When you start Obduction one of the first things you see is a white house with a picket fence planted in a desert cliff face under a purple alien sky. It’s no accident that this image harkens back to one of the earliest and most famous adventure games of all time, Zork. It’s Obduction‘s tacit acknowledgement of the grand tradition of puzzle gaming that came before, and an indication that Cyan is perfectly willing to cannibalize the best parts of that history to their own ends. And because Cyan is such a big part of that history, they’re pulling from the best parts of their own games as well.

The world of Obduction is a hodgepodge by design. The central conceit of the game is that there are pairs of “seeds” that have been scattered through the universe which, when activated, create spherical forcefields that swap everything inside them from one world to another. This means that there’s a perfectly logical in-game explanation for why a house with a white picket fence, a train yard, and strange alien technology are present in the same red desert. The collision of alien and familiar harkens back to the surreal atmosphere that stuck such a chord with gamers in Cyan’s most famous production, Myst. But whereas in Myst the world often felt somewhat arbitrary (Seriously, what was up with that rocket-ship? It didn’t even fly!) here the mix-and-match design has reason and purpose. The puzzles themselves are more in line with Riven‘s world-based conundrums, though not nearly as difficult to unravel.

Speaking of Riven and puzzles, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the absolutely devilish Base 4 puzzles that feature prominently in Obduction‘s alien world of Maray. Cyan is no stranger to using unusual base number systems in their puzzles; in Riven the player had to learn the Dn’i base 5 number system in order progress in the game. But Obduction unintentionally bungles this aspect of the game rather badly. There are keypads which use the alien system scattered about the world in order of increasing complexity, but because there aren’t as many numbers possible in the first two “places” of the base 4 system, the keypads are far easier to solve via brute-force entry than by taking the time to learn what you’re actually doing. And once you’ve reached the most complex iteration of the puzzle there is no way to go back and fill in those gaps in your knowledge.

Puzzle problems aside however, Obduction is an incredible world, full of amazing sights. I can imagine a version of this game with no puzzles, no other characters, just exploring and experiencing strange and beautiful vistas. That has always been the pull of Cyan’s games for me. Call them walking simulators if you must, but walking in any one of these incredible world is worth the price of admission in and of itself.

And scattered about in all the surreal beauty and confounding puzzles, Cyan has left the pieces of a story lying around. It’s a beautiful story, a tale of several very different groups of people trying to get along in a world they don’t fully understand. It emphasizes hope over fear, and favors progress over clinging to the past. But it’s delivered in such a piecemeal haphazard way that you could reach the end of the game and not fully understand what was going on. It doesn’t help that the only character you “interact” with is C.W. a crotchety, unpolished soul who does nothing but yell at you with exasperation as you fumble your way through the game.

Obduction is not without its faults. But its graces outweigh them all by far. It truly feels like Cyan’s crowning achievement, taking from the strengths of their past games and eschewing elements that didn’t work. And now that I’ve played it, I’m even more excited for whatever beautiful world they cook up next.





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