Myst series revisited

 

Recently I got nostalgic for the Myst games. I decided to replay them, but this time on Playstation.

 

I replayed Myst on a PSX emulator. I remember bits and pieces, but otherwise it was like playing it for the first time. I knew something was important about rotating the tower, but not what. I remembered the fireplace needed a pattern, but I didn’t remember which pattern to enter. I’m pleased to report it lives up to the memory. Every puzzle is discernible from the clues you find within the game. I wandered, and I found the answers I needed. My only “memory cheat” was the final white page. I must have missed the two half-pages in this playthrough, but I remembered where to find the final page needed to complete the game. Without that I would have wandered aimlessly looking for the final clue I needed, but those clues are present. You just have to pay attention to your environment, which is the reason Myst redefined the adventure game genre in 1993. Puzzles should be logical, solvable given the clues in the environment and the story. No red herrings. No bullshit inventory puzzles (though I really do wish you had the ability to carry more than one page at a time. I hear realMyst allows this, but I  haven’t played it because I am a purist for those ancient slideshow-immersive graphics that captivated me long before computers could display detailed 3D graphics). Myst hints at a much larger story going on, and while it gives answers by the end, they only leave you with more questions, and a vague sense of having been part of something larger. You, the player, have triumphed, and more awaits. It doesn’t feel like the game is over. There is no credit scroll alerting you to the end. It just hangs, and we had to wait years before we finally got a conclusion.

The Myst series captivated me when I first played it in the early 2000s. I’d seen the boxes on the shelf so many times in the computer section, so I finally bought a box set containing the first three games, which at the time were the only games. This is my second playthrough.

Riven, also on PSX. Hats off to anyone who played the Myst games on console. Moving a cursor with a d-pad is tedious compared to a computer mouse, but they are playable. Somehow Riven has an even uglier pixelated hand than Myst. Wow, it’s hideous and inelegant. Would it have been so hard to put a normal-sized cursor in there instead of a gaudy hand?

 

I’m proud to say that this time I made Riven my world. I figured out the code for the domes on my own. I figured out the sequence to the rebel Age on my own. I figured out the marble puzzle on my own except for one switch I didn’t know existed that you must press to check if your pattern is correct. Is it not enough to lower the giant piston for some kind of confirmation that you’ve arranged the marbles correctly? Nope. Gotta push one extra button, which doesn’t look like a button at all! Anyway, I was correct. I figured it out this time, consulting guides only to save myself an enormous amount of backtracking to doublecheck my notes. I didn’t need a solution fed to me. Everything is solvable by paying close attention to your environment. You must travel looooooong distances (sometimes across multiple discs) to find or reexamine these clues if you weren’t taking good enough notes, or if you think you made a mistake, and your path is not direct! All I need to do is double-check the position of one dome on the world map, but I have to cross the entire map to do so! It might be a little too unforgiving in this respect, but I have much respect for Riven.

Though the PS1 version suffers from reduced resolution, it is perfectly playable. On my original playthrough in 2003, I got impatient and finished the game with a walkthrough. I’ve always regretted that. I earned the ending this time.

 

Myst 3 on PS2. I thought the PS2 version would be easy to emulate. Seems it is not. I don’t understand how I can run Silent Hill 2, The Legend of Spyro trilogy, and Sonic Heroes, but Myst 3 has audio glitches and graphics bugs that make the game unplayable. I thought we’d reached a point in PS2 emulation where a point and click adventure game was easy to reproduce.

So I reinstalled my CD-ROM version and applied a patch I found online. After tinkering with the file system... it worked. I NEVER expected to be able to play my CD version from 2001. The cursor is still this ugly hand. I remember the CD version having this elegant empty circle when an action was not possible, and a filled circle when an action was possible, so why this pixelated hand?? No matter. It works, and it was just as good as I remember. The animations are quick and never get in the way, unlike in Riven where they often take way too long to play out and you are frozen until they do. The 360 degree spherical view at every node was nothing short of blockbuster when I first played it. 3D graphics were good at the time (Sonic Heroes, Star Fox Adventures), but still not photo-realistic. Myst III still looks damn good today. The puzzles are less brain-teasing than Riven and Myst, but I welcome that because the Ages you visit are thematically linked, and Amateria has the most beautiful design of any Age in the series, both aesthetically and functionally. I adore the story. I adore the theme. I adore the “unstable” acting from Brad Dourif, the voice of Chucky. It’s an immersive experience that makes the player an important part of not just the events, but a family. This is something a movie cannot do, and the experience certainly affected my own approach to writing.

 

Myst 4 has no console version [edit: I was wrong! It got an XBox port. Has reduced resolution, but it's all there!], and the 1.02 patch works for the DVD edition. I refuse to purchase the games twice, even for the sake of Steam achievements. I spent a lot of money on Myst 4, factoring in the DVD drive I had to buy for my computer in 2004, so I wanted to play it at least twice before upgrading.

Myst IV: the culmination of the entire series. It’s immersive and gorgeous. Real-time 3D graphics engines would not get this detailed and realistic for another 10+ years. Myst should get a remake with the Doom Eternal engine. Let’s have 60GB devoted to that! (It would help the creature animations on Haven, which often lack texture and lighting. They didn’t look great even at the time, but much like the acting, it worked well enough.) This is why we had slideshow graphics for adventure games. 3D graphics wouldn’t catch up to pre-rendered still images with videos playing on top of them until just a few years ago.

I had to gear up to do the final puzzle on Haven. I remember it well. Found all the names of the mangrees and I knew what I had to do, but I needed to prepare myself, mentally, to take on this puzzle, because I remember it so well, how involved it was. You have to remember every mangree’s name, how to call them, where they are in the grove, and where they need to be to set up the predator to stun it so you can get past. It’s brilliant. I made a gameboard out of paper to keep track of them. Didn’t take me as long as I feared it would; that puzzle is seared into my memory from 20 years ago.

 

You have to talk to monkeys to get past the predator. It’s a delightful action puzzle, where you know what you have to do, but setting everything up to win is a challenge. Your reward is a little ball of fluff in your lap as you take a ride back to the start. This is one of the cleverest puzzles in the entire series, if not the genre.

The puzzles are on par with Riven, but still discernible from clues in your environment. Even on my first playthrough, I didn’t need a walkthrough.

Spire is equally enthralling. Its main puzzle is also very, very clever. I remembered exactly what I had to do. I still recall the ah-ha moment 20 years ago when I realized it. Though it is a stretch to believe one man could build all of this with just his own two hands. I know he’s been isolated for 20 years, but where did he get the chains? How did he make the cables? How did he erect two elevators?? Ah, well, like father like son, I guess.

My PC in 2004 could just barely play the game; load times between nodes were upwards of 5 seconds. I think it’s amusing that this time is reduced to about 2 seconds on my modern PC, and it still feels like an eternity.

Myst IV feels like an interactive movie that makes you part of a family—the son or daughter Atrus never had. I adore every frame of it. Myst 3 atoned for the mistakes of Atrus’s sons. Myst 4 sees the brothers facing justice at last. It’s closure for both Atrus, and for the D’ni.

These games live up to my memory of them. They pull you in with their lore, and the slideshow graphics become part of the experience. While some performers are better than others, it works well enough for a game. The series had a profound effect on me, and my writing. I now notice traces of the Myst series in Archeons.

I’m glad Ubisoft and Cyan exist if only to keep porting these games to newer systems. It’s an experience movies and TV shows cannot create. It deserves to be preserved for future generations.

Myst 5, of course, does not exist.