Myst is an interesting cultural object that might be a little odd to visit for the first time today. My experience with it was quite positive given the intervening time, despite occasional frustrations.

I think the most striking thing about Myst today is the effectiveness of its pacing and world design. While the actual acting performances are over-the-top, the mechanism of gating the worlds behind journals and puzzles develops an excellent sense of mystery and curiosity.

Reading the journals for the various ages to which you can travel instills a sense of familiarity and anticipation to actually traveling to them. Arriving at an age was exciting, because it meant seeing something in person that you'd only read about, but also an encouraging sense of understanding as you recognize details based on what you've read.

There are a few occasions where it's near impossible to see a particular detail that you must interact with, or to find a path you can travel down in order to get where you need to go. I definitely encourage players to seek out clues or solutions online if they're stuck (I certainly had to a few times). Besides a few of these (probably unintentional) cheap shots, the widely available Masterpiece edition is very playable and very engaging for a sufficiently patient modern player.

absolutely gorgeous early 3D time capsule with a really interesting world. i like myst for its atmosphere and emptiness, which is something i feel the sequels kinda got wrong. myst appeals to me because it just feels like it's me wandering around this weird ass island alone, trying to solve puzzles. interactions with other characters were very sparse, which really helped to build this atmosphere. the later games in the myst series tried adding more characters to talk to, which kind of broke this atmosphere to me, and i didn't really enjoy them as much. that being said, the original myst is absolutely worth your time

to think that i would play a game such as myst when i absolutely despise point and click adventure games because they make me skyrocket my adhd to the stars and yet i managed to finish this one maybe im stronger than i believe

sexy ANerdList recommended this to me as part of this list thanks dude

so long story short I did enjoy the game but I do have some gripes with it that could only be explained by the fact that this game is now almost 30 years old and just thinking about the state of videogames during that time is making me go insane honestly that being said its absolutely unbelievable how this haven't become lost media because I swear getting a “rom” (???) idk whats the name of the format of the game files but ok whatever that one

mind you myst is really weird I read something around this site and there was a lot of good opinions so I HAD to try it out just for emotional value do I think this game is a masterpiece ??? hard to say definitely not for me but I do believe it had some resonance in the entire gaming industry and for that I have to F pay respect BUT its also to be said that its not as enjoyable an experience nowadays as it wouldve probably been during its releasing time its like how I have a lot of respect for the beatles but I would rather shoot myself in the migraines than listen to one of their albums

I have to come clean here i didn't really understand most of the storybeats in here so there's this guy who found a book and got sucked and licked and and slurped into the world of myst that I'm pretty sure of now from that point ONWARDS my understanding of everything in the game starts to crumble they begin to push in front of me lots of books and infodumps that I for the life of me did NOTSSSS read what the actual FUCK this is definitely not an ADHD friendly game ong all the ADHDies in the room please be advised and also the “do shit and wait for animation” was a red flag and also the talking books brothers that have the tendency of saying 10 lines of dialogue in 5 minutes its such a fucking bore WOW really detrimental to the pacing ngl

so there's these two brothers who are played by real life people and I didnt want to be that close to their face but ok go on let them cook so they hate each other and are not willing to have some truce for some reason so youre inbetween two brothers trying to get out of their book prisons and to do that you have to get some more pages in different ages of myst that you can access by other books

this game has a heavy focus on books and lord knows I don't like books so yeah the story isnt really that interesting TO ME but it sure can get its point across and has a really good way of setting the general vibe and atmosphere for the game

and then this is the gameplay loop find a “portal” get in the page aka another age of myst find either a blue page or a red page or both or anything and go back put the blue/red page back into the brothers books and listen them talk and talk and talk and talk wow they never FUCKING shut up and most of the time they don't even say anything interesting just “lemme out / fuck my brother / look at my nostril” rinse and repeat the end

so yeah even the ending no spoiler leaves a lot to be desired its like ok cool you did all the puzzles and shit and now you can have a conclusion to the story ……. this is the conclusion bye and then youre literally left with nothing umh ok I guess I'll get the next part of the story in the following game(s) even though I'll probably only stop at riven I'm not sure I can take 5 more games of this kind in the series that being said I liked the story for what it is but it's definitely not the winning point of this experience it has a lot of different worldbuilding elements that I did enjoy but most of the shit here is left unexplained like why are these people trapped in books and why are you also trapped in a book now whatever

