Has your dad ever gotten so mad at you and your brother that he trapped you both in books that require magical red and blue pages to set you free but some guy you don't even know has to find them by solving shitty gear puzzles? contact me right now please

Myst is a game I find downright haunting. I'm not sure whether that was the intention, but the lonely atmosphere, eerie soundtrack, and uncanny nature of early pre-rendered graphics definitely gives it a certain aura that I'm not able to shake. I played Myst with the lights off, something I only do for games that are explicitly labeled as "horror," yet it does such a good job at provoking unease in me that it feels entirely deserving of that treatment.

As I was building my Saturn collection I was surprised to find Myst and its sequel Riven: The Sequel to Myst were both ported to the console. "What an atrocious way to play Myst" I thought, then downloaded the ISO and burned the fucker onto a disc. Sure enough, it's about the least optimal way to pay this game. Scrolling between screens is agonizingly slow, with each new image causing the disk drive's laser head to click horribly as it searches for the correct image to load. I never put much stock into the idea of burned games wearing down the Saturn's disk drive, but the noises coming from my console while playing this game had me legitimately worried I was doing something destructive. You can at least change the speed of the cursor, though playing a point-and-click adventure game will always feel less satisfying on a gamepad. There is Saturn mouse support but... come on. I'm not searching the secondhand market and shelling out just to play a couple FMV adventure games. At that point I might as well play Myst on PC!

Of course there's plenty that's already been said about how arbitrary some of the puzzles are in this game, but it's still worth bringing up. I have no idea how some people solved these back in the day other than clicking around and hoping something in the world reacts. There's a number of puzzles with telegraphed solutions, though even those may require you to keep a notebook on hand to keep track of clues. I think Myst is best enjoyed without a guide, having all the solutions really robs the game of some of its atmosphere, but I also can't fault anyone for not wanting to beat their head against a wall until they make progress.

In fact, I think I don't have anything positive to say about the gameplay at all. I didn't care for rotating a gigantic fortress or redirecting water in the Ewok village, and my tone deaf ass wants to ring the neck of whoever designed the rocketship puzzle. But I could steep myself in the world of Myst for hours despite all that. It's a game that gets by on vibes alone. Traversing the different Ages (see: levels) feels like moving between one dream to the next, and indeed the creators of these worlds are presented both as programmers and lucid dreamers. Though they can change the very nature of worlds on a whim, their journals are written from the perspective of explorers in awe of how these Ages take shape. As a meta narrative for creating a story it's a bit on the nose, but I think it's incredibly interesting nonetheless.

The story of how the game got made is also fascinating, I'd definitely recommend checking out the Ars Technica interview with Rand Miller as well as the original Making of Myst documentary. It's clear a lot of thought and love went into creating the game, and the Miller's talents are undeniable. It's hard then to simply write the game off as being aged, no matter how obtuse or clunky it can be. What Cyan was doing at the time was unprecedented, and it's success was well earned.

Now if you'd please bring me more blue pages. Under no circumstance should you bring me red pages, I am deathly serious about this. Blue pages ONLY. Please, my freedom is on the line! I just need you to go into this Greek library and solve a numerology puzzle involving the birthdays of every sitting US president. No, where are you going? Come back! I haven't even told you about the crossword puzzle that has to be solved using a dead language! Noooooooo!

Myst is a trip.

This game is like a puzzle box. You know, those wooden toys for 11-year-olds and grandpas that have some hidden trick to opening them. (Maybe that wide age appeal is how this ended up being the only game I ever beat with my parents) Except inside that puzzle box are five more boxes. And each of those smaller puzzle boxes is connected to even more puzzle boxes that are hidden in other rooms of your house. And half of THOSE puzzle boxes are only functional if you've got the right combination of puzzle boxes unlocked in the attic. And two distant relatives are both pressuring you via Skype about which puzzle boxes you need to be focused on unlocking, and you don't know who to trust because you're not even sure how you got in the house in the first place or how you're going to get out and if you even like these puzzle boxes and WHAT WAS ATRUS THINKING

How could I not rate this as a masterpiece? It's a classic.

It was another one of these games that my parents happened to have on their PC when I was growing up. As a six year old I would just wander around this 90's-CGI pre-rendered island not knowing what the hell any of it was or what was going on, just clicking things and seeing what happened.

A few years ago I downloaded it on my phone and played it properly. I got pretty close to the end and then just never got around to finishing it. Perhaps this game will always remain: a MYSTery to me

It's been almost three decades since Myst's release and its world is somehow still just captivating. The bizarre mechanisms, aged artifacts and writings of those now gone both serve to create this sense of connection with another time, another place and the former inhabitants, whilst also emphasising how alone you are right now as you wander these abandoned and oftentimes silent lands, proceeding as an archaeologist of once magically conjured worlds.

As alluring as this sounds Myst is certainly far from perfect. The caves section was a wholly miserable low-point for me, sufficiently awful that I looked up a guide to save myself some pain, the 'good ending' I found fell flat on its face for me, and just generally a fair chunk of the puzzle-solving in Myst has been out-performed by time and those that would follow in its footsteps. Really Myst has aged substantially more than my rating for it necessarily indicates and that makes it hard for me to recommend as such, but the whole thing is just so fascinating to me, and whilst its age has led to some frustration in parts it also adds an almost meta element to playing it for the first time nowadays like the archaeological pursuits your character is engaging with in these mystical worlds are also being reflected in turn by you unearthing this old, time-worn game and trying to figure out what makes it tick.

