quite a lot I still like about the game. If you do enjoy challenging Myst-likes, I'd still give it a try (pick it up on sale), but if you find yourself stuck for too long, don't be afraid to find one of the hint guides to give yourself a nudge. Unfortunately the game does not have any such system built in... and depending what stage you're at, there could be a LOT of running back and forth (until you get enough shortcuts unlocked) including some potential load times which also help push this down a bit.

Great game! I found the game very challenging and it took me more than one attempt to solve it, which made it even more rewarding when I was able to move forward. Overall the game with its lore and graphics really grabbed me. Fair warning: There are a couple of red herrings and overall things can be frustrating because there are almost no hints most of the time for what you have to do next. I want to play more games like this.

Intriguing story line that has many different dimensions and many, many challenges along the way. Totally absorbing and universally perplexing.

Obduction is an amazing game that is designed like a modern 'Myst'. It feels familiar yet completely alien.

The only thing that got annoying after a while are all the loading screens, but it's nothing game-breaking.

If you love puzzle games and you loved Myst, this game holds up 8 years on! It is meandering but if you stick with it it has an intriguing story. My recommendation is to play it through in a shorter time frame because it is easy to forget what you were going to do next if you leave it for a month or more.

I tried to like it. Too tedious...

As a fan of Cyan Ubisot Myst Saga, I loved play this game, it reminds me of childhood and a perfect example of how a active non-violence game should be.
I personally reccomand it and hopefully more of this genre will be seen.

Obduction is badly implemented the game has ok graphics, clunky movement every other section of the map there will be real time loading of something causing stuttering, the puzzles are nice but the gameplay modest don't raise your expectations this is made by Cyan but not on par of Myst or Riven get it on sale.

A hard recommend. I tried to play this game when I first purchased it, spent maybe 30 minutes on it, and some reason it just felt like it was too slow to get started. The world is cool in terms of visuals, and even immersive to the point of quiet ambiance, and subtle sound effects which help create the feeling of you actually being there. I had not experienced too many of the puzzles, so I can't really knock it against that. I tried to revisit it years later, and have only put another 30 minutes or so into it, and still cannot get into a groove. It just feels too much like Myst/Riven/Cyan, which is both good and bad. I liked many of the earlier games by them, but it just has too much of the same essence. I'm currently on a portion with "switches" for railroad tracks (which feel much like the page-box toggles in Myst), and again encountering the classic FMV interactions, with (I'm sure), wily, mysterious characters, which I'd wager by the end, one or some could turn out to be antagonistic, or betray you. As well as the classic backtracking, loss of direction/progression, clueless-ness, that has been present many times before. So, kind of a middle of the road, if you like the Cyan series of games, I would wager this will fit right in. If not, then I'm pretty confident you will not like this. I think I am just not fit for this niche currently.

Love it!! After playing and enjoying 4 of the Myst games, this did not disappoint. The scenery is beautiful, as it tends to be in Cyan games, and I really enjoyed the environmental storytelling that made me put all sorts of little pieces together. The puzzles can be pretty difficult and it took me a while to get through the whole thing, but I'm very glad I did.

This is the most tedious game I have ever played. It starts off nice as a puzzle based walking simulator, but by mid game it gets so ridiculous with how slow everything is. The map is a giant maze that takes forever to traverse, so many teleporters its hard to keep track of which takes you where, a slow run speed and an even slower teleport animation. 99% of this game is doing an arduous trek from point A to point B just to find out that you forgot to flip a switch so you gotta trek all the way back to flip it, but you cant remember where it was.

It has a few 'a-ha' moments that are satisfying, but they are so few and far between.

Totally worth it. A Myst like game with logic puzzle.

There are some flaws to take in consideration:
- In free roam mode, it is hard to determine what can be interacted with;
- Lots of back and forth in order to solve some puzzle, it can be annoying at some point;
- no keyboard rebinding option;

puzzles are very challenging, walk throughs help when your stuck. really enjoying the visual effects. really nice job. thank you for all your hard work.

Imagine trying to solve a cool puzzle in a beautiful penthouse suite. Only, you can't actually move the puzzle pieces that are in front of you. You have to go to another location and move them remotely. So you take an elevator ride to the ground floor, walk across the campus to another building, and then take the elevator up to the top floor of that building. When you get to the remote control panel you can move the pieces of the puzzle, but now you can only see the single puzzle piece you wanted to move; you can't see the rest of the puzzle to know how to move it! So you go back and forth and back and forth between these buildings, up and down, and back and forth, alternating between moving pieces and returning to look at the how the piece moved and to look at the rest of the puzzle. Pretty soon you aren't enjoying the views anymore, the fun of the puzzle has faded, and you're just left wondering why the heck you're doing all this. That's Obduction.