so let's talk meat of the game now because theres a LOT

now at first I gotta say I was not impressed with the graphics mind you this is a pre rendered screens kind of game which means they're gonna have hi res pics formatted into a 10 byte disk and they're gonna get all grimy and grainy and shit usual final fantasy 7 through 9 psx era kind of art direction . now at first I was not impressed I did not think the island of myst was really that gorgeous it has some pretty landscape some great monuments a nice detailed library and cool effects but there's that the trees were fucking cones the buildings all looked plasticky and the entire island just felt kind of low budget (it was probably a high effort during that time and definitely blew some people's minds im not that stupid) so this was my first impression but as soon as I got to the different eras of myst i swear theres some of the most beautifully rendered screens and effects I've ever seen to this day now im not really a huge point and click fan so I don't know the graphical advancements of stuff in this genre but wow some of the places in here were fucking beautiful literally could not believe they could get something this high detailed and gorgeous and I still have no idea how in the hell they managed to do that I have to watch a documentary of some kind because that had to take an INCREDIBLE amount of effort even for today's standard some of the graphical effects and sceneries are still jawdropping im betting

so that to say that they really did a good job in the art department and its probably way this game was so well received in the previous millennium the vibes are UNMATCHED all the different ages of myst are characterised by a very specific sound design that makes them really intriguing and about the sound design umhhhhhh I'm pretty conflicted because theres some of the most forward thinking tunes I could think of and also some of the most ear piercing sounds made from the humankind . most of the sounds dabble into the ethereal / mysterious domain theres not really music to talk about but some of these “songs” really heighten different moments in the playthrough and every time you find something they usually put this really spooky tune thats SO GOOD like not good as in “I would listen to it” good but as in “sets the tone beautifully” good

myst really plays into the spooky territory mainly because youre gonna find some really fucking scary places and then they're gonna be like “ok now solve a three X inequality problem” girlie that shits the scariest thing I've ever seen in my entire life purr

that to say myst knows what's up with setting an atmosphere every single age is characterised by some surface level degree of wonder and them the deeper you dig the scarier are the secrets that are gonna unfold now this game is not inherently “scary” horror games don't have any effect on me but it's nice to see that they actually manage to convey the feeling of “being lost in an unknown environment” kind of vibe

so uhhhhhh I guess I'll need to talk about the THING…

this game is a puzzl- shoots himself in the head no jk but everyone knows I fucking hate puzzle games and I swear yall I TRIED to play this game walthrough free but the most I managed to do was “walk” around the island of myst trying to get a clue of what to do next for like a hour so since I fucking HATE not knowing what do to in a game I decided it was time to boot up a walkthrough from like 2001 literally something ancient the page was using some god forgotten coding language literally transported back to early 2000s (do you ever think about the fact that stuff you read online could be written from people who are now dead ? I always think about this its really going to deteriorate my dissociation with myself and reality) and I could manage to complete the puzzles with this walkthrough MOST OF THE TIMES

now after finishing the game I can confidently say that without a guide I wouldve NEVER been able to finish this game these puzzles are so fucking hideous sometimes I would just solve them and be like how the FUCK was I supposed to know I was gonna translate piano keys to frequencies or like or like the voltage combination and don't get me fucking started on that SHIT FUCKING MAZEEEEEEE GRRRRRRRRR OH MY GOD

every time I was under the spell that this game came out yesterday the gameplay made me come back to reality literally could not believe this gameplay could be real in 1997 WITHOUT walkthroughs I wouldve never played games anymore in the entirety of my life

I have no idea how a person should solve this shit without any sort of guidance but I digress I know the anniversary edition has hints of some kind that could help you but I decided stupidly that the original lost media one was the greatest choice

also that maze fucking suck the developers were under some LSD type of alterate state of consciousness because theres no way in hell somebody could enjoy THAT

so umhhhhhh I wasn't the target of this game i hate puzzle games and i hate point and click games but I found some stuff that I liked and some stuff that I hated and thats what love is all about maybe I will check out either the remakes and PROBABLY I'm gonna play riven because I want to know how they'll continue to implement real life videos into a videogame with the fucking cameras and computers of 1997

why can father myst git it

first time i've played this style of game and i was very very surprised to see myself enjoying it so much.

