Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/a-look-back-at-realmyst-masterpiece-edition-2014/
I was originally going to look at both the original realMyst and realMyst: Masterpiece Edition in the same article, but my look at the original realMyst was getting a bit wordy, so I split it up into two reviews.
Just like how the original Myst got an updated version with Myst: Masterpiece Edition, realMyst got an updated version of it’s own called realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, that came out in 2014, 14 years after realMyst. Unlike how Myst: Masterpiece Edition was just the original but remastered, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a remake of realMyst in the Unity Engine, so it’s technically the second remake of Myst so far along with being a remake of a remake. Plus it was made on the Unity Engine instead of a proprietary engine, so it ends up being less of a beta test for a whole new engine and more of a proper remake.
This time around there’s not much new to say about realMyst, so this is going to be shorter than my looks at the original Myst and the original RealMyst.
Since there’s not much of a difference between the plot of realMyst and the plot from the original Myst, you can find a plot summary as well as a more in-depth look at the original Myst here and my look at the original realMyst can be found here. The game pretty much contains all of the new content that the original realMyst introduced, including a whole new Age called Rime and better connections to the new Myst games along with the books, so it’s not like you’re missing out on content if you skip over realMyst.
This time around, the controls for realMyst: Masterpiece Edition are more in line with what you would expect from a first person game. The WASD keys are use to walk and mouse to look around. This time around the game forgoes a dead zone in the middle of the screen for the cursor and you just point and click at what you want to interact with. There’s still a little bit of a quirk to it’s design though. To interact with with objects, you right click to freeze the camera to move around the cursor around the area of whatever you’re looking at, and then right click again to go back to moving the camera.
It feels like this is what the original realMyst was trying to do with it’s controls but the developers just couldn’t execute due to their unfamiliarity with first person controls. I still feel like being able to interact with objects without freezing the screen should have been an option, but considering that it runs a lot smoother than the controls in the original realMyst, I can’t really complain too much, since they work fine.
But realMyst: Masterpiece Edition adds in a new gameplay option called ‘Classic Mode’, in which you can navigate the game the same way as the original, but instead of using still images to get around, the game instead mimics the still images by recreating their angle and position in the newer engine. Moving around in this mode can cause a little bit of whiplash when moving around since the game it clearly wasn’t designed with it in mind as the optimal way of moving around, but it’s still a neat little retro throwback. Plus if you’re using the ‘Classic Mode’, holding down shift brings up the still image of wherever you are from the original Myst, allowing you directly compare both the original and the remake, showing off what 21 years of advancement in games looks like.
This time around, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a lot more polished than the original realMyst. It wasn’t always quite so polished though, as the original release of realMyst: Masterpiece Edition was known to crash quite often, but since then the game received a 2.0 update that fixed pretty much all of the bugs and added a bunch of graphical features and updates.
This version of realMyst keeps the day-night cycle that the original realMyst introduced, but with a few changes. The day-night cycle doesn’t happen as quickly as it does in the original realMyst, making it feel like you’re actually spending days in the world of Myst instead of the game just showing off a fancy new graphical feature. The nights in Masterpiece Edition are much darker, way too dark. To compensate for this, the developers added a flashlight. I feel like having a flashlight doesn’t really fit with Myst’s whole aesthetic. If you had to use something, why not a lamp?
There are times when the full moon comes out and brightens up the area to some degree, but it’s still way too dark. I feel like making night not be so dark could have easily fixed this, and you still could have had slightly darker nights when the moon wasn’t out.
Various other changes have also been made across the game. The Stoneship Age is now more stormy than it was in the original realMyst, and thanks to the change to a newer engine, it actually looks more like a storm. The Selenitic Age had it’s day-night cycle removed, but the Channelwood Age now has a day-night cycle. And the moon in Channelwood is now massive.
My only complaint with the graphics is that they left out the whales in the Rime Age, which added a nice bit of atmosphere to that location.
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition does look pretty good for being a game being made by a smaller team.
But just like how the original realMyst re-uses the video files from the original Myst, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition once again uses those same files, in all of their highly compressed glory. And if they were looking a bit shabby by the year 2000, they’re definitely not looking so hot when 2014 rolled around, a whole 21 years after the release of the original Myst, especially since another game came out from another high-profile (for a game series know for having FMV) game series with live action actors, “Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure”, coming out the same year, along with a few other lesser known titles, like “Roundabout” and “Missing: An Interactive Thriller”, and “LocoCycle” coming out the year before.
The thing is that by this point, not only have video games moved on from the CD to DVDs and now digital distribution, but affordable cameras that small teams have also increased in quality, with even the iPhone 6’s recording quality being decent for a consumer grade camera for the time, so I don’t know why these videos weren’t updated for this release. Maybe the developers just didn’t have the budget to got back and update them, and I can’t really get annoyed for something that was probably out of their control.
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition overall is a much better experience than the original realMyst, with better graphics and controls, while keeping the content that realMyst introduced. While I do have a soft spot for that original version of realMyst, I have to recommend this over the original version, not only because it’s the most widely available, but it’s the best version of Myst at the time of it’s release.