It's got great world design, but the puzzles are executed terribly.

I really wanted to like it. I even came back to it after some time. My main takeaways are that it has a rich world to play in but some of the puzzles require an understanding of a specific concept and if you don't get that concept, you're going to be annoyed for a while. I made it close to the end of the game and STILL didn't get the logic on the bridges. I just guessed and made it work somehow.

Play this with a guide handy and embrace the atmosphere and notebooks and I guess you might have fun. By the end, I realized that I am happier adding this to my DNF list than trying to justify why I am playing it to completion.

Relatively interesting, if repetitive, puzzles made "difficult" by the circuitous backtracking required to test theories or explore areas. It's rarely actually a challenge to work out how to get somewhere or do something, but it often is tedious. I understand the motivation to pad out the time-to-test solutions to prevent people from brute force trial-and-error solving puzzles, but the result is to make the game frustrating for *everyone*.

Also was annoyed by some progression being tied to arbitrary unrelated player actions which don't give a satisfying feedback of "solving" something.

While the atmosphere and design were reminiscent of early Cyan works in the best ways, sound design and especially score are a major let down. Many parts of the game are DEAFENINGLY loud and score drops in and out extremely inelegantly.

Great puzzle game from Cyan, fun to play, challenging, decent story line. Looking forward to the next Cyan game.

The majority of the puzzles were not interesting and were mostly flipping a switch then retracing steps. Load times made this tedious, not challenging.

It's another game from the guys that made Myst, so if you're into Myst, you'll like this one. It seems to have been made with VR in mind, so it doesn't feel like a point-and-click adventure shoehorned into VR. Beautiful environments, wide variety of VR things to do. I haven't finished it yet, but it's been great so far.

I have mixed feelings about leaving a negative review, because I loved the Myst games, because Cyan is a venerable institution at this point, and because I don't want to discourage the creation of new adventure games in the same vein.

But unfortunately, if I stick purely to the game without those considerations, I can't really recommend Obduction. While it does engage very quickly in the same way as Myst, and tease with a fascinating world of both familiar and alien technology, it falls short in too many ways to ignore.

Some of these are technical. There far too many exceptionally long loading screens. Even in 2024, with pretty recent hardware, nVME drives, 16GB of video memory, and the rest, loading screens are a serious issue. Back in 2016, they must have been awful. Loading screens aren't the worst thing to happen to gaming, but there are some puzzles that find you passing through them a dozen or more times in fairly quick succession.

Which brings us to puzzle design. While reminiscent of Myst, there is a clunkiness that either I'd forgotten or have grown intolerant of. In one particularly bad example, you have to go through a loading screen over and over, followed each time by a bunch of (absurdly slow) walking, to swap bits of a maze around until you can figure out what controls swap what bits. This would be ok with a pad and paper, perhaps, without the loading screens, and without all the walking. But as it is, it's frankly a bit shocking that it made it into the game.

After figuring out how that particular puzzle was to be solved, I realized how much schlepping myself up and down paths and through loading screens it would require to execute the solution, and to be honest I stopped playing the game. It was just one too many of those cases where the solution can be found by treating the world as a static puzzle, and contemplating the 10-20 minutes I was going to spend putting the pieces into place. It's just not fun use of my time. I love pencil and paper puzzle books like Journal 29, which give you this exact feeling of triumph over a puzzle without the schlepping. It translates very poorly into a physical world where the controls are physically separated and split by a loading screen.

So overall, while there is some fun in the game, if you like this sort of puzzle, I can't recommend The Moscow Puzzles, Journal 29, or The Master Theorem strongly enough. There's less immediately rewarding sensual art in them, but there's also a distinct lack of loading screens.

The fun, for me -- and what I liked the most -- was figuring out WHAT was going on, not HOW to beat it. There is a logic but it's illusive. The "maze" is a highlight. Not too tough, not too easy. Overall, you enter a world which you really want to leave. But to leave you have to take that world with you. So, again, the most fun is figuring out what the rules are, and how to get those rules to work for you instead of driving you nuts! All in all, great fun game.