the puzzles were fine i guess, although mostly nonsensical, but the story is what really captivated me.

after this, i think i'll be playing the rest of the myst series

Myst è un cimelio storico, non solo per il suo impatto sul mercato videoludico, essendo divenuto uno dei primi "best-seller" per PC con 10 milioni di copie vendute, ma anche per la sua influenza creativa senza confini, riuscendo a toccare anche il mondo della televisione per quanto riguarda la serie "Lost".
Molti aspetti dell'immaginario fantasy o esplorativo odierno derivano da questo gioco e tanto basta per sentire la necessità di provarlo almeno una volta nella propria vita.

La fantasia, l'immaginazione, il potere della creatività da difendere a tutti i costi dal pensiero forzato e manipolatorio, questi sono i temi cruciali, oggi più che mai attuali, affrontati in questa affascinante avventura nella misteriosa isola di Myst, in cui le parole scritte diventano realtà e l'inchiostro diventa sangue.
Inizialmente può sembrare complesso e di difficile comprensione, ma in seguito ad un'esplorazione più approfondita, dopo essersi presi il dovuto tempo per riflettere, tutto diverrà più chiaro e la progressione più lineare... e questo purtroppo rappresenta un problema per gli appassionati del genere, che non troveranno il proverbiale "pane per i loro denti" proprio quando la storia giungerà al suo climax. Interessante e comoda, tuttavia, la funzione "zip", che permette al giocatore di teletrasportarsi in zone di interesse già visitate in precedenza, a patto che esse siano visibili dal punto in cui ci si trova.

Nel gioco sono presenti pochi dialoghi, tutti doppiati e recitati da attori reali in maniera ottimale, sia in lingua originale che in italiano. Il design dei suoni è convincente e ben strutturato, ma la colonna sonora originale stona un po' con le atmosfere fiabesche dell'opera, risultando talvolta confusionaria talvolta fastidiosa e fuori luogo. Fortunatamente può essere disabilitata in qualsiasi momento.

Esteticamente, inoltre, riesce tutt'oggi a fare la sua bella figura, al netto di qualche animazione un po' "antiquata".

Al di là di tutto, che possa piacere o no, l'esperienza di Myst è unica nel suo genere e, indipendentemente dai gusti personali, non potrà fare a meno di lasciare un ricordo indelebile nella mente dei giocatori.
Perciò giocateci, se possibile alla versione originale del 1993 su una macchina virtuale come ScummVM (ovviamente solo dopo aver acquistato il CD originale).

I suspect Myst will go overlooked by the vast majority of modern audiences due to an (arguably) lackluster presentation, yet that may just be the ace up its sleeve. When you compare Myst to any other puzzle game, it's sort of mind-blowing how it has pretty much only individual puzzles per area, barring those having to directly interact with the Age gimmick, and yet there's next-to-zero communicative failure on a sensory side regarding what those puzzles do. Even if you're pixel-hunting to discover the mechanisms you need, or just clicking hopelessly to find another screen you missed somewhere, the actual mechanisms at play are immediately quite clear-cut and intriguing in function. They're industrial, you read the cues of how you'd physically interact with those objects and voila, you've done it. The scope of the areas leaves you still scratching your head about the greater purpose of anything you find in spite of this though, and it's this combination that makes Myst both a solid game for those completely unfamiliar with video games, and those who've spent their life on the medium. Almost every technique here is beginner-friendly, but doesn't push away hardcore players, so much so that the only method of movement is extremely intuitive in a way I think almost anyone could immediately grasp, and is hard to formulate solid complaints against at the same time given Myst's goals. It'll lure in newcomers... but it'll also interest anyone deeply familiar with video games as a whole, with its fascinating setting and worldbuilding that don't fall clearly into any genre of fiction, alongside the creative puzzle concepts, which make the process of "fucking around with (effectively) alien contraptions" all the more alluring. If there's any point to take away from all this: designers of the future, and players, should probably go back to Myst to voice how to clearly communicate unique gameplay ideas without overt text being a driving factor, because it's excellent nonetheless.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/11/a-look-back-at-myst-1993/

With so much time passing since it’s release, it’s hard to get across just how big Myst was back in 1993. It became the highest selling video game at the the time, selling over 3 million copies world wide, and was only surpassed by the original Sims 9 years later in 2002. And while the series has unfortunately gone to the wayside since it’s original game, it still has a place in gaming history.

