Was looking forward to tackling Riven for this month, which I've never played (only the original Myst). In the weeks leading up to April, I thought I'd revisit the original to get myself back into the Myst mindset. I played and loved the original a few times, and I had recently bought a Myst package that included realMyst with a new zone. realMyst came out in 2000 which makes it technically ineligible for this TR, so normally I wouldn't post about it here. However my experiences with it allow me to draw (what I believe to be) interesting conclusions about the original, so I will discuss those here.
The one-word review of realMyst:
Yuck!Playing realMyst really hit home how much of a guided and crafted experience Myst was. Obviously, the original Myst engine was
HyperCard, so the game takes place across several still images that the player can navigate by clicking on hot spots. Whether it was due to economy of CD drive space or the effort required to put the HyperCard stacks together, the developers ensured that anything that was important to progression was usually visible within the frame at each location. In a world as detailed as Myst, important items get lost in the environment when it's fully in 3D. It's easy to miss hot spots, I found, and I can't imagine finding the secret doors in this version without lots of random clicking. Admittedly, this was true in the original in some areas, but when it's in static frames, it's not so onerous.
Another thing that becomes apparent with realMyst is how
small the individual areas are. When one is clicking between the individual images in the original, there is no motion so there less sense of the amount of distance that is traveled, making it a more detached experience. This suits the game world very well, it turns out, which is based on people's ability to create worlds by simply writing a book about them. It gives everything a more ethereal feeling. realMyst totally destroys that, and it's a bit like seeing the girders and gaps in an amusement park like Disneyland; it really takes you out of the illusion.
As such, I couldn't play it. After about 20 minutes, I returned to the original Myst and found it to be a much more enjoyable experience (though how much of this is based on nostalgia I can't say).
(Note: Some spoilers ahead, which have been appropriately spoilered.)
The visuals generally hold up, given its age, mostly due to the really nice texture work. The sound effects throughout, especially the wind and water, help fill in the missing gaps where there is no animation (save for some small movie clips of water or birds that play in a few of the frames). For most of the game, the only FMV sequences are around brothers Sirrus and Achenar, who are each trapped in books you find near the beginning. The videos are low-resolution, but given that there is a lot of static it doesn't really stick out. I really appreciated the effect of washing out the lighter tones on the actors, which integrates the trapped men into the static backgrounds better and avoids green-screeny look (though some of the warping of the characters comes off as cheesy). The acting is pretty bad, but for the majority of the game it actually works out okay, as one would expect people trapped in a Phantom-Zone like environment to act a little unhinged.
Myst was also remembered for its environmental storytelling, particularly around how Sirrus and Achenar behaved in each of the Ages of Myst. However, I had forgotten about the books in the library and their walls of text, which is pretty much the antithesis of environment storytelling. While it's not out of place in a universe driven by magical writing abilities, it does kill the pace of the game as reading these are required to get hints needed to solve some of the puzzles. Clearly I was able to look past this in the 1990s, but it doesn't work nearly as well now.
Otherwise, there are some trademark "Cosmic Osmo" moments (a reference to Cyan's earlier games which were largely around exploring and finding easter eggs). There are a couple of neat FMV animations which play when clicking on some objects (including an
interesting jack-in-the-box). These are more curiosities than anything, but they tend to be clustered in a few places and don't feel particularly well integrated throughout the Ages.
Myst famously had some really obtuse puzzles, though I feel like they are sensible once you figure out the internal logic of the game. I never did figure out the railroad maze back in the day, and so I wound up brute forcing it (hint: audio cues). However, I did get a bit of a thrill when I solved a puzzle which I didn't remember the solution to. I have to admit that lot easier when you already understand the rules that the game runs under. That said, I figured this all out over 20 years ago when I had a lot more to tease these things apart (and I did it without a walkthrough!). I'm not sure if I have the endurance to do it these days. I guess the real test will be when I attempt Riven.
Anyway, some final thoughts:
- I found realMyst to be a bust, though the recently-released realMyst Masterpiece Edition may be more promising, especially as it includes a classic mode where you can click between the original hotspots. However, it's $18 at the moment and it's a bit much for a game I already own 3 copies of. Perhaps someday in the future.
- As I mentioned before, being able to track your mouse around really helps find a lot of the necessary hot spots, and some of most frustrating puzzles involved hot spots where the cursor didn't give this indication (like some of the secret passages). As such, I don't think Myst would play very well on a touch screen unless they added something to mitigate this.
- Myst really was a product of its time, where they embraced the limitations of the technology and were able to make an experience that transcended them. Without that particular combination of technology, it feels off and a lot of the design choices don't make sense. Hence, it almost feels like a perfect time capsule.
So that's one in the bag. I know I said that I wanted to tackle Riven, but I like to mix things up so I don't get all Myst-ed out. As such, I'm going to tackle The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime (1997). It's a remake of the original (which predates Myst by a few months, it turns out), but it's fits better with Myst than one would expect because Presto Studios would go on to make Myst 3: Exile. Plus, I'm a sucker for time travel stories, both good and bad!
I'll check back in once I've given it a run!
