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It's a strange thing to think about now, but there was a time when Myst was the best-selling computer game of all time. Shifting more copies than even the almighty Doom, Cyan's enigmatic puzzle game about a series of peculiarly crafted islands stirred up feelings of awe, reverence and curiosity. Much of this was due to Myst's extremely abstruse premise. It contained no immediate backstory about you being a hero on a quest to save such and such. It didn't offer an exposition dump grounding you in its pristine world. And it didn't offer much in the way of character interaction. It simply dropped players on a surreal island of monuments - a rocket, a Greek palace, a contemporary lodge - and asked them to have at it until a more recognisable story came into focus.Comparatively, Obduction's intro leaves a little less to the imagination. It begins with narration, for one (though it's intentionally unclear if this is spoken by the player character or someone else), and it grounds the story in a more mundane setting: earth. Set along a starry campsite, your character encounters a floating seed that whisks them away to an alien landscape that resembles a desert ghost town surrounded by clumps of levitating rock. It's eerie, as one might expect being teleported to an alien planet to be, but not creepy. The bright desert canyons bathed in a the warm violet glow of an otherworldly sky offer a calming, serene sort of wonder.
In fact, the most unsettling aspect of this place isn't the unnatural scenery - because we expect that sort of thing from a genre video game - but rather the more man-made finds. This is a world that's littered with the remains of a thriving earthly civilization that's all but vanished for reasons unknown. It's up to you to uncover what went on here. Think Stargate meets Gone Home.
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