Beautiful scenery which allows you free roam for exploration and virtual hikes. This can lead you to certain dead ends but it's exploration. There's not much interaction with characters. The puzzles are elaborately spread out. It can be somewhat frustrating exploring many nooks and crannies just trying to proceed. You need to travel a lot to complete many of the individual 'puzzles' which are not you're standard puzzle game type but a long sequential task to open or activate something. The transport and swapping can get a bit tiring and time consuming. Overall, I'm liking the challenge and the scenery. You get a great sense of accomplishment after finally finding the next way.

The central mechanic of this game was very cool, but it was poorly implemented. Solving puzzles often requires going back and forth between various areas and, as the game progresses, this leads to a tedious amount of loading screens and slowly walking back and forth across large areas over and over. One puzzle near the end was especially awful in this regard. The puzzle itself wasn't hard to figure out, but it took forever to complete due to having to go back and forth constantly and wait for load screens.
Also, I managed to soft lock my game by accidentally getting out of the cart in an area that I should not have been able to get out in which both stuck me inside a wall (which can be fixed) and made it impossible to get back in my cart (which can't be fixed in game). I found a very old thread on the steam forums that told me how to alter my save file to fix this so I could continue the game. Later, there was an event that was supposed to display a code that I needed to progress the game, and the code just did not show up. Since I wasn't aware it was supposed to this led to a large amount of wandering around trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing before I looked it up and found out it was just bugged. On top of all the time wasted on loading and walking back and forth, this was just really frustrating.
Like Riven this game had a number puzzle with different number systems using different bases. Unlike Riven, the system was not easy to figure out through logic (rather than math) and didn't make a lot of sense visually. The interface for entering the numbers in the system was also hard to use and didn't respond well.
Speaking of things not responding well, when in free roam mode, many interactable things (like buttons, levers) couldn't be used unless you had your camera at the correct angle (they seemed to be designed for point and click) which led to me assuming several things weren't actually interactable for quite a while until I figured out what was going on.
Overall it felt like it had the makings of a good game but didn't quite manage to achieve its full potential.

A Lot of People Hate This Game...

My Take for the Non-Haters

Very much like the Myst games. Lots of puzzles to solve at your own pace.

Great game. Looks beautiful, nice game mechanics.

I really enjoyed Obduction's world building and plot, and most of the puzzles. If you like Myst-like games you're almost certain to like Obduction.

It does have some issues: The swapping mechanic can lead to a lot of waiting and made one puzzle I otherwise found pretty clever feel very tedious. Similarly I was sometimes was frustrated by how long it took to navigate around. Another problem, as I saw it, is that the game sometimes unblocks or blocks areas in response to events without giving any indication that it has done so, which ultimately caused me have to look up how to get to an end game location. You will also probably get the bad ending at first, not because you can't tell you're headed into the bad ending, but because it has been so long since you interacted with the thing that would lead to the good ending that you've probably forgot all about it.

It's like 95% really good though.

Even though I was a bit too young to play Myst when it first went huge, I watched my dad play it on our Windows 98 when I was little. Flash forward to 2008, and I asked for a DVD-ROM drive for Christmas so that I could play Myst IV: Revelation on our Windows 2001. I was late to the game, but I was obsessed. I was also a teenager and kinda stupid, so a lot of the puzzles were way over my head, but luckily there were websites that had text walkthroughs (YouTube was an infant and Let's Plays hadn't even been conceived).

Obduction was a lot of fun. I know it has mixed reviews, but it was great to play a game that FELT like Myst after so long of only having the same 5.5 games to occasionally revisit. The worldbuilding here was so beautiful, and it was cool seeing mo-cap characters like Myst used to have, now that we're in an age of CGI realistic NPC models. I also really enjoyed this because it was kind of easier than any of the Myst games, and even though I'm older and smarter, I'm also busier and tireder.

Obduction gets two thumbs up from me. I hope the team at Cyan keeps making new games again, instead of another from-the-ground-up remake of a Myst game (as of writing this, the Riven remake came out a few months ago, and I had replayed it on Steam just last year).

Excellent

Obduction was a really cool open world giant puzzle. There were a lot of head scratching moments and retracing your steps to see if you missed a clue. The start of the game is slow as there is no direction or what to look for.

The community for this game was amazing from the reviews / walkthroughs / Discord dissucsions. Everyone helping you but not giving away the answers. If you are looking for a good game to kill some time and take on some confusing puzzles this is the game! I really loved this.

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.

Yes.... BUT I only recommend ONE playthrough. The puzzle mechanics rely on you jumping back and forth between worlds to solve them. Which is tedious at best. Once you complete one of those puzzles, you don't ever want to do it again. Also, this is the first VR game that made me nauseous, and the VR controls behave strangely.