Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Myst Obduction from Cyan (Myst, Riven)

HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
Patron
Joined
Mar 27, 2016
Messages
9,151
Location
Disco Elysium
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Gosh i am too tired to figure out the villein numbers. Gotta try again tomorrow. Fu. Game though. Although i have to look up on which rocks are laser-able
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,107
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-08-01-obduction-review

Obduction review
Myst opportunity.

jpg


Myst's spiritual successor offers a lot of the same delights as its 1993 forbear, but is hampered by litany of technical issues.


It's a strange thing to think about now, but there was a time when Myst was the best-selling computer game of all time. Shifting more copies than even the almighty Doom, Cyan's enigmatic puzzle game about a series of peculiarly crafted islands stirred up feelings of awe, reverence and curiosity. Much of this was due to Myst's extremely abstruse premise. It contained no immediate backstory about you being a hero on a quest to save such and such. It didn't offer an exposition dump grounding you in its pristine world. And it didn't offer much in the way of character interaction. It simply dropped players on a surreal island of monuments - a rocket, a Greek palace, a contemporary lodge - and asked them to have at it until a more recognisable story came into focus.

Comparatively, Obduction's intro leaves a little less to the imagination. It begins with narration, for one (though it's intentionally unclear if this is spoken by the player character or someone else), and it grounds the story in a more mundane setting: earth. Set along a starry campsite, your character encounters a floating seed that whisks them away to an alien landscape that resembles a desert ghost town surrounded by clumps of levitating rock. It's eerie, as one might expect being teleported to an alien planet to be, but not creepy. The bright desert canyons bathed in a the warm violet glow of an otherworldly sky offer a calming, serene sort of wonder.

In fact, the most unsettling aspect of this place isn't the unnatural scenery - because we expect that sort of thing from a genre video game - but rather the more man-made finds. This is a world that's littered with the remains of a thriving earthly civilization that's all but vanished for reasons unknown. It's up to you to uncover what went on here. Think Stargate meets Gone Home.

jpg

Pro-tip: Change the options to 'always run'. It will make life a lot easier.

It's hoaky, but that isn't really a problem as Obduction's endearingly sincere about its aspirations. This is the fantasy of every geeky adolescent who grew up in the late 1970s. It feels like vintage Spielberg - or at least late-era Spielberg trying to recreate his glory years with questionable success.

Indeed, trying to recapture the feel of Myst in the 21st century is like trying to recreate Star Wars or Indiana Jones. At worst you get Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and at best you get something like The Force Awakens that hits the same notes, but can't help but feel derivative in the market its predecessor spawned.

Obduction falls somewhere in the middle then: probably ending up being better than you feared but less than you hoped. Aside from its more concrete opening and free-roaming first-person movement system (though there's an option for purists to use the classic Myst point-and-click system, which I wouldn't recommend), Obduction feels of a piece with its predecessors.

Thankfully, both the views and the puzzles are tantalizing enough to carry the adventure. The move to full 3D was an initially ugly gesture when Cyan first started experimenting with it around the turn of the century, but modern technology has finally allowed players to lose themselves in the strange terrain the studio has specialised in since its inception (there's even a PSVR mode coming as a free update). Always too sedate to really be imposing, yet offering fleeting glimpses of something sinister, Obduction's world(s) are a joy to drink in. Not leaning too far in any one direction, Cyan's varied palette offers subtle tonal shifts from tranquil rural country towns, to lush tropical forests, all peppered with shimmering alien artefacts. In a game where the core delight in solving a puzzles stems from the the environments you'll get to lay eyes on, Obduction's artistic achievements offer a worthwhile carrot at the end of the stick.

Cyan has always been skilled at varying the sorts of mental challenges it tasks players with, asking them to do a lot more than just shift gears and decode cryptic languages. One of Obduction's smartest designs it to make it not only challenging to solve its puzzles, but often obfuscate what even is a puzzle. Simply tinkering around with its various machinations, trying to draw connections between seemingly remote objects, is a pleasurable process in and of itself before you even really start cracking the underlying code.

And cracking that code? That's where Obduction is at its most divisive. Like Myst before it, Obduction is a slow game. Compare to The Witnesses' plethora of panel puzzles and Fez's dozens of collectible cubes, progress in Obduction can be glacial. Sometimes this adds to its appeal; having to takes notes, stop, think, experiment, stop, think, have a eureka moment and try something else, is the core appeal of puzzle solving. The problem with Obduction's mechanical enigmas is that they can require a lot of mindless traversal to put into practice.

Some of this trekking almost becomes charming to a point; it's fun to fantasise about a potentially successful solution and these lengthy hikes offer time to build up that giddy excitement of putting it into practice. And when it works? Oh boy is that a treat! But when you're still in recon mode trying to sort out how switch A affects mechanism B, it can be a chore to hoof it across Obduction's sprawling terrain.

jpg

Obduction charmingly brings back Myst's use of live-action actors. Contextualised as holograms and screen recordings, these weirdly fit the aesthetic.

