Obduction (video game)

Gameplay

In Obduction, the player's character has been abducted from Earth by aliens and transported to one of several alien worlds, with the goal to try to find a way home. The game, played out as an adventure game from the first-person perspective, has the player exploring the environment of several different worlds, which includes a mix of alien landscapes and familiar human settings, solving puzzles, and making decisions that can influence how the game ends. The game features traditional navigation controls for first-person games as well as a node-based point and click system. Many objects in the game can be selected and examined in a full three-dimensional view, allowing the player to discover possible hidden drawers or features that aid in puzzle solving.

Plot

The player-character is at a park at night when they witness strange lights in the sky. Investigating further, they encounter a seed-like object that immobilizes the character before they lose consciousness. When they wake, they find themselves and a small sphere of the nearby area on an alien world, along with several other spheres of Earth transported there, such as a country house and a small early 20th-century Arizona mining town, all enclosed within a larger sphere-field that prevents them from leaving the Earth area. The town is strangely empty and seemingly abandoned, but hologram recordings of the town's mayor, Josef, reveal this place as Hunrath and that several humans from across the 20th and 21st century had been abducted across time and space to this planet. The player eventually finds C.W., an inventor from 1870, who has locked himself away to protect himself from some threat, and implores the player to help connect up power systems to allow him to return them to Earth.

As the player completes these tasks, they learn from journals left by other humans, including the previous mayor, Farley, that Hunrath is one of four "cells" created by the mother seeds of four Trees that are all linked across time and space to a Heart. The mother seeds cause large spherical areas on the respective world to be swapped with the same volume from a paired world through the Trees. In addition to Earth, these cells include portions of Soria (home of the technologically-advanced Mofang alien species), Kaptar (home to the insect-like Arai species), and Maray (home of the peaceful Villein species). Smaller seeds from the Trees fall with some frequency, seeking out species on that planet and then bringing them, along with a small sphere of the world around them, to the paired world. The humans in Hunrath have been recording this for at least 150 years.

The player learns that they have arrived just after a major conflict between the abducted species. Initially, humans and the other species worked together to try to understand how the Trees and seeds worked, and were able to construct seed-swapping machines to travel between their respective cells for collaboration to try to return to their home planets. The Mofang felt that the other species' limited technology were holding them back, and devised a plan to set off a weapon of mass destruction in the other cells so they could progress along unfettered. Mofang that were allied with the other species learned of this plan, and the humans and Villeins took steps to "lock down" their cells to slow the Mofang, and most took shelter by entering cryogenic sleep within the Villein's "Silo" on Maray.

C.W. stayed behind to work on his plan to return their cell to Earth and now believes the others are dead. He instructs the player to restore water to the roots of each Tree, which will provide the energy needed to swap the cell back to Earth. The player proceeds to do this for the cells from Hunrath and Kaptar. While in the Maray cell, the player discovers that a Mofang disguised as Mayor Josef had just been able to sneak in one of the Mofang's weapons before being discovered and killed by the Villeins. At this point, if the player attempts to touch the weapon (despite prior warnings not to), the weapon annihilates Maray, killing the player and all those in the Silo, ending the game. Alternatively, the player can remotely destroy the weapon, and proceeds to restores water to its tree, while the Villein start to revive those sleeping in the Silo. Finally, the player enters the Soria cell to discover that the Mofang weapon set up on Kaptar had been sent back to Soria by the Arai some time in the past, and nearly all of the Soria cell is completely destroyed with no sign of any surviving Mofang. While activating the water for the Soria tree, the player-character can see the Arizona landscape just outside the Soria cell, but it appears to have been devastated by some type of massive event.

With the four Trees siphoning power, C.W. instructs the player to reconnect a large battery, a necessary element to pinpoint the cell's return to Earth, as well as to destroy the Mofang's bleeder that would siphon off the energy generated by the Trees and halt the process. The player can opt to connect the battery or leave it disconnected. If the player connects the battery, then C.W. initiates the swapping process and the Earth cell returns to Earth in the middle of the same devastated landscape seen before on Soria. Farley reports that she and only a few other humans had been able to make it back to Hunrath before C.W. swapped the worlds, and expresses disappointment at what C.W. had brought them back to. C.W. and the player can only look on as a massive dust storm overtakes the town. If the player disconnected the battery, C.W. becomes distraught when the process starts, believing they will end up in hell. When the swap is complete, they find Hunrath, as well as the other three cells, on a lush, green Earth-like planet, with the barriers on the cells destroyed. Farley contacts C.W. stating that she and all the humans and alien allies are awake now and they will soon join C.W. and the player to enjoy this new world.

