MYST

Submitted by mattbarton.exe on Tue, 05/31/2005 - 19:22

Review Of

Miller, Rand. Myst (10th Anniversary DVD Edition). San Francisco, CA: Brøderbund / Ubisoft, 1993.

Believe it or not, I never played MYST, one of the most popular graphical adventure games of all time, when it was released back in the mid-nineties. At the time, I was a diehard Amiga fan who didn't want to make the transition into Windows. Looking back, I regret not doing so. Undoubtedly many of the qualities that would have made MYST so noteworthy in 1994 seem rather tame now (the graphics are impressive, but the video segments seem a bit dated). Likewise, I've been playing so many games that owe a great deal of their heritage to this predecessor, and I'm not entirely clear on Cyan's specific innovations. I'm doing my best.

I bought MYST as part of a package called the "10th Anniversary DVD Edition" released by Ubisoft. The package includes Myst "Masterpiece Edition," Riven, and a third-party game in the series called Exile. I intend to play them all, though I've only managed to complete the first one at this point. One really nice feature of this set is two interviews with Rand Miller. The interviews shed a little light on the creation of the series and the developers' goals and ideas about game marketing. MYST did partially crash on me at least three times during gameplay; by this I mean that I was dumped to my desktop, but managed to click back and re-enter the game without data loss. Otherwise, the game worked fine.

Apparently, MYST was designed to be a game for adults who weren't already into games. It was an effort to create a more universally accessible game with a much wider audience and very broad appeal. To that end, the interface has been reduced to the bare essentials. At times this can be annoying. I would have appreciated an inventory or at least the ability to carry two pages at the same time. The player moves around by simply clicking on a spot on the screen; the perspectives are all pre-generated. This becomes a severe problem on at least one of the worlds, where knowing which direction you are facing becomes critical. Clicking where you want to go doesn't necessarily mean you will be facing the direction you thought you would when you get there. Indeed, I became so frustrated by this flaw that I almost resorted to cheating to get past a level involving pipes and flow controls. A small compass in the corner of the screen (or the like) would have helped immensely.

* spoilers ahead *

The strengths of MYST are its story and intriguing characters. It's clear why so many new media scholars like Bolter have seized upon this work and discussed it at length. The developers are having some fun with writing, books, and story-telling. Ironies abound. The books you find in MYST are portals into other worlds, and their "pages" amount to short videos that provide a sort of fly-through of the destination world. The creator of the these worlds, Atreus, seems to have the power to alter them by either writing or visiting them directly. Meanwhile, his sons have been overcome by greed and have begun destroying these worlds and killing their inhabitants. Atreus reacts by imprisoning them both in books, but they have managed to secret away a page from another book and thus have trapped Atreus in yet another world. During the game, the player finds pages of the brothers' books and has the option of inserting them. With each page, the brothers' videos get a little sharper and clearer. Both of them accuse the other of destroying the worlds and warn the player not to release the villain. Of course, at the end we discover both of them are corrupt (which is also obvious when one explores the world), and it's Atreus who must be freed.

The player also discovers many books and papers on the journey. While most of the books have been burnt beyond repair, others provide tantalizing clues and stories that flesh out the game's rich story arcs. The game sets up nicely for its sequel, Riven, though the ending of MYST is quite anticlimactic.

* end spoilers *

Compared to earlier graphical adventure games like those of Sierra On-Line or Lucas Arts, Cyan's MYST is a sharp departure. Gone is the humor and "cartoon" quality so central to these other titles. MYST's photorealistic graphics and ascetic feel lend themselves to a new type of adventure gaming experience. It's more meditative; there is something of a Zen-like quality to it all, really. The ambient sound and music definitely add to this atmosphere.

MYST turned out to be a great deal shorter than I first imagined. None of the puzzles I found were especially difficult and most were quite intuitive. A few gave me trouble, but the Masterpiece edition has an on-board hint system to provide just that little hint you need to move forward without removing the challenge.

What always struck me about My...

Submitted by Phil on Wed, 06/01/2005 - 08:41.

What always struck me about Myst was how unlike an adventure game it was - I don't think it's just the cartoon quality that differed from earlier adventure games. I can think of plenty of non-cartoonish adventure games, after all. Sierra had Police Quest ages ago, and Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight both came out the same year as Myst.
What I think Myst did do to the adventure game is take the people out of it - the game was much, much more spartan than most any adventure game since the Infocom days, and more spartan than a lot of those too.
Also notable was the removal of the inventory - no more item puzzles, a massive departure from what adventure games were up to this point. The puzzles, often, barely qualified as puzzles - with one or two exceptions, it seems more fair to call them virtual toys that one had to play with. The thrust of the game, then, became much more about exploring the (I hate using this term, but for once it seems appropriate) virtual world than about puzzles.
That said, I'm not sure adventure games are the games one should look to as antecedents of Myst - I'd look for The 7th Guest, which was 1993, one of the first actively multimedia games, and had a similarly empty world full of discrete puzzles that were set up in the world as deliberate puzzles, as opposed to item-based puzzles that sprung semi-organically from the plot. That is, both resembled puzzle games like The Fool's Errand more than adventure games like King's Quest.
The major change is that The 7th Guest had REALLY HARD puzzles (I still remember one with tortured fondness) whereas Myst, as I said, didn't.

Thanks very much for sharing y...

Submitted by mattbarton.exe on Wed, 06/01/2005 - 13:16.

Thanks very much for sharing your insights, Phil. I can see you're very familiar with the genre. I haven't played The 7th Guest, which I certainly will soon in preparation for the book, but I've read a lot about it. I'm thinking that the early to mid 90s was when we experienced that brief explosion of full motion video games that quickly died. I've read many diatribes by reviewers who felt that developers ruined or at least diminished the quality of games with FMV than enhanced them. I felt then as I do now; it is a tool that can do either, though there is little room for amateurs when the audience's expectations is to see Hollywood-quality acting and cinematography.
I did make note of how empty Myst felt, and I've noticed the same observations in other reviews. I experienced a more powerful feeling of this sort playing the first Tomb Raider. My wife and I are playing Riven now, and I have the same feeling at times of being in a closed or abandoned theme park. Riven tries to reduce the feeling a bit by showing video of people, but you can't interact with them (at least not yet).
I'm eager to play the URU series and see if Cyan handle 3-D environments well. To be honest, I'm not really enjoying Riven and will be glad to complete it so I can move on. Expect a review soon.

At least with the older Sierra...

Submitted by Mathew Tschirgi (not verified) on Sat, 06/04/2005 - 21:21.

At least with the older Sierra and LucasArts adventure games, you have a narrative or interesting NPCs motivating you to complete the game. The sheer alienation of Myst is just a huge turn-off for me... Especially after growing up playing King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Day of the Tentacle.
The alienation in Myst somewhat works because the main character is supposed to feel alienated in the worlds that he is transported to. Still, it makes the game a good less fun than it could have been-- it doesn't help that I don't like logic puzzles too much either. :)