Obduction 9+

LOVE IT, BUT VERY GLITCHY!

i love their games, played them for many years. Only - obduction is very glitchy. especially after loading.
it really loses the sense of being in that invironment, which is always somethine that i really enjoyed playing cyan world’s games.
it keeps pausing and having to wait. i see a lot of black rocks due to slow visual.
but… im still loving it. love is blind…..

i just finished playing this. it was just amazing. really great to know Cyan worlds still got it!
only thing though, as i mentioned above, its quite glitchy most of the time. could be my PC, but then the loading between swaps are just so long…

apart from that, i thoroughly enjoyed it! worth every cent!

thank you cyan worlds. i have been your fan since myst!

Great Game when it works

Update: Latest update hasn’t fixed the game crashing problems. Really annoyed spending significant money for a game that is clearly not ready for the Mac App Store.

The long load time of this game has been fixed after it went missing for a while from the Mac App Store. Since then it runs well until suddenly it just simply stops and you are booted out of the game. This has happened so often and the game becomes useless. The bugs in this game (at least for the Mac App Store version) make it a bad choice. Just wish it worked because when it is working it is really great. Now I find everytime I start up the game it crashes after a short time when I try to transport to Farley’s room. Hope a bug fixed version comes soon. It clearly was not ready for distribution on the Mac App Store.

Developer Response ,

Sorry for the trouble. Obduction is working well on most Macs in within the spec range, so we'd love to help get you exploring. Can you email your Mac specs and the MacOS version to our support department (support@cyan.com) and we'll see if we can find the problem.

good, but missing the soul and high art of Riven!

I need to qualify this by saying I am not an experienced gamer. Riven was probably the last long-winded graphics game I played as I hate just about every other kind of game out there. I adored Riven so much that I only just finished RealMyst - never played Myst all the way through back in the day.

I think part of the problem for me with this - even though I had all the specs for a Mac, ie 10.12.6 Sierra, metal-supported, blah blah…I had so many technical and play issues with the game I ended up cheating and looking for walkthroughs to make sure I wasn’t just experiencing some sort of bug or anomaly, as I had seen there were numerous ones for others. I had numerous crashes, situations where I had to walk backwards really slowly to get through a section (the injured Villein on Maray etc, the Hunrath tree…), needing to verify the install, deleting cache files etc…so that it really interfered with my experience of playing the game and made me doubt the actual gameplay.

Therefore, I just didn’t have the patience to slowly work through all Caroline’s notes etc, learn the numbering system properly…I just didn’t want to spend THAT much time on any of the puzzles, past a few hours or a couple of nights. THEREFORE, I didn’t experience the orgasmic satisfaction in the story ‘coming together’ for me that I’ve seen some reviewers describe. In fact, I still don’t fully get the way the whole seed/region/planet swapping thing was happening, or a lot of the backstory with the alien races. I don’t think I ever saw a ‘polyarch’ etc. I guess I should have gone back and re-read Caroline’s books - once I realised I could actually take photos of the pages using the spacebar!! (not obvious ANYWHERE)…but by then I couldn’t be bothered.

Additionally, the whole thing just didn’t have the same sort of ‘spiritual’ cohesion or otherworldly beauty that Riven had, to me (although Maray was lovely) - and still has, even with pre-rendered graphics etc. Riven just made some sort of cosmic sense to me, which this doesn’t. (I cheated on Riven too, a bit :-)). But then again, to play Obduction I had to have my settings on pretty low most of the time so I couldn’t really get the full effect. (It took me ages to adjust everything so I could actually take photos, save games, and actually see the written pages properly, which also interfered with the experience). By the way, I’m writing this in early Sept, 2017, with a Macbook I bought new last year). I really hated Kaptar by the end and couldn’t wait to get out of there. I didn’t understand the different species’ layered histories there although I’ve read that there was that.

The final piss-off for me after investing so much time was that everything I’d been led to reasonably do led me to the negative ending. That really sucked. To have it all rely on choosing not to do one minor thing in the process…when up to that time the main character had been guiding…pissed me off. And kind of affected me badly.
A number of things kind of just didn’t make sense for me. Anyway…I found out it was a kickstarter…so I guess I should be appreciative it was as good as it was. It was nice to see Robyn as C.W. :-)
I don’t think any female character will ever compare to Catherine though :-).
Riven still is the best game of Cyan’s, in my opinion. I think they just channelled something from another realm there, and nothing can really match it. I still really love Cyan and Rand and Robyn…I guess I just didn’t have a great experience playing this and my expectations had been set really high. Also I guess as an adult I just felt guilty about spending this much time on a game :-)
I guess my advice would be, buy it, but allow yourself to spend weeks on it (like four!) without going looking for any cheats/help (hard if you’re having gameplay issues though).