Luckily, Obduction’s puzzle game is strong. It’s tempting to throw up your hands and just play the puzzles. By the time Obduction reaches its ending (several are available, apparently, all as mysterious as the game that precedes them), you’ll likely have a picture of what’s going on, but it won’t be a clear one. Ironically, there are so many interesting sci-fi hooks and ideas to discover that they drown each other out in their own noise. Like many exploration-heavy games, much of the story takes place prior to your entry into it, with the player character cleaning up other people’s mess. Told mostly through environmental details, video messages, and notes (so many notes), it’s a classic example of lore run amok. Obduction’s story - that of a tiny community gone to hell, caught up in some interdimensional conflict - is utterly bewildering, in classic Cyan tradition. The point is, you get at least some direction as to what to do early on, and that’s important in a game like this.
Holograms of the town’s inhabitants (played by actors in live-action footage projected into the more traditional 3D game world) give you a little tour of the area and gently guide you towards solving the town’s mysteries, escaping the dome, and maybe reaching intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, I don’t know. What begins as an aimless wander through Hunrath soon takes on at least some sense of purpose. Or is Hunrath the experiment, and the laboratory some unfathomable alternate reality? Sci-fi elements casually dot the sandy, uninhabited village, suggesting a science experiment gone horribly wrong. Surrounded by a dome, outside which lies a bizarre landscape, the town of Hunrath is at once an Old West shantytown and a metaphysical science laboratory. Much like its spiritual antecedents, Obduction drops players into a game environment several steps removed from real life. Entering today’s world, Obduction - by Cyan, the studio behind Myst itself - faces an uphill climb. Nowadays though, despite the clones, and despite Myst itself having seen countless remasterings and remakes, the point-and-click puzzler is a dying genre in popular gaming culture, replaced by more action- or narrative-driven experiences.
Its quietly brain-twisting puzzles and self-directed exploration inspired a load of clones back in the day, but nothing ever reached the same level of fame and infamy. The best-selling PC game until The Sims came along, Myst created a genre unto itself.
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