Here's what I learned, or wish I'd know earlier to keep the enjoyment up: Patience, GrasshopperDespite some maddening flaws in the story and game mechanics, I quite liked it! The sheer otherness of their setting, the genuine experience of alterity, of something else, the absolute opposite of familiarity and cosiness, that’s what the Myst games are all about and you’ll find that amplified tenfold in Obduction, a game where every little thing you gain, anything you “possibly, understand” feels like it was plucked at great cost (and neatly cut out in a small sphere) from an ocean of incomprehensibility.Ī game, ultimately and intentionally, so alien in setting, so otherworldly in its perplexing design that it’s essentially about being abducted by aliens.
Well, no more of that, Obduction does away with that weak premise and only keeps the mystery and the brush with the unknown that the Myst games are renowned for, the total suspension of your cognitive background, that putting you in a situation where everything you know worths nothing and you have to learn it all anew in order to fit there. I was willing to ignore it in order to enjoy the puzzling – it wasn’t all that hard, ha ha – but I never accepted it as a worthy premise and always felt a little guilty for enjoying something so poorly staged. I mean Myst was fine and all, but placing the creator on the same level as his creations always felt a bit off to me, lazy narratively and ontologically dismissive, not to mention self-gratifying (yeah, we’re game designers and writing games feels a lot like creating worlds, so let’s make a game about that!), small minded and colonialistic in vision (John Walker was right to point that out) and an all around obvious metaphor.
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