1. Spiritual successors are a great idea. They allow developers to make a game in the style of their popular series w/o getting bogged down by having to appease a writhing mass of fandom w/ their infinite time to analyze lore and complain about absolutely everything. Obduction is a game a lot like Myst and Riven that is not tied to those games' world. I suspect fans of the latter two games will also be fans of this updated take on it because it's really well done. Most people can just stop reading this review right here.
2. I really wanted to play this in VR but the teleport function only allows you to move about six in-game micrometers at a time, making getting around painfully slow. I was perfectly happy playing this on an ordinary monitor but, you know, if you are a VR gamer who prefers teleport for locomotion, this might not be the game for you.
3. You wouldn't normally figure movement speed to be such an issue in a puzzle-based adventure game but a whole lot of Obduction is walking around and looking for things, remembering places you've been, doubling back to make sure you didn't miss anything, doubling back again to check if whatever you last did last changed something... It's a lot of goddamn walking.
4. This gets me to an important point about Obduction: everything in it that's great and world-building can have the converse effect of being mind-numbing and tedious.
5. For one example, there were several points where my progress was stalled because I just didn't happen to see a metal button on a similar colored metal surface. This is something that would happen to you if you were in a situation such as Obduction presents. It's realistic w/in the game's world and it makes you feel like you are really there but, my word, is it ever infuriating at times.
6. It does help quite a bit that Obduction is set in a gorgeous land full of details both odd and familiar. The abandoned town it's set in seems truly lived-in and it has an almost tactile sense of history you get just by wandering around and looking through it. As you press further in the game, other areas get a bit more surreal but still maintain that feeling of being places that actually exist.
8. The soundscape is sparse but very effective. Most segments are accompanied only by ambient sounds but the score has a way of popping in at just the right moment to mark a key step taken or change of location.
9. Because of all the walking and exploring, world building is incorporated very well in the gameplay. A lot of games have logs and video diaries and so forth to add another layer of depth for those who chose to explore. In Obduction, you pretty much have to go through this stuff with fine tooth comb not only to understand your situation but to figure out what all you need to do next. This is a really cool system that brings you deeper into the world but, my word, is it ever infuriating at times.
10. Gameplay, beyond exploration, consists mostly of some rather tough puzzles. These will see you crossing expanses of multiple worlds and establish their toughness through a variety of means. Some of them are just plain tough. Some are tough because the disparate elements are so spread across the wide worlds that it's just difficult to visualize how all the interacting elements fit together. And some are tough just because they require some obscure bit of information you need to dig up by meticulously combing through every single document and small piece of information you find in the game. The first kind, I dig. The second, I grew to really enjoy as I made my way through the game and learned its landscape. The third, I still really can't get behind. This is just me though.
11. This game that was released in 2016 has puzzles where there are load screens you must endure after every new thing you try. Seriously. This is actually always infuriating.
12. You are allowed a good deal of freedom in the order that you do things. This is enough true that when I looked up hints and walkthroughs--don't lie, you use these too--sometimes they'd be just useless because the state of the game in my playthrough would be so vastly different than it was in the resource I looked up. To be honest, I wish I had looked less stuff up on this my first time through because I was always ultimately able to figure everything out myself and, while sometimes it was needlessly frustrating, it was all the more satisfying for this reason.
13. Obduction is very much an improvement over basically everything about Myth. It looks better, sounds great, plays a bit more easily and the puzzles are less obtuse while still being difficult on multiple levels. Obduction sticks remarkably close to its predecessors and as such feels like something of a weird, dated curio even w/ the late resurgence of adventure games. Very few games wallow in deliberately slow pacing and lack of direction as much as these games do and so few can match their immediate sense of realness. It's truly something exceptional but, my word, is it ever infuriating at times.
No comments:
Post a Comment