When Myst was first released, it was so popular that it was the thing that finally got people to move on from the old 3 and a half inch Floppy Disks, which contained a meager 1.44 megabytes, to the then brand new format of CDs, which contained up to 700 megabytes on a single disc, hundreds of times bigger than what a Floppy Disk could ever hope to achieve, and Myst was the flagship title that really showed off what that extra space could do. High quality music, better looking graphics, characters being able to have voice acting that gave the characters more of a personality, and it even allowed for videos.

The version of Myst that I’ll be checking out is Myst: Masterpiece Edition because it’s the version that is the most widely available version of the game. It’s a remastered and updated version of the original game that came out 7 years after the release of the original version with remastered graphics and sound. Plus there isn’t any real reason to go back to the original version beyond nostalgia, curiosity, or if your a mega Myst fan.
Your first real look at Myst Island.

In Myst, you play as “The Stranger”, a nameless person who is a stand in for anyone playing the game, who comes across a book with the word MYST on it’s cover. After reading through the book, which describes a fantastical island, you come across the final page, which, to your surprise and confusion, contains a moving picture of the island that was described in the book.

After touching the image, you find yourself being teleported to the island. Now stuck there, you have no choice other than to explore the island. Located in the center of the island is a library that contains shelves of mostly burned books, which a few have survived and contain a brief history of the island, along with two other shelves containing one book each, a Red Book and a Blue Book.

When opening these books, you come to find that each has someone trapped inside them. Sirrus, who is stuck in the Red Book, and Achenar, who is stuck in the Blue Book. Both tell you to not trust the other one and to find the corresponding missing colored pages from their books and to bring them back to them. And this is where the game picks up.

You’re not only left to explore the island, but across the island are similar books to the one you originally came across called MYST, called “Ages”, in which colored pages are located. To gain access to each Age, you have to solve a puzzle to get to the book linking to that Age. Hints to these puzzles are not only located in the few normal books that survived being burned in the library in the middle of the island.

Myst is a first person point-and-click adventure game and it’s gameplay is about as basic as you would expect from a game likes. You point and click on certain parts of the screen to make your way through each location. It can be more accurately be described as interactivity than gameplay. There are a few spots that are a little confusing to navigate because it places you a direction that doesn’t always do a good job of setting up where you can and can’t go, but it’s few and far between. The game also comes with a feature called ‘Zip Mode’, which lets you quickly move around whatever location you’re in by hovering over where you’ve previously big and pressing a hot spot on the screen that’s indicated with the cursor changing from a hand to a lightening bolt. It can come in handy for those who don’t have the patience to click through each screen.

You can complete each Age in whatever order you want, who is both a burden and a blessing, which I’ll get into in a minute. You can read up on each Age in the previously mentioned library on Myst Island, so you don’t have to go into each new location blind.

But despite the fact that Myst is so simple in it’s gameplay and concept, it’s execution is where it starts to waver a bit. For starters, you can’t pick up both the Red Page and Blue Page at the same time. I don’t know if this was a deliberate design decision or a limitation of the software and/or hardware, but it effectively means you have to ‘complete’ each Age twice to get both pages to see what both Sirrus and Achenar have to say. Thankfully the game seems to leave all of the puzzles how you left them from when you played through each Age, so replaying them isn’t too bad.

A few of the Ages are easy to get through on a second play. The Channelwood Age (The one with all the trees) isn’t too bad since it’s just flipping a couple of switches and you’re back out of the Age in less than 2 minutes with the second page, but other Ages are a lot more aggravating. Thankfully, Myst also places you right back at the beginning of whatever Age you play no matter how many times you’ve played it before, which means that you can just skip replaying some puzzles, which helps speed the process along.

