Obduction’s story - that of a tiny community gone to hell, caught up in some interdimensional conflict - is utterly bewildering, in classic Cyan tradition. The point is, you get at least some direction as to what to do early on, and that’s important in a game like this. Holograms of the town’s inhabitants (played by actors in live-action footage projected into the more traditional 3D game world) give you a little tour of the area and gently guide you towards solving the town’s mysteries, escaping the dome, and maybe reaching intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, I don’t know. What begins as an aimless wander through Hunrath soon takes on at least some sense of purpose. Or is Hunrath the experiment, and the laboratory some unfathomable alternate reality? Sci-fi elements casually dot the sandy, uninhabited village, suggesting a science experiment gone horribly wrong. Surrounded by a dome, outside which lies a bizarre landscape, the town of Hunrath is at once an Old West shantytown and a metaphysical science laboratory. Much like its spiritual antecedents, Obduction drops players into a game environment several steps removed from real life.
Entering today’s world, Obduction - by Cyan, the studio behind Myst itself - faces an uphill climb. Nowadays though, despite the clones, and despite Myst itself having seen countless remasterings and remakes, the point-and-click puzzler is a dying genre in popular gaming culture, replaced by more action- or narrative-driven experiences.
Its quietly brain-twisting puzzles and self-directed exploration inspired a load of clones back in the day, but nothing ever reached the same level of fame and infamy.
#Obduction vr review Pc#
The best-selling PC game until The Sims came along, Myst created a genre unto itself. There you find two untrustworthy sons of the island’s caretaker, who are trapped within separate books that you must find the pages for in order to properly understand their story and judge whether they deserve saving.Myst was a long time ago now. The concept is actually fairly straightforward, as you find yourself trapped on a mysterious island that you’re teleported to via a magic book. Myst’s storytelling is equally opaque, although not as much as The Witness and later entries in the series. That’s fine up until you realise that the only reason you couldn’t solve a puzzle is that you didn’t notice a hidden note or some other tiny background detail, which the game absolutely refuses to give you a hint about. The Witness – which was clearly heavily influenced by the original Myst – would be one of the closest modern comparisons, in that both games offer almost no help or context for solving their puzzles and expect you to simply experiment and work things out for yourself.
#Obduction vr review trial#
The memory tests and trial and error solutions of some puzzles are especially trying but the majority are strictly logical and simply require a little experimentation and reading up on the in-game lore (something the higher resolution of the Oculus Quest 2 makes agreeably easy). That’s not because of any failure on its part but because the idea of purposefully difficult puzzles is not something any modern, mass-market video game would base itself around. With the VR environment raising up the visuals to something closer to modern standards it’s the gameplay which now feels like the most retro element of the game. Although, cleverly, there is the option to randomise things like dates and clues so you can’t solve anything purely by memory, even if the underlying puzzle is still the same. What the remake also retains is the same puzzles, so if you somehow remember all the solutions this will be a walk in the park – sometimes literally.
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