Obduction Review

Roughly a little more than a quarter century ago, a little company called Cyan locked themselves in a room in an effort to come up with something special. Eventually, the door creaked open, yielding to the creative hands of Rand and Robyn Miller. As the team emerged and the dust settled by their feet a concept was born. Myst hit store shelves in 1993 bringing a unique take on the puzzle adventure genre. Steeped in an almost unsettling amount of intrigue, Myst captivated people of all ages and even attracted those who had never gamed before. The Myst series would grow to become the most-sold PC game of its time, eventually being surpassed by The Sims in 2002. Several games and a book series later, 2005 was thought to be the last we’d see of the legendary studio. Thank God for crowdfunding.

In October of 2013, Obduction cropped up on Kickstarter under the company now known as Cyan Worlds (a Kickstarter I regretfully never heard tell of and missed). It would go on to meet and surpass its goal, garnering enough funding to include Oculus Rift support. Fast forward to 2016 and Obduction has finally arrived. Cyan Worlds spent almost none of the raised funds for marketing and so with little fanfare, Obduction comes to market hoping to do justice to the games that came before it.

I was honestly a bit scared going into Obduction. I had a lot of expectations and had been burned more than a few times over the years by games I’d looked forward to. I was lucky enough to enjoy Myst, Riven, Myst III, and Myst IV with my father as I grew up. It was a thrilling if not humbling experience working through the various puzzles and absorbing the brilliant stories and lore. Of course, Dad was doing most of the leg work, but it was always aw inspiring to see how the various puzzles ended up working. Those memories are a big part of me, and so you can perhaps understand how I could be both excited and scared to dive into the spiritual successor to a franchise birthed not long after I entered the world by the company that created it. As luck would have it, though luck seems to be a slight on Cyan, Obduction silenced all of my fears and replaced them with great joy and wonder before I even had time to think otherwise.

The opening segment of Obduction is a study in less is more. An untold number of games could learn from Cyan World’s introduction to the world of Obduction within the first five minutes. I felt like I was part of a movie while simultaneously experiencing some part of reality via a documentary. That probably doesn’t make any sense, but I was honestly shocked by how masterfully it was done. I will probably talk about it for years, attempting to explain it to family members around a dinner table at a birthday party, and I’ll never be able to do it any justice but that won’t stop me from trying.

You might not know much about Obduction going in, but you will immediately take note of how patchwork the environment is. On the grounds of a desert landscape, a white picket fence borders a stereotypical home awkwardly melded into a rock face, obscuring an entirely alien landscape that sweeps out and away in all directions. Not far from that doorstep rests what seems to be an entire mining town stripped out of the pages of early North American history. A large tree serves as the centerpiece of the mosaic and is remarkably well-protected. None of it seems to fit in with any other singular part of the environment and yet it will, like the well-written story behind the hit, make sense in good time.

As in the games that have come before it, Obduction presents you with what feels like a nonlinear experience guided only by your solving various puzzles. You’ll pull levers, push buttons, learn and employ alien number systems, and more. I can’t talk about much of it in detail without ruining the game but what you can expect is not what you’ve seen in more recent puzzle adventures. Games like The Witness and others have focused more on the various logic elaborations for puzzles to the point it feels like less of a game and more of a visual puzzle book you’d buy in a grocery store.

Like the Myst series, Cyan has provided a very distinct brand of puzzle building in Obduction that is based more on your learning about the worlds they’ve planted you in and the logic born of that understanding. The puzzles of Obduction wonderfully blend the game world, story, and characters together in a way that always just seems to make sense. The result is a particularly cohesive experience that rarely frustrates and ensures you never feel like you’re doing the same puzzle twice. There were only two instances that I questioned puzzle logic or progression logic in my time with the game, and I suspect they will be the same for most people. At the end of the day, however, they’re a minor hiccup in an otherwise nearly flawless delivery.

