Obduction is an adventure video game developed by Cyan Worlds. Obduction is considered a spiritual successor to Cyan's previous adventure games, Myst and Riven. In the game, the player finds their character transported to strange alien worlds but with human elements within the settings. The player must explore and solve puzzles to figure out how to return home.
The game was funded via a Kickstarter campaign in October 2013, and was released in August 2016 for Windows-based PCs, with a macOS version released in March 2017. A virtual reality version for Oculus Rift system was published in November 2016, while HTC Vive and Oculus Touch versions were released on March 22, 2017. The PlayStation 4 version was launched in August 2017 with a patch arriving shortly afterwards to support PlayStation VR. The Xbox One version of the game was released on April 10, 2020. The game was made available for Amazon Luna on October 20, 2020.
Gameplay
In Obduction, the player's character has been abducted from Earth by aliens and transported to one of several alien worlds, with the goal of trying to find a way home. The game, played out as an adventure game from the first-person perspective, has the player exploring the environment of several different worlds, which includes a mix of alien landscapes and familiar human settings, solving puzzles, and making decisions that can influence how the game ends. The game features traditional navigation controls for first-person games as well as a node-based point and click system. Many objects in the game can be selected and examined in a full three-dimensional view, allowing the player to discover possible hidden drawers or features that aid in puzzle solving.
Plot
The player, while at a campground, sees strange lights in the sky. One light resolves into a seed-like object that immobilizes the player and transports them and a small sphere of the park to an alien world, within the confines of a much larger sphere of Earth taken from an early-20th century Arizona mining town. They can see the alien world outside of this larger sphere, but cannot pass through it. Exploring the town, they find it seemingly empty outside of holographic pre-recorded welcoming messages from its mayor Josef Janssen (Patrick Treadway). Further exploration reveals that the town is called Hunrath, and that dozens of humans from across the 19th-21st centuries had been brought here, in the same manner the player was, for unknown reasons.
From journals left by some of these people, the player learns that there are four such spheres or "cells", linked via Trees in the center of each cell to a common Heart. The Trees periodically drop Seeds that travel through time and space and swap spherical areas from one linked world with another. The humans had peacefully worked with alien species from the other worlds to understand this process: the technologically-advanced Mofang from the planet Soria, the insect-like Arai species from Kaptar, and the peaceful Villein species from Maray. The four species found ways to harness the Seeds to transfer themselves between their worlds at will, allowing for collaboration and to try to find a means home. However, the player finds they had just arrived after a major conflict. The Mofang felt the other species were holding them back, and developed a weapon of mass destruction capable of devastating the other spheres. Friendly Mofang warned the other species, and they instituted various lockdown protocols to slow the Mofang from planting these weapons. Most then took shelter through cryogenic hibernation in a Villein "Silo". One human, C.W. (Robyn Miller), opted to stay behind in Hunrath and isolated himself in a safe room, believing the others were dead. He implores the player to help provide water to each Tree in the four cells and restart the power systems in Hunrath to allow him to return them back to Earth.