https://youtu.be/Io1GdRlOe6w

Even if you had never read that last sentence, anyone who has played, seen, or read about Myst will instantly recognize the connection between the two titles. They share the same essential grammar, the same emphasis on puzzles and exploration, and the same sense of “What in the world is going on?!” that lingers with you until the very last moments of the game.

As far as I’m concerned, VR has never had an experience that builds a world better than Obduction. From the opening moments, you’ll feel transported into a realm that has enough similarities to reality to feel familiar, and enough extra-dimensional surprises to feel truly wondrous and unsettling.

The setting of Obduction, while breathtaking inside of VR, is almost impossible to describe outside of the headset. Imagine if you took an emerging Old West town from the turn of the century, imbued it with a Gilded-age aesthetic, filled it with enigmatic characters, and then scooped the entire thing up and transported it into an alien dimension full of purple mountains and multiple suns. That’s Obduction.

The juxtaposition between the normalcy of a wooden shack or cave, against the foreboding sight of an alien sky littered with unfamiliar stars, creates a motivation in you to explore every room, rock, and corner that you can. This is a very good thing because that’s most of what Obduction asks you to do.

Your time in Obduction will essentially be spent doing three things: exploring this mysterious little town to uncover its true nature, solving puzzles to unlock new areas, and cursing silently under your breath.

The first reason for these subtle expletives is that the puzzles in Obduction are hard. Really hard. I consider myself fairly good at solving video game puzzles. In fact, if you’re playing a Zelda or Metroid title, I’m the guy you want sitting next to you saying “What if you tried putting a bomb against that wall?” and offering other advice along the way.

Obduction’s puzzles are, like the world itself, seemingly from another dimension. But let me be clear in that they’re not unintentionally obtuse, but rather that they’re so uniquely challenging because they are so clearly designed with VR in mind. This means that, for the most part, solving an Obduction puzzle is mostly a matter of assessing a scene as if it existed in the real world. There are no cracked walls indicating that an explosive may create a door in Obduction like in Zelda. Instead, you’ll be studying a generator to see where its wires lead in order to determine which crank you need to turn to finally get it powered up. Up close inspection like that isn’t customary for most gamers and it’s something that really shine in VR.

Setting up puzzles this way may make them harder to solve, but it also makes them more satisfying to complete. You feel like a regular Sherlock Holmes when you’re able to deduce from a realistic environment exactly which steps need to be taken in order to unlock your next phase of gameplay.

The other reason you’ll be dropping a few choice phrases as you play Obduction, is because it frankly doesn’t have the greatest controls. This game falls into the same trap that titles like Adr1ft stumbled upon before it. Basically, games that require you to exhaust an environment through rigorous analysis and backtracking don’t agree terribly well with VR in my experience.

The reason for this is that VR can only allow you to move in certain ways and at a certain pace in an open environment without creating motion sickness for a lot of people. Things like incremental turning and teleportation movement are comfort options that make the experience more bearable. However, the problem here is that the pace of backtracking and re-exploring areas multiple times is frustratingly lethargic.

This rings even more true when solving puzzles. You may routinely be faced with a, “I might have missed something all the way back by that rock that will take me 10 minutes to get back to, but I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting there again.”