Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/pyst-review-retrospective/

Like anything else that gained massive popularity, there were the inevitable parodies of and jokes at Myst. And probably the most infamous parody of Myst takes the form of the creatively bankrupt Pyst. Written by Peter Bergman, one of the co-founders of the Firesign Theatre, and published by Parroty Interactive in 1996 (Get it? Because ‘Parroty’ sounds like parody and they produced nothing but parody games), a whole three years after the release of Myst. And considering how lackluster that this “parody” is, that’s a little late to the party.

There isn’t really a plot to Pyst so much as there are jokes that your dad or uncle would make about something that they’ve only heard about because it was the big thing at the time. Well, I say jokes, but it’s more like a joke, singular, and that one joke is “What if 4 million people actually DID visit the island of Myst?”, which is how many copies that Myst had sold when this “parody” was released. And the incredibly obvious punchline to that incredibly obvious joke is that the island would obviously be trashed by the millions of people who tried Myst because it was popular, got frustrated at the puzzles, and gave up and just started trashing the place.

Apparently Peter Bergman along with the rest of the team at Parroty Interactive thought that this single joke was so incredibly funny that they thought they could press it to a CD and shit out to store shelves for money. And this was long before someone could easily dump their game onto any digital storefront was available at the time, in which you had to actually invest time and money to get your video game out. In any other game, a joke at the expense of Myst would either be a brief joke in an out of the way line of dialogue or note somewhere or a brief section of the game, not making a whole game based on a very limited joke.

The game actually begins with a narrator joking about how he fell into a manhole and accidentally landed onto the island of Pyst. I would assume that this is a reference to Cyan’s previous game called ‘The Manhole’, but considering how the rest of the game is, I’m pretty sure it’s less of a reference and more of a joke that the developers thought was funny.

Once you land on Pyst Island, you’re greeted by a trashed version of the original Myst Island, graffiti covering every surface, trash strewn all over the place and anything that wasn’t bolted down being torn up. There’s even a trailer park filled with trailers and porta-potties along with a giant TV called the ‘Mumbo Jumbo-Tron’ plopped right in the middle of Pyst Island. And the game quickly makes it obvious just how much of a one-note joke the whole thing.

But getting around in Pyst isn’t the same as getting around in Myst. Instead of the Island being presented with still images like in Myst, where you click on certain parts of the screen to explore the game, Pyst presents each image as a postcard and 99% of the “gameplay” is pressing on something and watching an incredibly short “funny” animation.

When you’re not clicking around the screen to see what moves, you can either click the top or bottom of the screen to see a message on the back of the postcard, with each postcard coming with two handwritten messages, one for the top or bottom. And this is where the few jokes that the ‘game’ relies on quickly gets driven into the ground and becomes irritating really quickly, with whoever wrote the message complaining about how hard the puzzles are or how trashed the island is because of it’s popularity. To move from screen to screen, you just click on the right to get to the next postcard and the left to get the previous postcard. Which is extra amusing (or baffling on your point of view) since the first time you move to another area is when you move from the dock to the room with the holographic machine you have to click right despite it being located to the left of you when you first land on Pyst Island.

Each postcard does come with a speaker on the bottom right that has an announcement from the ‘Octoplex Corporation Tour Guide’, with each announcement talking about buying out Pyst Island and changing it into a popular resort, including adding beaches and mini-golf to the Island. I have no idea is this was poking fun at the rumors of Disney making an actual attraction based on the original Myst before it got canned, or just a generic joke about giant companies jumping on trends and riding them until they’ve milked it dry and I’m just retroactively justifying it in my brain and making the game more interesting than it is.

So basically the game is filled to the brim with lowbrow jokes that I’m pretty sure were “edgy” in the 90s, but are so incredibly lame and played out that the only other place that you’re going to hear them is a bad joke book and your uncle who told you a joke once when you were 7 that made you laugh and has been telling you bad jokes ever since because he got that one reaction out of you.

Surprisingly, the game also features Full Motion Video with live action actors just like the original Myst. Honestly, with just how lazy the introduction to the game was, I just assumed that the whole game would have been simple still images.

On the second screen, or postcard, a parody of the room featuring the holographic machine from the original game, we get out first look at the FMV with the three characters parodying the three characters from the original game. This includes Prince Syrrup, who is overwhelmed by the amount of people coming to the island and was entirely based around the world syrup sounding funny, the character named ‘The Prince Formerly Known As Prince’, a self-absorbed stereotype based on musical artist Prince and only here because someone thought the name was ‘The Prince Formerly Known As Prince’ was clever, and King Mattrus, played by, of all people, John Goodman, king of the game and Pyst Island.

You read that right, John Goodman in this game, and he’s the best thing about the game, if only because of his charm and enthusiasm. At least I know where all of the budget went. But the absolute highlight of getting John Goodman to be in this game is that he sings the lyrics to the song “I’m Pyst”, which you can either play by selecting it one of the menus in the game, or by putting it into your CD player. It’s incredibly catchy and I could actually see myself listening to it outside of the game.

