Obduction’s artistic triumphs made up for its technical trials, and its so-so story couldn’t eclipse the real joy of exploring and understanding its fascinating alternate worlds. Cyanįiguring out how to get around in each of the game’s three main worlds is one of the most fun parts of Obduction. One level’s even built like a sly joke, with subtle details setting you up for a well-placed, legitimately funny “punchline” when you round the right corner. And another gauntlet of multiple, interlocking challenges late in the game ranks among Cyan’s most delightfully fiendish brain-busters- hard enough to be fun, but never frustrating. I only got completely stumped on one puzzle, which may be more my fault than the designers’. The story most effectively plays on your emotions when it’s told through the environments themselves, rather than the texts you find within them. Obduction even makes it fun to decipher a geometric base 4 number system.
Lead designer Rand Miller and the Cyan team once again create fully realized places that look and feel alive, and integrate puzzles into the rules that govern those worlds in ways that rarely feel forced. The game’s story works better when it’s told through the strange environments you traverse, rather than the notes and journals you find along the way.īut oh, those worlds are gorgeous, brimming with real awe and wonder. And load times for levels range from “lengthy” to “seriously, go make a sandwich.” Leaping between different worlds sometimes took so long, with little or no indication of loading, that I thought the game had crashed. The game occasionally crashed when I replayed its opening minutes. But distant objects still jarringly pop into view as you draw closer.
You can tell that delays and budget cuts during the game’s lengthy development curtailed what Obduction might otherwise have been.Īfter months of glitchy pre-release Mac versions, the final version runs smoothly on a late 2012 Mac mini, albeit at the lowest settings. And somewhere in a pile of journals and notebooks, I must have missed the clues that would’ve helped me figure out how to choose between the game’s good and bad endings, both of which are short and anticlimactic. Reveals that ought to be spine-tingling fall flat. But Obduction’s story lacks suspense and urgency. The few characters you meet prove endearing, despite their somewhat hokey acting and old-fashioned full-motion-video appearances. You’ll stumble into a strange new world in Obduction-and then try your best to get home.
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