One of the marks of a good developer is their ability to teach you what you need to learn in ways that make sense within the game world, even if it's hours ahead of time. A simple example of this would be World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. whereby it lays out the basic game mechanics without making you read a paragraph explaining them. Obduction is full of examples of this which is perhaps unsurprising given the pedigree Cyan brings. What’s more impressive is how those teaching tools evolve throughout the game. The game world may seem small, but the mastery of level design on display here is staggering. I can’t remember the last time I stopped to ponder level design in a game, but Obduction certainly had my attention on more than one occasion.

Graphically, Obduction is also particularly eye-catching. Made possible by the shiny and new Unreal 4 Engine, the game world is full of screenshot-worthy locales. Obduction also runs remarkably smooth and has a level of polish you’d perhaps not expect from a Kickstarter title. You can, unlike in almost all Cyan games previous, explore the world in full 3D. As someone who played the Myst games and enjoyed their gorgeous pre-rendered scenes, being able to explore the world of Obduction in 3D was a real treat. I was worried Cyan would have a hard time transitioning properly to 3D world-building despite their experience with Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. Perhaps not surprisingly they not only did so successfully, but they also set the bar for the genre as it stands today.

Interestingly enough they included the option to experience the game in the same point-and-click style of the 90s, even including a few different scene transition types for your pleasure. Funny enough as I initially scrolled through the various options at my disposal I discovered that I could choose the sex of my shadow. You may never see your character outright, but at least you’ll cast an appropriate shadow! A bit obscure, but I love that it’s there nevertheless.

Perhaps most amazing to me was there inclusion of FMV characters. I was so very pleased to see they kept some of that nostalgia of the 90s. I was honestly quite surprised at the quality of the FMV as well. Look closely enough and you’ll see the FMV characters even cast shadows! The future is now! The environments are of course beautifully done, and perfectly suited in many instances for VR. The game’s VR capabilities were delayed on launch day but as of this writing are coming in a few weeks and will support the Oculus Rift. This game is the first to make me wish I had a Rift, and that’s saying something.

Visuals aside, the acting is done very well. Done just as well if not better is some of the voice-over work. There is a startling level of realism in many line deliveries and the writing is superb. The music you’ll encounter throughout is perfectly suited to the environments they’re attached to, though some tracks are perhaps a bit awkward at times. The whole package is just very well done and you are likely to be taken aback more than a few times.

As mentioned the writing in Obduction is phenomenal. The world-building Rand Miller delivers is profound, and this may represent the most complete lore he’s managed for a game. Remarkably, a puzzle adventure game can make you forget you’re even playing a puzzle adventure game, but Obduction has that power. I’d love a book to go alongside Obduction much like we got to enjoy with The Myst Reader.

Ultimately, Obduction proves that a puzzle adventure game can be more than just puzzles and I think that’s incredibly important. It proves that they can have beautifully crafted worlds, wonderful characters and writing, and great pacing. It proves that the puzzle adventure genre is still very much viable in today’s market, and that’s an accomplishment in and of itself. I think it also shows that Cyan still has something that its contemporaries haven’t quite got a handle on yet. Some may have certain pieces of the puzzle so to speak, but Cyan is still the keeper of the last piece. I am so very thankful that they have been able to showcase that once again, and perhaps spark the minds of younger game developers as they did so many years ago.

I very much want to see the continued success of the puzzle adventure genre, and perhaps even to see it flourish as it once did. Maybe VR will be the catalyst to bring the genre back to the forefront of gaming, but maybe it won’t. All I know is that solving a well-crafted Cyan puzzle provides a feeling of accomplishment that you don’t get in other games. It’s something that until you’ve done it, you may not understand. In a world where everyone is focused on level progression and gear progression, the puzzle adventure rewards you for more than just a grind.

Obduction, like Myst, is a game that can be enjoyed by almost anyone. It is intriguing, beautiful, impeccably crafted, and challenging. It is both a love letter to genre fans of the 90s and a launching pad for the genre moving forward. My only point of contention with Obduction is that I want more. Not in the sense that the game is incomplete, mind you. I just want more. If that’s the worst thing you can say about a game, I think that’s something a developer can be proud of. Well done, Cyan Worlds. You’ve done it again.