Worse is that Obduction features some of the most intolerable load times of any game I've ever played. Transitioning between environments can leave you stranded in (admittedly very stylish) loading screens for upwards of a minute. These horrible hitches are strewn about with alarming regularity that really ratchets up in the late game. By its later stages this drudgery nearly unravels all the goodwill Cyan earned throughout the rest of the game. It's not often that I listen to podcasts whilst playing a game, but Obduction all but requires some sort of extracurricular distraction.

Outside of the loading screens, Obduction is otherwise technically amateurish. The PS4 build crashed on me several times and the framerate frequently took a hit as the game would stop and stutter in busier areas. Occasionally the controls would cease to function as intended, making certain switches impossible to flip without shutting the game down and rebooting it. For such a serene game devoid of any combat and few moving pieces, it's somewhat shocking that it was released in this state of affairs.

Ultimately, Obduction is a game about wanting to return home, just as for Myst developer Cyan it's about trying to recapture the glory days of when its obscure puzzle adventure was the most prestigious product on the market. And in its best moments, it absolutely nails what made the Myst series so special: the wondrous vistas, the clever logic puzzles, the calming pace. But the needle has shifted in the near quarter century since Myst. We've had The Witness, Fez, and The Talos Principle grappling with similar terrain in ways that feel new. Slowly punting about an unearthly terrain solving mechanical puzzles and piecing together a dime store fantasy plot isn't nearly as novel in 2017 as it was in 1993. While Obduction proves that you can't go home again, you can at least have a pleasant time visiting. There's some comfort in that.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Also somewhat mysterious update: http://steamcommunity.com/games/306760/announcements/detail/1673523905810268300

Obduction Update!

We’re constantly tweaking and fixing Obduction, but this update has a bit more than just tweaks and fixes. We’ve included a few extra places to explore -- places that fill in a bit more of the story. It’s a perfect time to play Obduction again, get a bit further, or maybe even try Obduction in VR. Make it home.

(And if you haven’t checked out what’s happening at Cyan lately, you might want to link on over to http://myst.com and http://firmamentgame.com )

Enjoy!
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
Oct 6, 2012
Messages
1,874,659
Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
I finally picked this up again thanks to some thread about an all-in-one Myst collection reminding me of it. I dropped it at release because its performance was hot ass and it crashed on the regular, but it seems fine now on max settings aside from intermittent loading stutter, which the developers announced on their forums isn't something that can ever be fixed. I suspect that using Unreal 4 to construct such large, detailed, and seamless areas was a bit much from a technical standpoint.

It's great so far, and scratches the same itch any Myst game (and many text adventures) would typically scratch.
 

HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
Patron
Joined
Mar 27, 2016
Messages
9,151
Location
Disco Elysium
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I finally picked this up again thanks to some thread about an all-in-one Myst collection reminding me of it. I dropped it at release because its performance was hot ass and it crashed on the regular, but it seems fine now on max settings aside from intermittent loading stutter, which the developers announced on their forums isn't something that can ever be fixed. I suspect that using Unreal 4 to construct such large, detailed, and seamless areas was a bit much from a technical standpoint.

It's great so far, and scratches the same itch any Myst game (and many text adventures) would typically scratch.
is it patched? i dropped it for the same reason. low FPS and First person makes my head hurts physically. also at some point, it just wont load stuck at the beginning loading time for like 5 mintues then i just ctl+alt+del and had to end task from the task manager.
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
Oct 6, 2012
Messages
1,874,659
Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
I still get record-breakingly low FPS in a few spots where large vistas are visible, although I have a 144 Hz monitor and am using max settings, so that's worth keeping in mind (though at the same time, I get 0 v-sync performance hit). Regardless, I suspect performance should be better than it was at release, and crashes reduced also.

The FPS drops and occasional area loading stutter are somewhat annoying, but clearly much more bearable than they were two years ago when I dropped the game entirely.
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
Oct 6, 2012
Messages
1,874,659
Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
Finished the game with 0 hints. Every time I got "stuck" was simply a case of my needing to wander around and find something I'd overlooked or forgotten about, namely

  • riverside holorocks shootable from the dead-end overhang near the Junkyard in Hunrath
  • an obduiction seed device sitting slightly off one of the ridgeline paths in Hunrath in plain view
  • the path branch that takes you to the uppermost catwalk of the Blue Gear-y World wind engine
  • the final red-trimmed door, which I'd previously noticed that C.W. was moving carts of plates steadily away from, but I forgot about it and spent almost an hour scouring around elsewhere before rediscovering it when it was time to blow the Bleeder

Story is interesting, strange, surreal, and serviceable, fitting enough I suppose. My take:

Rescue Trees ejaculate into space so that their teleporting sperm can find and abduct-rescue (immediately) doomed beings of (imminently) doomed races by sphere-teleporting these beings inside the Rescue Trees' first-stage cum bubbles.