Development

Following the release of Myst Online: Uru Live, Cyan's team began discussing what their next project should be, debating between another work in the Myst franchise, or an entirely new property. They opted for the latter option, as it would give them more freedom to create and not be limited by their established canon for Myst, though would risk alienating fans of the Myst series. Following its announcement and Kickstarter, the team discovered that fans were very open to the new direction, showing great interest in Cyan's puzzle and adventure approaches.

Obduction was formally announced on October 17, 2013, via a Kickstarter campaign headed by Cyan co-founder and CEO Rand Miller. The basic goal was set at US$1.1 million. Though Cyan had estimated it would take around $2.5 million to complete Obduction, they set a lower goal as to avoid appearing greedy, according to Miller, hoping to bring in at least a multiple of the initial request. In the accompanying video, Miller states that the video game is intended to serve as the spiritual successor to Myst and Riven. Taking inspiration from his earlier material, Miller remarked that the setting of a mysterious alien world would parallel the beginning experience of Myst. Noting that the announcement comes twenty years since the release of Myst, Miller emphasized that collaborators from the original two Myst games, as well as those who assisted in developing Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, would have a hand in Obduction's development. The campaign ended on November 16, surpassing the stretch goal of US$1.3 million, meaning that the game will also have support for the Oculus Rift. Though they did not bring as much as they desired, the success of the Kickstarter allowed them to engage with other funding mechanisms as to assure completion of the game.

Internally, the game was developed with the mantra of "Myst in space"; comparable to Myst's Ages, the player explores different alien worlds, with means to travel back and forth between them similar to the Linking books. Though they initially wanted to move away from being too Myst-like, treating the title as a spiritual successor, they found that during development they were naturally brought back to structuring the game similar to Myst. The game includes three non-player characters (NPCs), which originally were planned to be rendered and animated within the game's engine, but by March 2015, Cyan decided to return to the use of full-motion video of live actors that will be incorporated into the game, in the same manner as they used in Riven, with Miller considering that it was part of Cyan's legacy to be able to use this approach.

Robyn Miller, who composed the soundtracks for Myst and Riven before leaving Cyan, returned to work on Obduction's soundtrack and appear as an NPC in live action sequences. Rand had reached out for Robyn's help late in the projects' development, and the two recounted their earlier success during this. The two are considering a future project they would fully collaborate on together.

Though the game was anticipated to be out in 2015, production delays pushed the game into a 2016 release. In March 2016, alongside a teaser-trailer, Cyan announced the game would be available in June 2016. Cyan later pushed the release by a month to July 26, 2016, citing a major Unreal Engine update as one reason for the postponement; the extra time enabled them to implement a virtual reality version for Oculus Rift systems. About a week before this new date, Cyan announced one final release pushback until the week of August 22, 2016, stating that there were some last-minute bugs that arose during new gameplay systems added in the latest development cycles. The game was officially released on August 24, 2016, though the Oculus version remained in development at this point.

The Oculus version was released on October 31, 2016. For this version, Cyan was well-aware of issues with motion sickness associated with fully immersive games, moreso for their larger spaces they created for Obduction. To get around this, they decided to allow the player to control their movement using a gamepad, following a waypoint system similar to the original Myst, so that the player would appear to teleport to the nearby point rather those shown moving towards it and eliminate the motion sickness. Cyan plans to incorporate the Oculus Touch controls. Cyan also has stated they plan to use their experience from developing the VR on Obduction onto new projects, noting that while a VR version of the original Myst is of high demand, they have their own unique ideas they would like to explore. Cyan announced plans for release on two other VR units, the PlayStation VR and the HTC Vive; with the former, this also enabled them to develop a version for the PlayStation 4, which will be their first console release for the game. These three versions are expected in 2017.

Reception

Obduction received "favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic.

Caitlin Cook of Destructoid gave the game a score of 9/10. She said that "For what it sets out to do, it does it pretty perfectly".

Jed Whitaker of Game Revolution gave the game a score of 1 out of 5 stars. He found that the game had several bugs and ran poorly with long loading times and framedrops on the high-end computer used, stating "it isn't something that should be running poorly given my specs". Whitaker also considered many of the puzzles to be outdated when compared to other modern adventure games such as Firewatch and Oxenfree.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais of Polygon gave the game a score of 8.5/10. He stated that "Cyan succeeded in making another adventure that feels truly timeless."