Here’s something I haven’t done in ages… Reviewed a game!
Actually, I haven’t been gaming much at all since 2021 because I’ve been too wrapped up in writing my debut novel. Learn more about The First Sin here.
But, when I get stuck on my writing or burnt out, I do return to the gaming world to help me refill the creative well. I’m still playing Guild Wars 2 now and then, but recently I decided to try something new. The game I selected was Obduction.
Obduction was created by Cyan, Inc, the same studio responsible for Myst and Riven. I went into it thinking I was going to get a game fairly similar in scope to Myst and Riven, and in some respects I did. Obduction certainly has challenging puzzles like those other games, and takes place in a mysterious environment… But in many ways I found the game to be too obtuse, too vague, about what was going on. Mostly I wandered around feeling bewildered, because the information the game fed me didn’t seem to make a lot of sense.
The game starts out with the player character standing near a lakeshore at night, and as the player begins to explore, a voiceover track begins playing. There’s no indication of where this voice is coming from or why the player is hearing it. The story the voice tells has no context to the environment around the player. I tried to pay attention to what was being said, but the intervals between when each piece of the voiceover would be triggered made for a disjointed experience. I listened, but what I was told basically went in one ear and out the other, because I didn’t seem to have been given any reason to care about it based on what I was seeing around me.
Then, the player character is whisked away to another location, and this is when the confusion really begins. The environment looks like Arizona, but there’s a planet in the sky, and in the distance are very strange-looking mountains. There’s a strange scifi-looking contraption near the starting area, but I almost walked by it without interacting because it didn’t really look like something I would want to interact with.
And so it goes. I played through the entire game, and did my best to work out what I was supposed to do on my own, but once I ran into the alien math puzzle I knew I was in trouble. Math is not my strong suit, and trying to learn base 3 math and also translate that math into alien glyphs was just too much. I ended up having to resort to a walkthrough to help me proceed, and that’s not something I enjoy doing.
There were also parts of the game that felt unfinished or abandoned. In one area, I came across a broken seed swapper that was hooked up to a weigh scale and had half a dead alien laying nearby. This spot had every indication about it that the broken swapper should have been fixable, but in the end it was just…nothing. I was disappointed.
Eventually, things began happening in the game that just left me going “???”. The fake mayor and his strange messages… What was the point of them? I have no idea. I read every journal I came across, looked at every piece of paper… Most of what I found didn’t seem to have any relevance to anything. This made the frustration rise and again I found myself reaching for the walkthrough.
In the end, I got the “good” ending, and that’s all well and fine, but I’m still not sure why I was supposed to care that this was the end. Was this what I was supposed to have been working toward all this time? I guess so. I think if I’d had a greater sense of that all through the game, it would have helped the ending feel more satisfying. As it was, I saw the events unfold, said, “Okay, cool” and then closed the game.
I spent thirteen hours in Obduction. I don’t necessarily want my thirteen hours back, but I kind also wish I had spent them somewhere else.