Each first-stage cum bubble is itself an abducted-rescued huge sphere of terrain that has swapped places with a huge sphere of terrain from another, paired planet (each home to a doomed race), but in a sneaky way so that the un-kidnapped inhabitants of each planet are none the wiser.

Each first-stage cum bubble is sealed off from the outside and contains one species, but the various alien species can ride special teleporting sperm back and forth between the various different cum bubbles to meet and greet each other.

Eventually, when the Rescue Trees have gathered enough rescuees, they'll ejaculate all of their cum bubbles into the far reaches of the universe to resettle the rescuees a la casting seedlings to the wind, this time without cum bubbles for prisons.

Some of the abductees weren't fond of unprotected tree rape and worried what else the mysterious trees were capable of, so they constructed a Communist Bleeder to sap the the Rescue Trees' precious bodily fluids and vital essence.

Additionally, some of the Red Roswell aliens were mean and decided that only one race (theirs) was fit for ultimate survival, so they sent D&D dice bombs via teleporting sperm, but some of the Red Roswell aliens were nice and warned the others. The defenders used blue ink secret messages and Bigmouth Alien freezy pods to prepare a defense and hedge their bets, and returned the exploding dice to sender.

If you help Cripple Redneck Man, he cockblocks the Rescue Trees with batteries when they ejaculate so that all of the cum bubbles get sent back to their original (doomed) planets, oh no!

If you leave his battery disconnected, the Rescue Trees successfully ejaculate all surviving abductees off to new and fun corners of the universe, away from their doomed planets.
 

AwesomeButton

Proud owner of BG 3: Day of Swen's Tentacle
Patron
Joined
Nov 23, 2014
Messages
16,144
Location
At large
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
This just went on 80% sale on GOG. Is it worth buying, considering I like quest/adventure games, but I haven't played anything from the Myst family?
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
Oct 6, 2012
Messages
1,874,659
Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
This just went on 80% sale on GOG. Is it worth buying, considering I like quest/adventure games, but I haven't played anything from the Myst family?

Yes, it's absolutely worthwhile. I've been playing adventure games in general since 1990, I played most of the Myst series as it was released, and Obduction is a worthy entry.

Generally speaking, Myst-type adventure games are longer on puzzles and shorter on story, which is typically delivered through audio/visual recordings and notes. Obduction's puzzles aren't quite as blisteringly challenging as earlier titles, but are still very respectable, always logical, and there's a decently interesting central mystery driving the story.
 

HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
Patron
Joined
Mar 27, 2016
Messages
9,151
Location
Disco Elysium
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I really ought to try thus again. When i olayed it, once before the huge patches are rolling, the game keeo crashing and one day it just crash on loading. Everytime. I stopped then.
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
Optimization and Bug Fix Update incoming on all platforms, also Update for it to work with the Valve Index and Rift S in VR: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/2489374
Last Chance for Firmament and other Obduction news!
Posted by Victoria Almond (Collaborator)

e846cea4fb56217320e302992649a718_original.jpg

Since you supported Obduction we feel like you’ll really be interested in Firmament, too.
We wanted to let you know that our Kickstarter for Firmament has only a couple days left.

Firmament is an amazing visual and narrative adventure with a steampunk vibe, that will be playable on a PC with a monitor or with VR - and Mac and PS4 support have also been announced. We’ll be taking everything we’ve learned from Obduction (including your comments and feedback) and using it to make Firmament an amazing experience.

Click here to learn more about Firmament and help make it happen!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252280491/firmament?ref=4cyrk4

Obduction News

As we’ve previously mentioned, we have an update planned for Obduction across all platforms. It’s filled with optimizations, bug fixes, and speed and memory improvements. More information is coming very soon - watch for details and timelines.

In the meantime we’re happy to announce that in addition to Oculus Rift and HTC Vive support, we’ll be updating Obduction will also support the Rift S and the new Valve Index!

c15134facaf6ae4f8022c2a8499e6756_original.jpg

The Rift S is Oculus’ update for the Rift, and the Index is the new VR Headset from Valve. We are excited to bring Obduction to these headsets and continue to support the evolving VR experience.

Thank you for all the continued support.
 

Ranselknulf

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 28, 2012
Messages
1,879,477
Location
Best America
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The fire marble puzzle had me stuck for a long time. I hate using walkthroughs though so I just toughed it out.

I forget how many hours it took me to figure it out.
 