Myst falls into the category of great games that, with a good remake, would easily be considered classics. I found myself immediately gripped by the world, scouring the environments for any potential clue, reading personal journal entries and taking actual, physical notes with a pen and paper of what I considered to be important. When I finally came across the critical information I lacked, I often almost instantly formed a hypothesis based on it. And the game tends to earn this kind of engagement, because the puzzles are simply fantastic. Both mechanically and internally, they make perfect sense and require the player to fill in the logical leaps based on available information. It never condescends, but neither does it feel esoteric.

Beyond mechanics, the game has an undeniable 90's charm to it, with cheesy voice (over-)acting and pre-recorded live-action cutscenes. Considering how antiquated it is, it's all surprisingly engaging, and the game (rightfully) lacks any kind of shame in it's story, presentation and performances; it plays everything absolutely straight, and I adore that kind of earnestness in any creative endeavor. These story moments never overstay their welcome, in fact most can simply be ignored, but I was surprised at how compelling it became once I understood how this "universe" works internally. All of this is rounded off by some surprisingly great music, which plays at key moments in the game to cap-off puzzle development; it has a style so off-the-wall, so 90's, you likely haven't seen much anything like it since, giving Myst a truly unique identity.

I didn't love all of it, though.

Myst has all pre-rendered backgrounds which have aged about as well as you'd expect from an early-90's game. This is par for the course with point-and-click games, and it never looks ugly (in fact it's quite the contrary), but the trouble comes from two distinct but non-overlapping sources:

1) the lack of angles from which to view an area or object. I can say that at least one stage is made more difficult simply due to the static camera position, which makes basic navigation of the stage cumbersome; the lack of animation in the backgrounds also makes the consequences of your interaction with the world challenging to discern;

and
2) the non-linearity of the world. While I would normally commend a game for giving the player total agency in regards to which order they tackle the game's content, if you don't carefully consider and balance the experience properly, players can very easily get stuck, or have an inverse difficulty curve, leaving a poor (and flawed) impression of the game's consistency. In Myst there's a clear (ideal) order to play the stages. Not just according to difficulty, (I actually think the easiest stage should be second) but also according to available information. The hardest puzzle in the game can be brute-force'd, but the critical information necessary to understand what the puzzle is even asking is found in another level.

I would normally have no problem with this. But I also would normally have the ability to backtrack and visit another stage should I get stuck. This is a major problem for Myst, because there's no way to escape the stage you're on, except for solving the puzzle. This isn't just a mechanical choice, either; there's a lore explanation that prevents backtracking, and it seriously hurts the game's progression. Luckily, this sort of thing can be fixed by having a friend tell you, "Hey, do [X] stage last. Trust me."

Myst has some fatal flaws that hold it back from greatness, but if you're trying to scratch the puzzle-solving itch of Outer Wilds, or just have a weekend to spare, there are worse ways to pass the time than this.

Edit: After having played the two remakes, I have concluded the best way to enjoy Myst is through the 2014 realMyst: Masterpiece Edition version. I don't love every change they made, but it's probably the best way to enjoy the game now.

Este videojuego (de point and click) lo conseguí con la ya desaparecida revista GameLive, eran mis años mozos y mis primeros pinitos como jugona (que recuerdos, acabar los deberes pronto y
ponerme a jugar) Este juego estaba ÍNTEGRO en inglés, y yo, por aquel entonces no lo hablaba apenas y lo entendía poco… Solución: diccionario al ladito del ordenador y lo que no entendía, apuntado, buscado y a seguir con la aventura.
Este primer videojuego sienta las bases y hace de presentación de personajes y el porqué de las consecuencias de los demás…

Its a piece of gaming history that was essential in inspiring later works, but judged by modern standards its largely been made obsolete.

And I'm not saying this in the sense that 'old is bad'. Tolkien is still one of the best fantasy writers despite decades of work in the genre. The plays of Ancient Greece still hold up despite millennia of works building off of them. Oftentimes, even while mediums grow and improve, the originals still have a quality to them that can ensure they're still worth visiting for reasons apart from their historical value.

Myst does not fall into that category. Its puzzles are incredibly obtuse and generally unenjoyable. Virtually all of them will be solved in one of two ways: either you've hit your head against the wall for long enough that you finally brute forced your way into a solution or you've solved it ages ago but need to keep trekking between various locations and getting precise inputs so that you can actually progress past the puzzle. The worlds themselves are the biggest draw, but even they feel uninteresting. Their nature as a platform to give you puzzles is obvious from the beginning and, while they have their visual appeal, its hardly anything special enough to make trudging through the puzzles actually worth it.

Ultimately, I just don't see the value in revisiting Myst anymore. By today's standards, what the game does well is hardly impressive and what it does poorly is egregious. Myst is still valuable from the perspective of a historian or anyone else interested in the evolution of gaming as a medium. But for a player? There just isn't enough good and far too much bad for this to be a worthwhile experience.

Riven is pretty good though. Play that instead.

i bet this shit hit different in 1993

regardless it's still relatively cool, although the puzzles can be quite antiquated at times but it's so awesome when you figure one out its not really a huge deal and they kinda balance one another out. of note i did pull up a guide when i felt completely clueless but i tried to only use it when i was at an absolute brickwall and only to get over that one roadblock and then put it down right after. worldbuilding is dope and apparently the puzzles are a bit less obtuse in riven which definitely makes me look forward to that lol