For a long time, I didn’t own any games that I had never actually played. Growing up, our stock of computer games was relatively limited (although perfectly sufficient) and so I knew all of them quite well. After I got my own computer and the ability to buy my own games, I started out collecting them slowly, just getting a couple at a time and playing them all soon after acquiring them – but my starting a regular job coincided with me starting to gain general interest in a wider variety of games, and my collecting rate increased. The end result was that, for a couple of years, I stocked up on a fairly large number of games that, since my time was limited and I kept going back to my favorites, ended up unplayed. I eventually realized that I had plenty enough games for likely the rest of my life, and stopped collecting – I haven’t acquired a new computer game since I got Into the Breach back in February. But I still have a rather large number of games, especially adventure games, that I haven’t gotten around to actually playing yet.
Until recently, Obduction was one of those games. It was in the summer of 2016 that I finally played Myst and Riven, still two of my favorite adventure games of all time, for the first time, and when I found out that their creators, Cyan Studios, had recently come out with a new spiritual successor game, I knew I was interested. While it was an expensive game by my standards at $30, my brother was kind enough to get it for me that Christmas. But I also got a large number of other games then, and when I did start Obduction my mid-spec computer from 2015 had a hard time with it, to the point where after I played through the opening and quit, as far as I could tell it wouldn’t load my game when I came back. That put a damper on me trying the game, and the small amount that I had done hadn’t really hooked me, so I didn’t get to it even when I got a better gaming computer a couple years later. It wasn’t until this October that, in the mood to play one of my unplayed adventure games, I finally delved into this one again.
I am most certainly glad that I did. While definitely an imperfect game, Obduction lives up to its descriptor as a spiritual successor to Myst, and was a quality, very enjoyable experience for me.
The Musings of Eauxps 