Watch the trailer for Myst's spiritual successor, Obduction

It's a good year for gorgeous, brutally challenging puzzle games. In January we had The Witness, and this June we're getting Obduction — a new game from Cyan, the studio behind Riven and Myst. Cyan calls Obduction the spiritual successor to Myst, and it's easy to see why that is from the game's first trailer, which was released on Thursday.

You can click around the world, Myst-style

Obduction puts you in a similarly beautiful and mysterious open world with the goal of finding a way home. There's a sci-fi element this time around (also, a weird prog rock thing), but the general conceit of exploring a strange, once-inhabited place remains the same. For Obduction, Cyan has gone fully 3D, so you won't have to click around from screen to screen like you did in Myst (although Cyan is also building a setting into Obduction that'll let you play with Myst-style clicking if you really want to).

Cyan funded the production of Obduction on Kickstarter, raising over $1.3 million to make the game happen. Though it's been a long time since Myst, Cyan did spend about a decade and a half after the game's 1993 release creating sequels for it. Since then, it's also ported Myst and its sequel Riven to iOS; both games are also available, in many different editions, on Steam.

Still, Cyan is making a big deal out of Obduction, positioning the game as a revival for the studio and a return to its roots. It doesn't have to do much to sell old Myst fans on the idea of a new adventure. This teaser suggests it can still create a compelling world — hopefully the next teaser will show whether it can still create wonderfully maddening puzzles, too.

• ViaRock, Paper, Shotgun
• SourceCyan (YouTube)