I adored Myst back in the day, even if it was inscrutable to ten year old me. I didn't have the attention span to stick it out through the brutally cryptic puzzles, regretfully, so I never saw much of the game. But just clicking around that island was a revelation, back when Doom was as good as realtime "3D" graphics got.
Riven blew Myst away, and in my opinion the subsequent titles only kept getting better. By the time Myst 4 came out, the world it depicted was so vibrant, animated, layered and lush that it didn't matter in the slightest that it was all pre-rendered. Cyan really pushed that approach as far as it could go, with dazzling results.
Then there was Uru. Many people absolutely adored it, but my interest in the Myst series plummeted after it went truly 3D. Part of the fascination for me was how the games, prior to that point, created such a living, breathing atmosphere without employing a single polygon.
So whether or not I was justified in doing so, I went into Obduction not expecting much. It only wound up perfectly priming me to have my mind blown wide open. Holy shit. Hooooooly shit. It's not even the most beautiful game I've seen in VR! The opening forest area doesn't look as good as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, for example. But soon after that, you're thrust into a creative, alien environment that is as much a joy to look at as it is to learn about.
I get the feeling that this is what Cyan has always wanted to create. They recently more or less confirmed that suspicion, stating they are "all in" where VR is concerned and will make only VR titles going forward. Myst was an attempt to transcend technological limitations of the day and bring a VR-like experience to the masses. Well, now technology's caught up to that vision.
It's based on Unreal Engine 4, so don't expect anything too far in advance of what you've seen in other UE4 VR games. But the environmental design itself puts the visual appeal over the top. Every square foot of the world is jam packed with detail. Individual strands of grass instead of flat grass "planes" like in other UE4 games. Scattered rocks, as small as pebbles. Trash, trinkets, all manner of little doodads wherever you look.
The main world you'll start out in, after the intro, is cobbled together from spherical chunks of the Earth. Other time periods and locations, teleported across the universe to this alien planet, along with an individual human. The overall community they live in, with all these little different cut out chunks of Earth, exists within a protective bubble that maintains the right conditions for humans inside.
If you recall that Rick and Morty episode where the entire Smith household is accidentally teleported to an alien planet during a party (along with the land immediately around it) that's more or less how teleportation appears to work in this game. It also evokes Stephen King's "Under the Dome", a small community confined together by inscrutable alien intelligence.
By reading scattered notes, watching recorded holographic messages and so on, you'll piece together what life was like for the small population of this human zoo before they fled for someplace safer. The holograms are live action video cutouts of human actors, but in stereoscopic 3D. It's quite an interesting effect to see them superimposed in a polygonal environment with full depth perception.
Solving puzzles in this game made me feel terribly clever. I resolved not to consult any walkthroughs for any reason from the outset and haven't regretted it. This is easier to figure out than the Myst games but still satisfyingly hard. I had to think about some puzzles for a day or more before the solution struck me. Then I dove back into the world of Obduction to solve the puzzle, fix some machine, and open up a new area to explore.
The more success you have, the more new paths open up connecting new areas back to old ones, making it progressively less of a pain in the ass to traverse the game world. The first time I escaped the hub world for a larger, more expansive alien vista, it was an incalculable rush. To have the areas available to me so suddenly expanded felt like the first time I left Kokiri forest and entered Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time.
The number one thing I wanted to do in VR, ever since I learned about the very concept, was to explore whole virtual worlds. Ones which looked and felt real. Not like the admittedly impressive "living cities" of the Grand Theft Auto games, but someplace fantastical and wholly different from the world we inhabit. Yet similarly "lived in", with its own physical laws, its own ecosystem, its own inhabitants and politics.
Obduction delivers. It feels like someplace that must really exist if only because of how detailed and fully realized it is. Every little aspect of it smacks of reality, especially the living spaces where human settlers lived before you arrived. messy, personalized to each inhabitant, everything where they left it on the day they fled. It truly feels like, upon donning the headset, you're transported to a different reality no less authentic than our own.
That's the culmination and realization of my fondest VR fantasies from back in the 1990s. I can hardly think of anyone better to make it happen than Cyan, given their history of stellar world building. The Myst games have an accompanying series of novels after all, so expansive is the lore that the games weren't enough to convey it all.
The only small niggle is that snap turning is forced on you. There is an option to move either via teleporting from node to node, making it feel like classic Myst games, or free thumbstick movement. However, you cannot turn smoothly. It's widely believed by developers that smooth turning guarantees nausea, but many of us don't have that problem and would appreciate the choice.
Thankfully from what I've heard, smooth turning will be added in as an option via an incoming patch very soon. It's a delight when developers have their finger on the pulse of their fans, implementing such widely requested features in a reasonable timeframe. Now the only thing left on my wish list is Touch support, but they'll cross that bridge when it arrives.
Unbelievably, Obduction is only $29.99. I would've paid $40, possibly $50 for a VR title of this caliber. It's one of the few which is so rich and chocolatey that it would've stood on its own merits as a "flat" game, and indeed it's possible to buy a version playable on any monitor. I won't hesitate to say it's one of the absolute best games available for Rift and Vive right now though, easily netting a 9/10.
All images courtesy of Cyan Worlds and Oculus.