This week, I invite you to discover Autopsy, an immersive adventure game from the developers of Myst and Riven (Cyan).
How not to tell you about a game that is the worthy successor of the mythical Myst, the first game to have made me spend a sleepless night! It's been a while since I waited for such a project on Kickstarter ... Obduction takes us into a new world with magnificent landscapes and complex architecture, where every corner must be explored in order to move forward in a captivating story where everything is to discover, without forgetting the many puzzles to solve. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Myst monument, a game that launched a new genre where you seek to understand your environment rather than test your reflexes. The opportunity to dust off the concept with new technologies (the game will run under Unreal Engine 4), in a new world just as immersive, we hope.
The game begins with our abduction on a clear night when the moon is shining. A strange artifact from the sky takes us to we do not know where (neither when, nor why). We have to explore this strange world to understand what is happening to us and find some snippets of answers. Why is there this old abandoned farmhouse with beautiful white fences in the middle of this foreign landscape?
Obduction has a few key things in common with Myst and Riven:
- Build each element for the player to appropriate the virtual world.
- Offer an intuitive and transparent interface.
- Reveal the story through exploration, not through cutscenes.
- Vary the difficulty of the puzzles. The player must own all the pieces to solve all the puzzles, even the toughest.
- Balance sound and music to add emotion without distracting or annoying the player.
Cyan has tested most of the options that exist for publishing a game, from self-publishing on floppy disks to publishers who get 88% of the revenue. Currently, they are independent and they wish to remain so. The profits from Myst have allowed the studio to last until then but they now want to create a large-scale project that requires a sum that they do not have: with $ 1.1 million, they will be able to deliver the Obduction adventure on PC and Mac for the end of 2015. But the whole project is flexible: the more money they have, the more places, puzzles, mysteries and locations they can add. They therefore hope to go beyond the main objective to add depth to their universe.
The game, in its digital version, is $ 25. The digital collector's version is $ 45 with some bonuses (soundtrack and artbook), you will need $ 75 for a boxed version. The most fans can spend $ 10 to visit the developers, grab an iPad and participate directly in development!