And you might ask yourself, “If Pyst is making fun of Myst, then how does it make fun of it’s puzzles?”, and the answer to that question is that it doesn’t. Instead of poking fun at the puzzles in Myst, Pyst instead just makes fun at the people who visited Myst Island finding the puzzles of Myst being too hard. There isn’t even an attempt to make fun of the puzzles of Myst. And everything I described about interacting with the game, clicking on stuff to get an incredibly brief animation, flipping over the postcard to see what the messages are on the back of the card, and them moving on is the entirety of the interaction with the game.

Adventure games aimed at children at the time had more interactivity than this. Just look at any of the games that Humongous Entertainment was putting out. All of the interactivity in Pyst would have been amusing interactive objects in the background of any of Humongous Entertainment’s games. Even Myst, the very game that this was parodying, had more interactivity, and it was criticized heavily by hardcore adventure game fans for “dumbing down the genre”. Myst had a variety of puzzles to solve, where this is just clicking on a few random things and getting a fart joke. Both “Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside” and “Freddi Fish 2: The Case of the Haunted Schoolhouse” and even Edutainment games like “Logical Journey of the Zoombinis” and “Chill Manon” (the sequel to “I.M. Meen”) were released the same year as Pyst, along with multiple “Putt-Putt” and “Freddi Fish” mini-game collections that have just as much interactivity as this game, and are meant for kinder-gardeners.

That’s right, there is no gameplay to Pyst. If Myst was criticized at the time by dedicated adventure game fans for both dumbing down adventure games so that even your grandmother can enjoy it, then Pyst has no gameplay at all. Sure, you can click on a few things, but that’s not gameplay. And the whole thing takes about an hour at most to get through and has no replay value. It still took me an hour to get through the original Myst when I was replaying it, and that’s with me knowing the solution to all of the puzzles and knowing exactly where to go. And it’s not like the jokes in Pyst were so gut busting that it’s worth playing it a second time.

But then again, if Pyst did have puzzles, they wouldn’t have lead anywhere like the ones in the original Myst because Pyst features Myst Island and ONLY Myst Island. The original game had several places you could visit beyond the initial island. Which means one of three things happened. One, the development team got stuck on these puzzles and just decided to wing it with what they had.

Two, the development team quickly ran out of material before they could make fun of the other areas of the game, and considering that you can’t even visit all of Myst Island, with there only being 10 postcards in total for a place with several locations with multiple screens, is completely embarrassing. And three of these screens are on the back of the box, so you’ve seen a giant chunk of the game even before buying it.

Or three, which is the most likely, the development team just jumped onto whatever was popular at the time, which would become more blatant as Parroty Interactive, the developers who made this game, went on to make more ‘games’.

However there is exactly one good joke in the game, and it’s about the adventure genre as a whole, and that is a joke making fun at how older adventure games used to use words to interact with environment, such as ‘Look’, ‘Use’, and ‘Speak’, and presents it as the building blocks of the language of interaction in video games. And I’m pretty sure it’s entirely accidental considering how the rest of the jokes turned out.

If you’re going to jump on the popularity of something, you could at least make jokes specifically about what you’re making fun of. Imagine if the game made fun of the maze in the Selenitic Age by having something that completely skips over it that somehow everyone missed, or the rotating fortress in the Mechanical Age having an ‘Overkill’ mode that spins it so fast that it makes you puke. Stuff that’s still incredibly obvious and low hanging fruit, but at least interesting and with some variety.

Just like the original Myst, Pyst comes with a “Making Of” video. In the same vein with the game, the making of video is filled with jokes mixed in with a few highlights on how the game was made. It’s neat, but it’s more of a video of the developers having fun while making the game rather than being informative.

And the cherry on top the sundae is the credits, which have more people listed than the original Myst did. That’s right, the original Myst, a game that not only helped the gaming industry move from floppies to the CD-ROM, got more computers into peoples homes, and was more visually impressive, had less people working on it despite having more content. If a couple of people can end up making something like Myst at a time when not only making a video game was a lot more difficult than it is these days but getting it onto shelves, then Pyst is looking pretty shallow in comparison.

There was even going to be a sequel to Pyst called “Driven: The Sequel to Pyst.”, which a demo of it was included on later versions of Pyst. But due to the company going under, for some pretty obvious reasons, so that never came out.

In retrospect, was Pyst good? No, of course not, it was a product meant to jump onto a fad, and even if it had a few things going for it, it’s not really worth visiting unless you’re a hardcore Myst fan. The only thing the game had going for it was that it was $15 when it was released, which clearly shows that even the creators of this game knew how little they had on their hands. We could have had a game poking fun of adventure game tropes as told through a Myst parody and what we got was a few mildly funny jokes quickly worn out.

The creators of Myst seemed to be amused by this game, and they even have a copy of it in their vault over at ‘Cyan, Inc’ so clearly they had no hard feelings about it. So clearly this isn’t worth getting annoyed over.