
“On the monitor, when I look up the canyons, there's not much,” says Miller of the game’s first world. “And let's face it, so far, VR really raises the experience up to some crazy level for putting people in a new world.” In virtual reality, every moment of Obduction becomes weightier, every piece of the world more worthy of awe. “We're kind of just an indie developer in the middle of nowhere that loves making these otherworldly experiences,” Miller says, in the wake of the game’s release. “VR really raises the experience up to some crazy level.” It’s the kind of place that would be fascinating to walk around in real life, and that’s exactly why it sounds like such a great VR project. Its first world is an anachronism-filled Old West town apparently transplanted onto another planet, complete with towering cliffs and the withered remains of abandoned gardens it’s both compelling puzzle box and eerie fictional space. Besides a few holographic figures, Obduction is a lonely game, inviting players to piece together the lives of people who have long since disappeared.
#Obduction news series
You’re collected by an alien power (the name is a homophone of “abduction”) and dropped into a nearly empty series of interconnected worlds, where strings of puzzles will let you uncover its secrets. While Obduction isn’t set in the same world as Myst, it follows the same formula.
#Obduction news update
When the update comes out, it will be in a radically different VR landscape from the one in which Obduction was announced - one where we’re figuring out what immersion means, and what we want out of it. But while the game has gotten critical acclaim, Cyan is still working out bugs in its virtual reality version, which is set to appear soon. Three years later, in late August, Obduction was officially released. And Oculus Rift support soon became an official Obduction stretch goal, reached in the last few hours of the campaign. The studio had gotten one of Oculus’ early development kits, and they’d used it to walk around the world of RealMyst, a 3D remake of the original. And Cyan had already started to dip its toes into VR. Obduction, it seemed, could do the same thing with virtual reality. In 1994, Myst had pushed computer graphics to new levels anecdotally, its immersive and atmospheric worlds helped make the data-dense CD-ROM format mainstream. Miller’s answer was vague, but it seemed like a perfect match. When the campaign launched, Cyan co-founder Rand Miller dropped by Reddit, and somebody asked him a tantalizing question: would Obduction support a young, but increasingly exciting, new platform called the Oculus Rift? The year was 2013, and gaming studio Cyan Worlds was running a crowdfunding campaign for Obduction - a spiritual sequel to Myst, one of the most beloved adventure games of all time.
