The last year or so was a pretty great time
for video game nostalgia, wasn't it?
I mean, there's rarely any lack of remakes,
reboots and.. spiritual successors in the game industry.
But often enough, something gets lost in time.
Many attempts to bring back the glory of an
old fan-favorite either completely miss the
mark
or they end up being overall decent games
with a handful of references and throwbacks
to the predecessors here and there,
but fail to capture the essence of
how it once felt to experience the original
for the first time.
Guard: "Whoa!
What made that go out?!"
Have you ever had fond but very vague memories
of a game or a film from your childhood that
you haven't seen since?
And that, once you decided to look it up...
turned out to be not nearly as impressive
as the nostalgically embellished memory you
carried around for decades
- and you can't help but feel...
a pang of disappointment?
That is why a spiritual successor shouldn't
feel like the original.
It should feel like people remember the original.
It might sound like tomayto tomarto
- but this little distinction makes all the
difference in the world.
Ron Gilbert, creator of Maniac Mansion and
Monkey Island
put it wonderfully when talking about his
and Gary Winnick's upcoming game Thimbleweed-Park:
“It's all the wonderful, charming things
about point-and-click adventures
but without all the stupid stuff about point-and-click
adventures.
We want this game to really feel like you
remember those old games.
It's not really how those old games were,
because I think we remember those old games
being a lot better than they actually were.”
And lately, a lot of developers seem to get
this right.
Thimbleweed Park is that old LucasArts adventure
that you suddenly find, covered in thick layers
of dust in a desk drawer,
but that you've miraculously never played
before.
The new Doom succesfully resurrected the kick-ass
feeling
of old-school first person shooters for a
modern audience
and Resident Evil 7 - for a lot of people
- rekindled the same flavor of thrill that
made playing
the first game in the series so memorable...
21 years ago.
And then there is Obduction.
Obduction is the newest creation by Cyan Worlds,
a long-established developer studio mostly
renowned
for their critically and commercially acclaimed
Myst-series of adventure games
and let me tell you up front without any suspense
or build-up:
this Kickstarter-fueled project has turned
out to be a
gorgeous, ingenious and more than worthy spiritual
successor to Myst.
In this video, I want to take a look at what
made Myst, its sequels,
and the subgenre of graphic adventures it
pioneered
so beloved and unforgettable
- and how Cyan brought it back!
Now the term “graphic adventure”, historically,
is most commonly associated with the LucasArts-type
of adventure game
in the vein of Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion
and the respective genre that evolved from
them -
Indy: "I guess it's mayonnaise, but it looks
like used motor oil."
but to many people, the word is at least
equally closely associated with the Myst-likes.
With the original Myst releasing in 1993,
this contemporary sister-genre of the point-and-click
adventure
focused on a different core emotional engagement.
Mystery and curiosty.
Inspired by Jules Verne's novel “The Mysterious
Island”,
the original Myst and its many sequels cast
a faceless protagonist
into an unknown - and also completely desolate
world.
Navigating through pre-rendered backgrounds
from a first person perspective,
by clicking hot-spots to instantaneously swap
to the next position
and manipulating objects in the environment,
the beauty of Myst was in piecing together
the story
in the same way an archeologist uncovers the
history
of a long-forgotten civilization.
You begin by aimlessly meandering around a
strange island
you find yourself marooned on,
discover buildings and machines, buttons,
levers and contraptions
that don't seem to make any sense at all.
But if you bring the patience to experiment
with every nook and cranny,
to obersve and interpret cause and effect
of your actions,
to thoroughly study all the notes, letters,
signs and books you come across
- you slowly but gradually begin to understand
more,
piece by piece, one insight after the other.
Those games were - to many people
- really really boring.
They require patience, natural curiosity and
a...
fertile mind to find enjoyment in them.
But if you ask those who did bite through
their unenventful tranquility,
you will get nothing but praise and love for
how immensely satisfying experiences they
were.
How you started by stumbling around blindly
... as if you mind was shrouded in a fog of
war for you to uncover,
contemplating in painful ignorance for hours
until at some point,
the dots would suddenly start connecting
and eventually everything would fall into
place
and you can palpably feel that gordian knot
burst apart in your mind.
This sensation of a hard-earned revelation
is one of the most intellectually satisfying
emotions
I've experienced in any forms of narrative
media
- and its rare!
