Obduction was on sale on GOG and was excited to try it out. But I also couldn’t resist re-purchasing the grandaddy of adventure puzzle games, which I had been waiting to replay after cheating my way through it when I was like 12 years old.
RIVEN
Riven has been discussed to death and I don’t have much to contribute. A few random thoughts on replaying the game in 2017:
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The game 100% holds up and is actually better than it was 20 years ago. You don’t have to swap CDs anymore so it takes less than a 2 minutes to get anywhere (assuming you click fast and accurately) in order to re-examine something specific.
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Sadly, I still remembered the solutions to all the big puzzles of the game and the biggest surprises. Credit where credit is due: retaining these 20 year old memories so distinctly probably isn’t due to some great memory on my part but rather due to how memorable Riven is.
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It’s unfortunate Riven was basically a dead-end of game design (are there any other “anthropology theme park” games?). But if Riven was a tough sell in 1997 (when obtuse adventure game was still a genre), it’d be even more niche today. Riven was the ultimate pet project – an insane, AAA budget (self-funded), humorless, introspective game that expects you to spend about 10 hours wandering around until you hopefully get enough insight to solve it’s 3 or 4 puzzles. I consider Riven a one-time gift.
OBDUCTION
The opening 30 minutes of Obduction are great. Environmental graphics are nearing Riven’s photorealistic pre-rendered scenes and Obduction’s opening sells this well. The game drops you into an unfamiliar and bizarre world, let’s you explore a bit, and expects you to try to piece some information together. I’m not inclined to expand on this part of the game since I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who may play the game.
Unfortunately, the game steadily gets worse as you go on.
Riven was a game that expected lots of the player throughout it’s runtime, very little is telegraphed. Riven asked you to embrace the mystery, never gave you any hints, and ultimately rewarded you with a satisfying explanation for everything. This is the ideal for a puzzle game – making the player observe,contemplate, and experiment to what seems to be the limit and then rewarding them appropriately.
Obduction strangely expects less and less of the player as it goes on. The enticing mystery of the opening 30 minutes quickly becomes…a straightforward, cliche sci fi story. The exciting but intimidating goal of figuring out what is going on becomes…the more boring but concrete goal activating 3 identical “beacons.” The alien number system can be solved early on…but if you wait a few hours the game just spells it out for you (and worse still, it’s never really used for any puzzles). Most of the puzzles are just finding codes written down and knowing where to input them, no contemplation necessary.
The game climaxes with a large transporation puzzle (the central mechanic of the game) that is just a huge misfire. It’s not interesting, requires no in-game knowledge, and adds nothing to the game’s world. Worst of all, although it is not particularly difficult it literally requires 30 to 45 minutes of busy work. Before this point I was pretty neutral on the game but afterward I was angry at how little it respected my time.
The whole game feels undercooked. Maybe it’s because (as I later found out) the game makers underballed their Kickstarter goal, expecting to make 2-3x their goal but really only matching it. Maybe it’s the changing expectations of what gamers want. I do feel this game would have had more of an impact if it had come out before The Witness, which is a far superior game.
The game isn’t a disaster, it’s worth checking out for some of the environments, but it may be more worthwhile just replaying Riven rather than playing this.