Obduction commits to this idea of being stranded on an alien world whose history (and physics) you don’t understand in the slightest.
One living soul remains in town, locked in the basement of a workshop that you can’t enter, and although he gives you occasional pieces of advice, the majority of Obduction’s play is wandering around and attempting to figure out not only what happened in Hunrath but how you now fit into this new scheme of things.
The town is abandoned and players only have a handful of recorded, holographic projections to orient themselves in this mining community. A strange beam of light snatches the player from a contemporary lake to the alien Hunrath at an unknown point in the future. Obduction begins with an abduction: the player’s. Despite the rapid splintering of the genre, Cyan has found a way to not only embrace the roots of the type of game it helped to create but to also integrate puzzles and narrative with a deceptive degree of elegance. And The Chinese Room ( Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture) places faith in players’ ability to find meaning and drama through largely environmental narratives. Jonathan Blow’s The Witness was a direct response to the idea that puzzle-driven gameplay is incompatible with a complex, interwoven narrative. Developers like Telltale ( The Walking Dead) and Fullbright ( Gone Home) have replaced an emphasis on puzzles with a focus on emotionally charged narratives. In the twenty three years since Myst’s release, Cyan’s influence in the “adventure” game genre has begun to dissipate. It would be another couple hours before I understood what any of this meant. And suddenly here was a tower and an elevator and a strange device that was half high-tech electronics and half ancient rotary phone. I’d undammed a waterfall I’d used the creek that waterfall unleashed to operate a swing-bridge I’d restored basic electricity to Hunrath and found a… secret passage that let me reach this cliff (I won’t say more for fear of spoiling one of the game’s many surprises). I’d made it to the top of this cliff in roundabout fashion.
I could have mistaken Hunrath for John Ford’s beloved Monument Valley if it weren’t for the purple, alien mountains towering over it on all sides.
Several hours into Obduction-the latest game from Myst developers Cyan Worlds-I stumbled upon an elevator hidden at the top of a cliffside amidst the desert mining town of Hunrath.
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