I played about seven hours of Obduction, with its VR patch, yesterday. It's currently getting destroyed in the VRoverse because:
a) The graphics are a huge step down from the flat version
b) Movement is teleportation- and pie-rotation-only. No direct motion, no smooth turning.
c) It's not unusual to see a brief (maybe eigth-of-a-second) loading screen every 50 feet or so.
d) Whenever you use a vehicle (elevator, train, car, etc.), the game superimposes a porthole-sized vignette.
It's also getting knocked for being either Move-only or Dualshock-only, but that's just wrong - it's one of the VR games, like Skyrim, that only shows you the controls for whatever controller is currently turned on. I've played with both the Dualshock and the Moves, and it works with both. I think it's best with the Moves, and you really only need one - having two will give you two hands, but you only need a single hand to manipulate everything in Obduction, and the buttons are exactly duplicated on both your left and right hand. The Dualshock does give you the ability, via the sticks, of controlling simultaneously both where you'll teleport to and what direction you'll be facing (some other game used the same control scheme, but I can't remember which - maybe Invisible Hours), which I don't seem to be able to do with the Moves. But manipulating objects is less clumsy with a Move controller.
Other than the controller thing, these are all real issues, and especially egregious now that PSVR has been available for over a year. My understanding is that Sony insists the comfort aids have to be enabled by default, but not being able to dial them down or turn them off is a real let-down, and genuinely startling at this point in VR's development. I also expect Obduction won't go the Skyrim route of patching in an ability to remove the comfort settings later - Cyan's a very small indie studio to start with, and (pure speculation on my part) it's very possible that many who worked on the game moved onto other projects and companies after the initial PC version shipped. I doubt they have the staff, resources, or experience to continue working on this game without additional capital coming in.
I actually didn't find the graphics as bad as people are complaining. Many are saying it looks worse than Skyrim (which I like enough that I've had no problem putting over 100 hours into the VR version), but Obduction's less-realistic, cartoonish graphics I think fare better in their reduced-resolution version than Skyrim's downscaling. The flat-screen PS4 version got bad reviews for stutter, so they clearly had to do a massive downscaling of graphics intensity to meet the higher-framerate demands for VR. That said, I looked at some footage of the PC version on YouTube last night and...it's best not to do that until after you've finished/abandoned the VR version of Obduction. The game looks gorgeous on PC, and while the VR version isn't the worse thing I've seen in VR - I think it's perfectly acceptable (although text is hard to read until you're inches away from it) - but it really is a huge step down from the 2D version on a capable PC.
The mandatory, unremovable comfort settings are annoying, and they make interacting with objects more finicky than they should be - it's easy teleport either too far from (out of arm's reach) or too close to (so it's actually inside you) a button/lever/interactable object, and since you can't simply back up, to reposition yourself you need to rotate a few clicks, teleport away, turn back to the object, and then try teleporting again to a better spot. They really do need a "back away a half foot" button.
As an ancient, wizened gamer who's played all the Myst games, when they first released, I have to admit that there's a certain initial nostalgic element to the comfort settings, though. For completely different reasons, the first Myst games only allowed movement from node to node, restricted turning to set angles at each node, and only showed a tiny window of pre-rendered motion when you were in a vehicle. So, you know, there's that.
So, is it the worst VR game yet? Absolutely not. For the small number of gamers who a) can get used to these limitations, and b) still enjoy Myst-style puzzle games (probably an even smaller minority), VR still delivers a sense of scale on the extraordinary environments and fantastical machinery of this game that no other version can (note: it will take you a few hours before you find your way out of the introductory area to the more breathtaking ones). By definition this game is not for everyone - whether or not we're talking about the VR version - and the VR version has some very unfortunate shortcomings by design rather than by failure to execute on intended design, but after putting in seven hours I know that I'll be putting more time into the VR version (a conclusion I would not have reached after the first hour or two). There's just something essentially compelling about being in a lonely, intriguing, Myst-like environment, physically interacting with buttons, levers, wheels, and doors, instead of just watching it on a screen.
