Obduction. Yes, this is a word. No, almost nobody uses it. As in, the opposite of 'subduction' - meaning to layer one surface over another, as a covering. But it also sounds like abduction. Both 'abduction' and 'obduction' are relevant words to this story.

This sci-fi original IP by Cyan was the result of a 2013 Kickstarter and was released in 2016, to mostly positive reviews. It's one of Cyan's most visually stunning games which is saying a lot considering their track record, but the relatively recent nature of the game and its use of Unreal Engine 4 with VR, made it a pretty cool thing.

Obduction was funded, as far as we can tell, almost entirely by the KS, which means its budget is no more than the original Myst's, inflation-adjusted. So clearly there may have been, scrathc that, there definitely was, way more Cyan would have liked to do here, had the game been a surprise hit and not an obscure but beautiful puzzler that flew under the radar.

The Kickstarter certainly had stretch goals - more worlds, multiplayer modes, and so on. I would've loved it had this game been broader in scope with even more worlds branching out, but it's already quite impressive in scale as is.

Obduction, as Cyan's first VR foray, would not be the last. 2021 saw a VR remake of Myst, 2023 is seeing the release of another new IP (Firmament) which Cyan has been quite tight-lipped about prior to launch, and at some point beyond 2023 they're going to remake Riven for VR. So by the mid-2020s Cyan will have launched four VR experiences... going all-in on a tech that hasn't really taken off, precisely because their style of game is so perfectly suited to VR as a medium, given the emphasiss the studio places on immersion and rich gameworlds.

But we'll note here, while Obduction can shine in VR, this game, Myst 2021, and Firmament all three can be played on PCs without VR.

I've played Obduction and think it's mostly pretty great with one noteworthy aside - the loading times are frequent and lengthy. Many puzzles require multiple jumps - swaps - between worlds and each swap has a loading process that's sort of slow. That won't be as much a problem now with newer PCs but it was a widespread complaint at the time the game came out. The game also allows a lot of wandering and in certain rare spots - maybe this has been fixed since but I'm unsure - you can get yourself wedged into the world geometry - ie stuck in a tunnel, between two rocks, whatever, and unable to walk out. This is solvable - go to the options menu, switch from 'free roam' mode to a VR-focused and decidedly old-school 'point-and-click' mode that was designed to reduce nausea for VR users. This switch will move you to the nearest point-and-click node location, so then you can switch back to free roam and voila, you'll be able to walk around again.  

All this said- the occasional glitch or slow loading - 'slowding' on older hardware -  should not dissuade you from trying this one. The art direction and graphics are gorgeous, the puzzles largely make sense, there is a story that is reasonably simple at its core but answers most every question you have at the outset well. Robyn Miller came back to Cyan for the first time since Riven for this project. He both acts in it and composed the soundtrack, which is quirky and a little off-kilter but pretty good.

I don't want you to get too hung up on a particular... box. There's a box with many buttons and a lot of Cyrillic text. It looks like it is a puzzle. It's not. You can entirely finish the game without interacting with it. It's a red herring, essentially, and it exists due to the nature of Kickstarter crowdfunding - it has numerous 'Easter Egg' combinations submitted by game backers. Similarly bewildering are the occasional prop items you can pick up and look at in random spots. These too were backer items, and as a general rule, they are not puzzle-relevant. That's not to say they don't add a little weird color and humor at points, like the random figurine of a samurai weasel. In one crevice you'll find the Ark of the Covenant, which made me LOL. (So that's where it went!)

I felt that the KS backer details were not too much, they didn't significantly detract from the game. And in fairness, even the OG Myst had a lot of quirky interactable items that did not serve any puzzle purpose. Remember the gems in Mechanical or the little wind-up bird? Those did absolutely nothing in progression terms either.

They were just there as fun details that reacted to being clicked on.

And here it makes sense. There's so much amalgamated mess everywhere in Hunrath. It adds to the story actually, and is believable even if it leans a bit America-centric to some extent. You have all these chunks of Earth, yourself included, dumped together in one enclosed space, a spherical space surrounded by a wall of energy you cannot pass beyond, a wall with an alien landscape visible outside of it. And this world holds, or held, a bunch of people pulled from different places and years ranging from the 1840s to the 2040s. They and bits of fragmented Earth all just sort of got tossed together without initial explanation. And they figured out that there were other enclosures, other species from other worlds in their own contained spheres. They learned how to 'swap' between these contained worlds, and then... something went very wrong - right before you arrived. Something involving a hostile and unreasonable species in a different enclosure?

The seeds. They're organic-looking alien objects, and they've been collecting samples of intelligent life from planets across the universe. They tear out everything within range of the swap, and put it somewhere else... understanding these functions matters. You were out walking a trail by a lake one night and you were one of those collected, along with a little bit of pine tree and rocks and a lantern. And the big question here is why, why do these spherical terrarium-like ecosystems exist, why are they being filled, to what purpose... and what does that mean for what you should do next?