There are also a few other minor problems that scattered throughout the game, such as the telescope in the Stoneship Age (the one on the boat) being a bit finicky because in order to move it around you have to drag the screen to the left or right and there were a few times that I rushed and I accidentally clicked away from it a few times.

But the low point of the game for me is the Selenitic Age (the one with the rocket ship). A portion of The Selenitic Age has you playing through a maze. And for the players who might have picked this as their first Age to try and complete probably weren’t expecting to have to revisit locations on their first play through, resulting in some people not having mapped it out or not have it memorized. Unless you were one of the few who actually thought to map it out first time around, it just becomes a tedious slog. Having yo navigate a maze through sound cues sounds is a neat idea, but there has never been a good maze, even in the best of games.

It does actually fit with the rest of the Age, with there being noises for clues on how to get through the maze, but I had trouble discerning them from other noises in the maze and it was one of the rare times that I had to look up a guide for a game. I wasn’t going to spend hours of my life to grind out the maze or try to map it out, and I know it wasn’t just me because when I look up reactions to this game, it’s the only section for the game that other people used a guide for.

So the game does help guide you through the maze, but because mazes suck even in the best of games, it was still the worst section of a pretty enjoyable experience.

Myst: Masterpiece Edition also added a general map for whatever location you’re in that highlights anything that you need to pay attention to, which is great for those who are struggling to remember whats located where.

Myst was not the first game to make use of pre-rendered CGI stills for it’s graphics, with games such as ‘Alice: An Interactive Museum’ (1991) and ‘L-Zone’ (1992) coming out the previous years, and ‘The Journeyman Project’ (1993) and ‘Gadget Invention, Travel, & Adventure’ (1993) coming out the same year. But unlike those games, which go for more complex CGI and distinct art styles, Myst instead goes for both a more simplistic art style and more basic with it’s CGI. I’m pretty sure this was due to Myst having a smaller team size that reigned in the scope a bit, but it ends up working in Myst’s favor. And that’s not to say that the other games from the same time period looked bad or aged worse.

Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and eventual writer of his own pre-rendered adventure game ‘Starship Titanic’, was quoted as calling Myst a “Beautiful Void”, naming the trope in the process, when the game originally came out and it’s easy to see why. Interactions with other characters are kept to a minimum and in very specific circumstances, so you’re entirely left to exploring places that empty and have even been abandoned, essentially creating something akin to the feeling of kenopsia, having an eclectic aura, or being a liminal space a few decades before those terms took off and giving it this really distinct feeling.

This was also around the same time that polygons were starting to finally take off more on home computers and consoles. 1993 also had games like the original Star Fox for the Super Nintendo, which was also graphically impressive, and the previous year had the likes of the original Alone in the Dark. But as impressive as they were, no game at the time was going to come even remotely close to showing off what Myst was doing in real time. So the trade off is that while it wasn’t running in real time, it did make the game look impressive in other ways.

It looked so good that Cyan, Inc. released a screensaver with screens from the game, which was back when screensavers were a thing because computers didn’t go into a standby mode that turned the screen off, preventing the image to be burned into the monitor. And this screensaver even has exclusive images that didn’t make it into the game along with behind the scenes content. It’s the equivalent of a company today releasing a 10 hour video onto their YouTube video that’s just game ambiance.

1993 even had ID Software’s Doom, but it wasn’t until 3 years later in 1996 with Quake that having games running smoothly with polygons in real time that it was even feasible for both developers and consumers to work with, so Myst’s graphics were making the best of a very limited situation in multiple ways.

And to add to the other worldly feeling of the game is the memorable soundtrack of the game. Done by Robyn Miller, one of the two brothers who founded Cyan, Inc, a lot of the tracks from the soundtrack adds to the ambiance of each location you’ll visit as well as add to some emptiness that some of the levels create. But it’s not a constant throughout the game, as there are times where it pulls back and lets you just take in the ambient noises of each location, which includes the wind blowing through the trees, water lapping up on the shore, and whatever wildlife resides in a location to walking through some empty caves or through the empty corridors of abandoned buildings.