It's one of the reasons why other games, too,
that put an emphasis on environmental and
indirect storytelling
in favor of serving the whole backstory on
a silver-platter,
often end up being such undying fan-favorites.
The adventure genre in its classic form,
including the LucasArts-y point-and clicks,
as well as the Jules-Vernian Myst-likes,
has been out of fashin in the indurstry for
quite some time.
Aside from nostalgic indie-developers and
Kickstarting industry-legends,
the mainstream industry has, over time,
evolved the adventure game into a more contemporary
form,
namely the "Walking-Dead likes".
When you look at old-established series,
like Sierra's Kings Quest or The Longest Journey
series,
you can see how strongly their most recent
incarnations
took inspiration from the Telltale formula.
One of the main reasons for this tonal shift
is how the overall gaming landscape has changed,
especially with the widespread accessibility
of the internet:
Nowadays, pretty much every gamer can instantly
look up
solutions and guides for a game when they
get stuck
- and that's just not very conductive for
classic adventures.
It's a bit like being a recovering alcoholic
while working as a bartender
- the very thing that spoils the experience
is just too easily accessible.
You see, nowadays, adventure games are almost
exclusively
optimized for flow.
In many ways, they feel as if they're playing
themselves
- in some cases that's even literally the
case.
Their focus has almost entirely shifted towards
narrative
and away from lateral thinking challenges.
Puzzles.
You're never gonna get stuck and therefore
never feel tempted to look up a walkthrough.
For classic adventures and especially Myst-likes,
in which the discovery of the story and lore
of the world
is inherently tied to solving its puzzles
through understanding the world
- spoiling those puzzles with a walkthrough
is the absolute death
of what makes those games enjoyable in the
first place.
Getting stuck and regularly not making any
progress for hours,
sometimes even for days was a necessary part
of the experience.
And what might sound incredibly tedious and
frustrating
from a modern point-of-view,
well,
was also tedious and borderline frustrating
back in the day,
but - and this is where I'm inevitably gonna
start to sound old:
it just was a different time.
These days, we have what I like to call video
game inflation.
Steam libraries bursting with titles we haven't
even touched
or that lost their appeal after just a couple
of minutes
and who of us hasn't bought stuff because
it was on sale
that we didn't actually want,
but we just got it because, y'know,
who knows when we might get it for 75% less!!
And don't get me wrong, having access to way
more games is good,
nobody actually wants to go back to having
less choice.
What I'm saying is that it changed the attitude
with which we approach games in general.
Back in the day - we had far more time,
less money and a substantially smaller library
in total.
A new game was a really valuable thing I would
look forward to
and work for for weeks,
so even if I ended up with an objectively
terrible game
or an unforgivingly difficult one,
it wouldn't just wither away in the corner,
but I'd keep playing it over and over
until I eventuall got better at it and it
started to grow on me.
In addition to that, as I've mentioned before,
information about and around video games was
much harder to come by.
If I was lucky, I could find some hints and
tricks
and maybe a walkthrough in a monthly magazine
or trade cheats with my friends in the schoolyard
- but I couldn't just google for the situation
I was being stuck in at that time.
“Solving” a game like Myst was a vastly
different experience
than most games are today
- something that I feel got lost in time.
When Myst was one of the few games you got
at the time
- even if it was initially boring and daunting
and even if you got stuck for days without
making any progress,
you'd still return until it became a habit.
The lack of external information made it wonderful
to play together with a friend in tandem.
Sitting together in front of the monitor
and attempting to solve riddles in combined
effort.
And when you couldn't hang out, each one would
play on their own
while keeping the other informed about new
mind-blowing revelations
and solutions via phone or next day in school.
This notion of cracking an epic puzzle,
that required perseverance and commitment
made those games feel like embarking on a
big adventure.
Myst and Riven were predestined for this kind
of experience.
And Obduction... really managed to bring that
back for me.
One of the greatest incentives for people
to get a copy of Myst
back in the day way was that it was visually
just absolutely stunning.
This might be hard to imagine when you look
at it
with eyes spoiled by modern graphic technology
- but you gotta consider, this was 1993
- the prettiest video games at the time looked
like this!
Aesthetically charming maybe, but very low-resolution
and usually rather stylized than realistic.
Myst was one of the first games to almost
exclusively
rely on elaborately pre-rendered backgrounds
combined with the comparably large storage
capacity of the,
at the time, brand-new CD-ROM drive.
In the context of its time, it felt almost
photo-realistic.
Extremely immersive.
