Obduction Gets June Release Date, Teaser Trailer
Lensflare alert
Obduction [official site] - the Kickstarter-ed spiritual successor to Myst and Riven by developers Cyan - now has a teaser trailer. It's the sort of teaser trailer whether the camera slowly drifts past scenery as mystery music plays. Observe.
The description of the video includes a SPOILER ALERT for purists so if that's you, look away now...
So, June 2016 for this one.
If you haven't heard of Obduction and the text snippets weren't enough for you to hang an idea of the game around, here's the skinny:
The game starts with you being abducted by some kind of organic artifact. It just sort of shunts you across the universe to an alien environment. Well, it's alien-ish. There's a "stereotypical, Kansas farmhouse with a white picket fence" which is apparently part of a weird town.
In terms of how you play, the official site offers this:
"You choose where you want to go. You choose how much freedom you want. Choose to have full gamer control, or simplify and explore with a simple click of the mouse. Either way these new worlds reveal their secrets only as you explore and coax them. And no matter how you choose to explore, you fall upon some heavy choices to make with substantial consequences."
I didn't play Myst back in the day and have heard wildly differing opinions about it. Obduction sounded interesting but talk of Myst ended up overshadowing talk about Obduction so I ended up drifting away. With this trailer I'm still not sure. I think it's hard to communicate gradual unravelling of mystery in a trailer - I didn't really get a sense of that side of The Witness til I was playing it - so I'm not really getting a feel for that side of things and it's ended up at more of an environmental showcase kind of level for me.