Both the music and ambient soundscapes show just how alone you are in these locations. Don’t worry, it’s not as creepy as I’m making it sound.

If you want to track down a copy of this game, I would recommend getting the GOG version since it comes with a program called SCUMMVM that means you don’t have to fiddle with anything to get the game running on modern systems. Just boot it up and play.

The original Myst is from a unique period of time where the technology of video games were making giant leaps, which Myst help to make popular. It might be a little rough around the edges compared to more modern games and somewhat limited by the technology of the time, but it’s an enjoyable little adventure game that clearly has the markings of a small team who had some big ideas.

Due to the previously mentioned success, Myst managed to become a franchise, with multiple sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, along with a book series, a comic series that was cancelled half way through its run, and a potential TV mini-series and movie projects that never seemed to get off the ground. After looking back at the original Myst, it’s pretty obvious that it was never really intended to be a franchise, but the developers took advantage of the success that they were given and ran with it.

It even spawned a trend of what were called “Myst Clones”, which all involved going through a series of pre-rendered images, or even worlds made up of photographs of actual locations or real-world sets, in a similar style to Myst. Adventure fans thought that Myst’s popularity would kill the adventure genre by making it “dumbed-down” and making the genre more accessible to more people, along with Doom, which came out the same year, which, according to adventure game fans at the time, required no thought at all to play. The irony is that Myst making it more accessible to people probably made it better because you didn’t have to deal with the genre’s non-stop use of awful logic for puzzles.

Considering that a lot of previous adventure games required brute forcing your way through a game, either because you could easily screw yourself over, wasting hours and even days of your life (I’m looking at you Sierra), or because it only made sense in the designers head and they didn’t take in consideration that that other people would be playing it, or both at the same time, both could mean that you could end up wasting tens of hours of time only to get frustrated and often confused, so a game that made logical sense was a warm welcome.

Myst was even popular enough for Disney to get in contact with Cyan to build a Myst themed island as Disneyland Florida, in which only a limited amount of people would have been allowed onto the island in any given day, with park goers having to figure out what happened to the islands last inhabitants over 11 acres of land, with the whole thing being non-linear, meaning that no two people would have had the same experience. But alas, that never came to be. But from the sounds of it, it probably would have had more success in the modern world of geo-caching and escape rooms.

The library from Myst Island even made it’s way onto an episode of The Simpsons, in the background of the ‘Homer3’ segment of ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’ along with a snippet of the soundtrack, which in turn was featured in the IMAX film Cyberworld 3D, which was the film used to promote the then new IMAX cinemas. Unfortunately, you can’t see the film anymore since it only gets used to test out new IMAX theater before they’re opened to the public.

Looking back at the original Myst, it’s quaint compared to other games that have come out since it’s release, not only on a technical level, with games being able to easily be rendered in real time that look much better than even some of the later Myst games, but with how adventure games are now designed to be more accessible roughly 30 years later (as of this look back at the original Myst), which the original Myst helped to some degree, even with it’s own series, with it’s sequels leaning from the mistakes made in the original.

that FORWARD/BACKTRACK train maze has got to be one of the most vile GAME LENGTHENER adventure game moments I've ever seen!!!!!!

hard to keep motivation when all the basic attempts at interaction AND punishments for failure can squander MINUTES of your life to consecutive unskippable transition scenes or overly large and tricky to navigate fmv hellscapes! just ain't got the patience anymore, man....

classic aesthetic and sound design tho. the breadcrumb-y writing too! really, I was quite captivated and totally tolerating the game's oldschool clunkiness until idk I just couldn't take it anymore. shame..

respect your elders??? i POMPOUSLY acknowledge their EXISTENCE at least~

Also played on DS years later, but this one hits home, used to play with my dad, he kept his copy from before I was born, it was fun to revisit his notes in the Journal that the game used to come with. Once my mom bought me Myst 3 on Xbox cuz she remembered the game, but we didn't have an Xbox in our house so it was always a fun "wonder what that game was like" for years after, too. Just lots of fun memories around this one, so it gets that perfect rating, but I can understand that it's a little slow and esoteric for a lot of people who just want a game to be a fun button masher or fun interactive story.