Both Obduction Endings Explained

Hello everyone, and welcome to “Spoiler Alert,” a PlayStation LifeStyle original feature that gives the PSLS community a safe place to come and discuss spoilers about various games, while providing spoiler-filled videos of the endings and other major plot points. If you want to see the latest games’ endings and talk about it, you’ve come to the right place! This time, it’s the Obduction endings under the microscope.

Obduction is the latest game from Myst and Riven creator Rand Miller and the team at Cyan Worlds. Having launched last year on PC, the game is now available on PS4 with PSVR compatibility to be coming soon. While my time with Obduction was hampered by technical problems, I was enamored with how well the entire game revealed plot through puzzles that naturally fit into the environment, or used the environment to tell a story that became a critical puzzle solution. The world building in Obduction feels cohesive, and the mystery does have a satisfying conclusion.

Be warned, from here forward there are major spoilers for Obduction. If you don’t want to be spoiled, turn away now. If you haven’t read our SPOILER FREE review, you should go check it out.

Here’s a picture of the campfire from the very start of Obduction to separate you from the spoilers that lie in wait below.

Obduction’s premise is that portions of Earth have been stolen away and placed on an alien planet. Early exploration shows a conglomeration of buildings and environments that don’t seem to belong together all in one place, the borders of each being oddly circular in shape. It seems like this hodge-podge was once a community, but it’s currently empty, and documents scattered about hint at a war with alien beasts. There’s an entire lore and history of the people and aliens that I won’t go into because an entire book could be written with the details found scattered around the game.

In the end, it is discovered that portions of planets from various places and times have been swapped out. For example, the Arizona desert sitting in the middle of the alien planet is swapped out for a chunk of Soria (the final Mofang alien planet) that becomes lodged in the middle of Arizona on Earth. This becomes clear when you finally visit Soria and rise over a crest to see Arizona in the distance. This fact becomes crucial to many of the puzzles in the game’s latter half.

Now to both of the Obduction endings. Ending one is the bad ending, and can be obtained if you plug C.W.’s battery in. By plugging the battery in, you are allowing human will to subvert what nature was trying to do, and C.W. is successful in swapping Hunrath back to the Arizona desert it was plucked from. Only problem is the world seems like it’s fallen to an apocalypse, and there’s a sandstorm rolling in. C.W. may have gotten you home, but he’s killed himself, you, and everyone else in Hunrath in the process.

The second ending is happier. If you forget to (or actually dig into the lore scattered throughout the game and figure out that you shouldn’t) plug the battery in, the spheres of worlds are all transported to a lush green paradise. It seems that the tree had the task of seeding pieces of society from across time and space to subvert certain doom and start a brand new society. The humans who didn’t understand and were frightened of this change had actually caused the process to stall with the bleeder that you blow up. With the bleeder destroyed, and C.W.’s machine not targeting teleportation back to Earth, nature is allowed to save some of humanity and alien-kind to begin a new world.

Obduction obviously has a lot more depth than I was able to shorthand within a 20 minute video and two paragraphs (including the war with the Mofang, the cryo-pods, and the other alien races), so if you noticed anything about Obduction’s story or lore that you want to bring up, feel free to discuss it in the comments below Stay tuned for PlayStation LifeStyle’s next Spoiler Alert feature to discuss spoilers on the biggest games.

“Spoiler Alert” is a feature from PlayStation LifeStyle that showcases the latest games’ ending(s), and gives the community a safe place to come and discuss spoilers with other people. If you want to see the latest game endings and talk about it, you’ve come to the right place.