Obduction
Game focused on environmental puzzle solving, revealing the story and.. being obscure.
I really like games involving puzzle solving - and not only in a typical adventure point & click style, but when you use your environment to achieve your goal. Obduction is a game like that - discovering what is happening, what you even need to do (the goals are, for the most part, not clearly defined) and how - is on you. So why do I think this game is not amazing?
Well, the best words that comes to my mind are “obscure” and “empty”. I don’t want to spoil too much, in case someone will be interested in playing it, so I’ll try to be vague when describing some things ;) The game tells you a story mostly by the environment and the “lore” fragments that you can find. You basically won’t meet anyone in the game. It fits to the actual story, and I kind of understand that design decision, but also because of that… it feels very empty. And lonely. Your character doesn’t say anything, doesn’t react to anything - it actually doesn’t matter who you are. That’s fine - but also the history you are discovering, and people that you learn about are also not presented in a way that they feel important or you feel really connected to them. For me, it felt that I have some quest to do, but I actually didn’t care that much.
This thing combined with a very slow paced gameplay might be discouraging. Ok, the game is an adventure game (but without dialouges really) and focusing on puzzle solving, but it also puts you in a pretty large main area which you will explore A LOT. And multiple times. And trying to find anything that connects. This is mostly ok, as this is the purpose of the game - but it gets tiring after a while. There is a lot of backtracking, and pretty much wandering around. If I would know at the beginning about that (maybe the game could hint about it someway?), I would draw a map of the place. For real. Without a map - it gets pretty hard. Especially, when at one point you are introduced with some kind of “passageways” which are not clear where they are leading - so a map of those connections is practically crucial.
As for the puzzles, well… for most of the time, it’s just an exploration without any idea what to do. Sometimes you just turn things, just because you can, sometimes it is some lore fragment that says something… but for the most part, I think they are too obscure. Or the pieces are absurdly far away from each other. Or they are important much much later in the game. This makes the game hard, but rather in a frustrating way. But after a bit of the game, we are mostly operating with puzzles based on teleportation and moving pieces of the world… between couple of worlds. Remember when I talked about the map? Make that 3 or 4 maps, which are layered on each other. This is sometimes mind bending and quite complicated, especially because it’s easy to make a mistake and going from one place to another is so slow..
When I actually knew the whole story, I wasn’t really satisfied. It definitely created an interesting atmosphere and world, but it was rather bored with it - or thinking that this potential was just wasted.
So, do I recommend it? Well… hard to say. This game had a really big potential, but I’m not sure it’s worth to play it - puzzles are interesting but very obscure, story seems interesting but it’s poorly presented and the gameplay is so slow and gets somewhat tiring.. I guess it’s a no then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My rating: 6/10
Playtime: 10-12h
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Obduction on Steam