Obduction Trailer Shows Off Otherworldly Locations
By Brad Jones 26 February 2016
The first trailer for Cyan Worlds’ Kickstarter funded follow-up to the Myst series, Obduction, gives a glimpse into the varied and vivid locations players can look forward to exploring.
In 2013, a Kickstarter campaign for a spiritual successor to iconic 90s adventure game Myst proved to be an enormous success, raising more than $1.3 million to fund development. Now, the team at Cyan Worlds have released the first trailer for Obduction — and the footage looks very promising indeed.
Anyone who’s familiar with Myst and its sequel Riven will know that these games are at their best when they combine engrossing puzzle-solving with intricate environment design. While this trailer doesn’t show much of the former, the locations that are featured certainly seem to uphold a tradition of amazing visuals.
The plot of Obduction looks to centre around a place where parts of our world and others are thrown together. Of course, this offers up plenty of opportunities for reality-bending sights — but it seems fairly likely that it will have a major impact of the game’s narrative, also.
In fact, those juxtaposed landscapes are pretty much all that this trailer gives away. It’s a teaser in the classic sense of the word, light on any real information, but sure to build anticipation in anyone with even a cursory interest in what the developers of Myst can do as of 2016.
That said, it’s interesting to note that we don’t see any hint of the player interacting with the world around them. This year’s Myst-inspired indie success The Witness used a very original method of environment interaction, and it will be interesting to see whether Obduction opts for a similar approach.
While the last several years have seen Cyan Worlds largely putting out smaller mobile titles and re-releasing various classic games, it’s important to remember the enormous success the studio enjoyed in the 1990s. The massive popularity of Myst saw it take the title of highest selling PC game for almost a decade, and even now it’s reportedly being developed as a TV series.
It remains to be seen whether Obduction will reach those dizzying heights, but its success on Kickstarter certainly suggests that there are plenty of fans eager for this sort of experience. This slickly cut trailer will no doubt tempt others into checking out the game when it releases later this year.
It really seems that what’s old is new again. There was a time when a classic adventure game like this would be decried as a relic, but after the genre went quiet for several years, now there’s a vocal audience that’s very hungry for more titles that fill this niche.
Obduction is set to release for PC in June 2016.