And just outright... jaw-dropping.
It was kind of the game you'd show a non-computer
person
if you wanted to boast about just how far
technology had come.
I can vividly remember how I was daydreaming:
"Man, just imagine if one day graphics like
these were possible
in actual real-time.
How cool would it be to be actually *in there*?
phhh... this is gonna take forEVER until technology
gets there..."
And it was while I was playing Obduction
and found myself marvelling at its calm and
beautiful landscapes...
that I realized: I had just arrived in that
future
I envisioned back then
- and that had seemed an eternity away.
This eternity had just passed
- 24 years to be precise -
almost a quarter of a century.
And I couldn't help but feel my back ache
a little bit.
Obduction had just made me feel old.
But... that's okay!
Because... just look at what a stunningly
beautiful game that is
in the same way Myst was back in the day.
And yes, there are certainly games that have
150 polyongs more
or a higher texture resolution
and subsurface tesselation bump shader occlusion
mapping v 4.3
and yaddyaddayadda...
But aesthetically, this game looks near perfect,
with an incredible intuition for the distribution
of color and light,
attention to detail and just love and care
in every nook and cranny.
And all of this is fueled by the gorgeous
rendering capabilities
of the Unreal Engine 4 - and even better,
that childhood dream of "being in there" has
become even closer to reality
through the fantastic implementation of VR
that Obduction provides.
Now, you might say: "But Ragnar!
There has been REAL Myst,
the realtime 3d version of the original,
as well as URU, the online-spinoff from 2003
that was rendered in real-time as well."
And that is true, but those games were made
in a time
when real time 3D graphics were nowhere near
as impressive
as the visuals of Myst and Riven *felt* when
those games were released.
It all goes back to the quote from Ron Gilbert
- that it's about how people remembered those
games,
not how they really were.
Myst and Riven, in contrast to REAL Myst and
URU,
felt immensely ahead of their time.
Another indicator for this is the use of Full
Motion Video.
The dawn of the CD-ROM drive ushered in the
- often times unintentionally hilarious -
age of Full Motion Video.
And Myst was one of the first games to implement
filmed actors into their game.
But in contrast to many clumsy attempts of
this movement,
it was done mostly in style.
You would find old, recorded messages
- often times in small frames to save hard
drive space -
and... for some reason, they always featured
strikingly mediocre greenscreen recordings.
Which came to be sort of a staple of the series
in the end.
Obduction actually brings those back.
All the characters you come across either
talk to you
via pre-recorded messages or are behind some
window.
So..
Cyan decided to use real actors for them and...
very similar to Myst and Riven...
filmed with that same ... strikingly mediocre
style of green-screen recording.
It looks technically totally out of place,
but I'm fairly certain that this is meant
as an icing on the cake for veterans.
A pinch of that cheesy amateur-film feeling
that we all subsconsciously tied to the Myst-series
back in the day.
Obduction comes with plethora of those little
nods and references
that old-timers might pick up on and marvel
about,
but that don't lessen the experience for new
players if they don't catch them.
I think this kind of attention to detail and
love for the tiny things
is one of the core factors that makes great...
remakes... reboots.. spiritual successors
and so on.
Another factor that, especially in the case
of Obduction,
makes this game stand out for me is.... it
has balls!
*cough*...alright so I don't usually like
that expression as a metaphor for boldness,
but you know.. it's a pun... one that you'll
only get
if you know the game and have gotten past
the central... twist.
And I guess even then it's not really funny
so...
I apologize...
Alright so ... think about a lateral-thinking
puzzle game like Portal.
It revolves around one central mechanic,
a game design twist that comes with a certain
"wow" effect for new players.
The moment when it 'clicked' in your head,
when you understood how the portal-mechanics
worked most certainly
felt like an epiphany, an a-ha effect.
But in all of those puzzle-games that focus
on such a central idea
- it is usually... frontloaded.
Because if Portal waited until you're halfway
through the game
until it introduced you to the Portal mechanic...
that would feel kind of counter-productive,
wouldn't it?
But in a way, this is exactly what Obduction
does.
It starts out pretty much exactly as the good-old
Myst games.
It even gives you a classic hot-spot point-and-click
control-scheme,
as another throwback to the good old days
and it, once again, throws you into a somehow
relatable,
but at the same time completely foreign world
that seems to make not much sense at first.
You'll feel straight at home.
