Despite what my predjudices might tell me, it must actually be pretty goddamn hard to design a MYST clone, because good lord did a lot of companies seem to struggle with it back in the day. This one is I believe the first attempt from seasoned adventure game originator Sierra, and boy you wouldn't be able to tell that they had any experience at all in the genre, because even the fundamentals of this are boneheaded beyond belief. You're doing the usual FMV actor, pre-rendered world slideshow thing, but instead of trying to get somewhere or advance through areas in a somewhat linear fashion, your goal is to find and capture ten (silly-ass, cartoony) ghosts spread around an absolutely massive and maze-like yet mostly open-ended environment. In order to catch them, though, you need to have the corresponding receptacle, each of which is split into two pieces semi-randomly distributed throughout the game - and guess what, your inventory is exactly one slot big. So what this amounts to is an extreme level of trial and error and backtracking as you find pieces you don't need or can't pick up or ghosts you can't catch (who will damage you! You have a health bar! In a fuckin MYST clone!) before finally getting all three locations lined up in your notes and then doing a run to, you know, complete one tenth of the game's objectives.
Meanwhile, to open the areas, you'll be slogging through puzzles, which are more in the 7TH GUEST style of self-contained little parlor games or physical escape-room-type brain teasers than sprawling MYST-y mechanical stuff. Again, the idea is to make much of the game accessible to you right away in a non-linear fashion if you want to work through it, but unbelievably, things like elevators between areas have randomized puzzles that you have to REPEAT EVERY TIME YOU USE THEM. They're dumb easy little sliding block game things, but are you kidding?
So, yeah, I mean, go ahead and add all that up together and tell me if it sounds like a good time. It's crazy, the more of these knockoffs I play, the more they make MYST and T7G look like absolute miracles.
Meanwhile, to open the areas, you'll be slogging through puzzles, which are more in the 7TH GUEST style of self-contained little parlor games or physical escape-room-type brain teasers than sprawling MYST-y mechanical stuff. Again, the idea is to make much of the game accessible to you right away in a non-linear fashion if you want to work through it, but unbelievably, things like elevators between areas have randomized puzzles that you have to REPEAT EVERY TIME YOU USE THEM. They're dumb easy little sliding block game things, but are you kidding?
So, yeah, I mean, go ahead and add all that up together and tell me if it sounds like a good time. It's crazy, the more of these knockoffs I play, the more they make MYST and T7G look like absolute miracles.