I was originally going to look at both the original realMyst and realMyst: Masterpiece Edition in the same article, but my look at the original realMyst was getting a bit wordy, so I split it up into two reviews.
Just like how the original Myst got an updated version with Myst: Masterpiece Edition, realMyst got an updated version of it’s own called realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, that came out in 2014, 14 years after realMyst. Unlike how Myst: Masterpiece Edition was just the original but remastered, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a remake of realMyst in the Unity Engine, so it’s technically the second remake of Myst so far along with being a remake of a remake. Plus it was made on the Unity Engine instead of a proprietary engine, so it ends up being less of a beta test for a whole new engine and more of a proper remake.
This time around there’s not much new to say about realMyst, so this is going to be shorter than my looks at the original Myst and the original RealMyst.
Since there’s not much of a difference between the plot of realMyst and the plot from the original Myst, you can find a plot summary as well as a more in-depth look at the original Myst here and my look at the original realMyst can be found here. The game pretty much contains all of the new content that the original realMyst introduced, including a whole new Age called Rime and better connections to the new Myst games along with the books, so it’s not like you’re missing out on content if you skip over realMyst.
This time around, the controls for realMyst: Masterpiece Edition are more in line with what you would expect from a first person game. The WASD keys are use to walk and mouse to look around. This time around the game forgoes a dead zone in the middle of the screen for the cursor and you just point and click at what you want to interact with. There’s still a little bit of a quirk to it’s design though. To interact with with objects, you right click to freeze the camera to move around the cursor around the area of whatever you’re looking at, and then right click again to go back to moving the camera.
It feels like this is what the original realMyst was trying to do with it’s controls but the developers just couldn’t execute due to their unfamiliarity with first person controls. I still feel like being able to interact with objects without freezing the screen should have been an option, but considering that it runs a lot smoother than the controls in the original realMyst, I can’t really complain too much, since they work fine.
But realMyst: Masterpiece Edition adds in a new gameplay option called ‘Classic Mode’, in which you can navigate the game the same way as the original, but instead of using still images to get around, the game instead mimics the still images by recreating their angle and position in the newer engine. Moving around in this mode can cause a little bit of whiplash when moving around since the game it clearly wasn’t designed with it in mind as the optimal way of moving around, but it’s still a neat little retro throwback. Plus if you’re using the ‘Classic Mode’, holding down shift brings up the still image of wherever you are from the original Myst, allowing you directly compare both the original and the remake, showing off what 21 years of advancement in games looks like.
This time around, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is a lot more polished than the original realMyst. It wasn’t always quite so polished though, as the original release of realMyst: Masterpiece Edition was known to crash quite often, but since then the game received a 2.0 update that fixed pretty much all of the bugs and added a bunch of graphical features and updates.
This version of realMyst keeps the day-night cycle that the original realMyst introduced, but with a few changes. The day-night cycle doesn’t happen as quickly as it does in the original realMyst, making it feel like you’re actually spending days in the world of Myst instead of the game just showing off a fancy new graphical feature. The nights in Masterpiece Edition are much darker, way too dark. To compensate for this, the developers added a flashlight. I feel like having a flashlight doesn’t really fit with Myst’s whole aesthetic. If you had to use something, why not a lamp?
There are times when the full moon comes out and brightens up the area to some degree, but it’s still way too dark. I feel like making night not be so dark could have easily fixed this, and you still could have had slightly darker nights when the moon wasn’t out.
Various other changes have also been made across the game. The Stoneship Age is now more stormy than it was in the original realMyst, and thanks to the change to a newer engine, it actually looks more like a storm. The Selenitic Age had it’s day-night cycle removed, but the Channelwood Age now has a day-night cycle. And the moon in Channelwood is now massive.
My only complaint with the graphics is that they left out the whales in the Rime Age, which added a nice bit of atmosphere to that location.
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition does look pretty good for being a game being made by a smaller team.
But just like how the original realMyst re-uses the video files from the original Myst, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition once again uses those same files, in all of their highly compressed glory. And if they were looking a bit shabby by the year 2000, they’re definitely not looking so hot when 2014 rolled around, a whole 21 years after the release of the original Myst, especially since another game came out from another high-profile (for a game series know for having FMV) game series with live action actors, “Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure”, coming out the same year, along with a few other lesser known titles, like “Roundabout” and “Missing: An Interactive Thriller”, and “LocoCycle” coming out the year before.
The thing is that by this point, not only have video games moved on from the CD to DVDs and now digital distribution, but affordable cameras that small teams have also increased in quality, with even the iPhone 6’s recording quality being decent for a consumer grade camera for the time, so I don’t know why these videos weren’t updated for this release. Maybe the developers just didn’t have the budget to got back and update them, and I can’t really get annoyed for something that was probably out of their control.
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition overall is a much better experience than the original realMyst, with better graphics and controls, while keeping the content that realMyst introduced. While I do have a soft spot for that original version of realMyst, I have to recommend this over the original version, not only because it’s the most widely available, but it’s the best version of Myst at the time of it’s release.