You observe and catalogue seemingly arbitrary
things in your mind,
moving around the loose parts and trying to
make sense of the whole.
But it's moving forward at an agonizingly
slow pace.
After a few hours, I started to understand
more bits and pieces,
but ultimately, I was still as clueless about
the bigger picture
as I was in the beginning.
But just as games like Portal or Braid
Obduction's world is equally centered around
a single lateral thinking principle.
But it took me a good 10-14 hours of puzzling
my way through it
in almost complete ignorance until I eventually
got to a part
where I finally understood this central idea.
But where in Portal, it's like
"oohhh, what a cool mechanic, so this is what
this game is about, nice!"...
here in Obduction, it felt like an unbelievable
mind-blow!
So far it was literally myself mostly stumbling
in the dark.
Most pieces of information were largely self-contained.
But uncovering this central revelation without
anyone explaining it to me,
but solely by observing, by taking in clues
and piecing together
the tales told through wonderful archeological
and environmental storytelling
and by torturing my brain cells for hours
of cluelessness...
it suddenly proved to be the pivotal key
that let everything else fall into place at
once.
It was not just one eureka-moment,
but it was like an avalanche of sudden epiphanies,
my mind wouldn't stop wildly connecting more
and more dots.
Seriously, I found myself smiling and "oh
my goood"ing for minutes.
It was one of the most satisfying mind-blows
I've had in a video game in such a long time.
And after this ... cerebral orgasm had passed...
the post-climactic sadness inevitably started
to set in.
Because I realized that it really was
almost a quarter of a century ago,
when I had the last comparable onslaught of
revelations caused by a video game in this way.
So yeah... In. This. Way...
Obduction really achieved everything
that an outstanding spiritual successor should
aim for.
It didn't just make me feel the way I remembered
playing Myst back in the days.
It went so far as to accurately remind me
of an emotion from the past
that had long become a vague, distant memory.
Obduction showed courage in a lot of ways,
and I believe that the freedom of crowdfunding
helped the developers big time for that.
And it's what I think Kickstarter campaigns
that tap into nostalgia
should use as a ground rule:
The will to take bold decisions that
"the bastards with the money"
simply wouldn't grant you.
Because in a time when most games are really
just about flow
and the pedantic avoidance of frustration
of any kind,
Obduction has the boldness to steer back to
a slow and deliberate playstyle
that requires an awful lot of patience, the
will to take actual notes on real paper
and that embraces a certain amount of ... boredom...
as a core part of its experience.
It's definitely not a game for everyone.
But if you really want to enjoy it in the
way it is supposed to be enjoyed,
then stay.
the hell.
away from any kind of guide or walkthrough!
Rather go in with the knowledge that you will
get stuck, more than once, often for hours
- but that it's a place that you can come
back to every day, a peaceful place,
for a long period of time...
If that sounds like something you could find
enjoyment in,
then Obduction could take you on a journey
that will feel like a
long and epic cerebral adventure, that requires
commitment, dilligence and perseverance.
*mumbles* "Uhh, who's there?"
"Hang on, I'm coming!"
"on my way!"
*things.breaking*
"Alright hang on I'll open the fucker.."
"The devil are you?!"
"Ohh, wait I got an idea... you're one o-dem
fellas supportin' this channel on Patreon, right?!"
"Hang on hang on, I got the list right here...
got it right... here..."
"So it's uuuh, Caroline Mills"
"Simon Andersson"
"Lucas"
"Travis Deng"
"Even Tekro"
"James Lynch"
"Luke Johnson"
"Danny Sendel"
"Darkblue1... umm just the first one apparently..."
"Tiago Pereira Dos Santos Silva From Porto,
Portugal..
huh, that's a mouthful!"
"Milan Vujinovic"
"Carlos Vega...
huh, like the guy from Street Fighter, funny..."
"Uuh, Max Bensimon"
"Marissa Martinez"
"Michelle Stoliker"
"uuuhm...
Kelvin Bombach"
"Kristopher Kolish"
"Nicholas Stephenson"
"Ronny Meinert"
"Ian Melancon"
"and uuuh...
Dewi Wahyu Hendrayani!"
"You among dem fellas.. or the ones scrolling
along the sidebar?"
"Well, what are you waitin' for?!
Go on, hop over, join them and... y'know"
"I'll keep working on my machinery"
"Welp, go go!
C'mon... time's a wastin'!"
"I'll wait here and... umm.. see you when
you're done!"
"Take care!"