Anthedon

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 1, 2015
Messages
4,487
Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
I recently finished this. My only real gripe is the swap seed puzzle(s), due to the long loading times they are no fun at all. Otherwise I enjoyed my time with Obduction very much.
 

HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
Patron
Joined
Mar 27, 2016
Messages
9,151
Location
Disco Elysium
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
umm so i played it again, it seems loading time and performance got alot better. i stopped around the first seed puzzle or so because loading take so damn long, and eventually the game bugged and stuck on initial loading screen forever so i uninstalled
 

HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
Patron
Joined
Mar 27, 2016
Messages
9,151
Location
Disco Elysium
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Can't play it; wanted to, but it quickly causes painful simulator sickness.
it used to run badly even on gtx 1080, and it used to make me feel like puking after an hour or so.

it still does yesterday but not as bad as it used to. i dunno why but all these FP puzzlers and walking sims made me dizzy.

funny because FPS don't, even high movement games like serious sam
 

Chaosdwarft

Learned
Patron
Joined
Oct 8, 2019
Messages
272
Location
Old outpost in the middle of Iberia
I will shamefully :oops: admit I used a hint guide to figure out the Veilen numbers. Maybe because I am older, I had an easier time with Obduction than Myst (which I still have not finished).

It has been long enough, that I forgot most puzzles, that I should give Obduction an other try and the Myst series too (my cousin gifted me the series a while back).

I will try to earn back my honor, wish me luck comrades:salute:
 

toucanplay

Novice
Joined
Apr 8, 2018
Messages
33
I recently finished this. My only real gripe is the swap seed puzzle(s), due to the long loading times they are no fun at all. Otherwise I enjoyed my time with Obduction very much.

I was enjoying this game enough until I got to this puzzle. It completely ruined the game for me: if there were no load times, it would have been kind of tedious but bearable (a bit like entering the same villein numbers in multiple areas). But instead, it's near-constant load times for, what, half an hour? An hour? I remember looking up a video of the game after I finished it; someone had a roughly 5-hour playthrough and I think a whole hour of it was just this sequence of seed-swapping puzzles, because of all of the load times.

If they really couldn't avoid the load times being that long, they could have made a fairly minor change to the puzzle: put some of the seed swappers on a timer. Or, if they wanted to do more with the C.W. character, implement the same puzzle so that, at the start, you're setting it up for him to do some of the flipping on the Hunrath end while you direct him. Giving him more of a chance to talk to you and sell you on his idea while you work together on making something work could have been a neat little thing. As it is, it really fucking bothers me; did nobody play-test this and think that maybe this was a bad implementation for a puzzle?

I was really looking forward to playing this game, too. One flat explosion texture out of five.
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
Patron
Joined
Jan 12, 2004
Messages
11,524
Location
Black Goat Woods !@#*%&^
Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I finally gave this the first half hour. Not real impressed so far.

Starting off with 17 locked doors in a row isn't a strong draw. There aren't even any keyholes or wires to imply how you'll open them later, just a very gamey sense of "We'll open these when we want to, stupid". Rattle, rattle, rattle, I love rattling doorknobs.

The first few "puzzles" (scare quotes intentional) aren't encouraging either. The hard part is clicking on everything in sight to see what can be manipulated. Who doesn't love an old timey pixel hunt? Me. I was almost tempted to turn "item glow" on because this part is so boring. Once I know what I can touch, nothing seems hard, just arbitrary. I lifted up the right side of a door lock and pulled a nearby switch in case they were connected (which I had no reason to believe other than they were near each other). Nothing happened. I lifted up the left side of the lock and pulled the same nearby switch and then the door opened. No sense of accomplishment, just oh ok, those things happen to be connected and that combination happens to work. How many more random things do I have to push and pull and hope they match up? Am I walking across the whole dome to pull a lever here, then walk back and push a button over there, in case they're connected? Then I turned on an engine by looking at all the buttons and dials and then clicking them in an order, which didn't work. I got bored and came back later and clicked them in the same order, which did work. (Yes, I had the fuel pump part done both times.) I mean, I guess I must have done something different, but the only language I'm being taught is "close your eyes and click a lot".

I'm not finding the atmosphere magical, and I'm not at all impressed with a 2D actor sitting behind a glass wall who could very easily explain just what he wants me to do (and more importantly where to do it - wandering around looking for the one button I'm supposed to push next isn't thrilling), but he refuses to give me any useful direction, just "Do the next thing!" but he makes sure to make it be a 3-minute homespun cutscene every time.

Not sure if I'm going to go back to it. There seems to be no thought put into inspiring player motivation except "this is a game you have to get through to get through". Warnings about long load times and how it turns into a horrible slog at the end sure aren't helping.

Anyone want to expend the effort to convince me to keep trudging through this?
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom