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Myst reviews series#
I had a great time figuring that one out, and it was more along the lines of the kind of puzzles that made the next game in the series my favourite.Įxile is the point at which most people’s knowledge of the series seems to drop off, which is too bad, because I personally think it’s the best one. There was one self-contained puzzle in it that I remember fondly, though, in which a toy in a classroom teaches you the numbers in the language of the mythical D’ni culture. Riven looks gorgeous but I mostly remember spending my time with it walking around lost and confused and annoyed.
Myst reviews how to#
Those frustrations were exacerbated by the way that you click around to move between different “nodes” in a way that can be a bit disorienting if you’re not used to it, making it difficult to figure out how to retrace your steps. I prefer to walk into one room and know that there’s a puzzle in here and all the information I need to solve it is somewhere in the same general area, and there were points in Riven when it really irritated me to realize that I couldn’t solve something after all, because I missed something earlier, and it could be absolutely anywhere. I can appreciate how this kind of design would appeal to other people, but personally, I don’t really like searching the whole world for clues to puzzles. It’s a beautiful and deep world, and at first I was really excited to explore it all-but it ended up kind of annoying me in the end. Riven sets itself apart from the rest of the series by taking place entirely in one very large age, with puzzles and clues scattered all over the map. It’s plain to see why Myst had such an impact, as it’s a very impressive game for its time. I’d definitely recommend a guide for that one, but the rest is pretty fun and includes some really cool environments. My least favourite part of the original Myst is one age that’s centered around sound-based puzzles, as you have to spend a lot of time figuring out where to go based on distinguishing the differences between various weird sound effects, and I was just awful at it and couldn’t tell some of them apart to save my life. I especially love Sirrus and Achenar from this one, and Arctic and I still quote one line Sirrus yells at you in his bad end, “You stupid fool!”, all the time. The FMV scenes are probably my favourite element of the entire series, as the actors are always hamming it up and it’s a lot of fun. You typically spend a Myst game traveling between a few of these different “ages,” in which you have to solve puzzles to reach some goal or other and get back to where you came from, uncovering some lore through cheesy FMV scenes along the way. The basic idea of the Myst series is that Atrus has the ability to write different worlds into existence through magic books that will teleport you into the corresponding age if you touch them.
Myst reviews free#
At first, you want the pages to help free two mysterious prisoners named Sirrus and Achenar, but as your journey teaches you more about their past, you may start to side with Atrus-their father, who imprisoned them-instead. The iconic classic that started it all brings you to the eponymous Myst Island, from which you travel to several other “ages” in search of missing pages from books. This review will summarize some of my feelings about each game without spoiling much beyond some general explanation of how the story goes. But I’m glad I took this long Myst journey, even though there were some frustrating points along this way. Sometimes they’re challenging in a way that’s fun and satisfying, but a lot of the time they just annoyed me, and I would have almost certainly ragequit without a friend to help me and motivate me to continue. Fortunately, this meant I could play while screensharing on discord and asking him for hints with the puzzles-I definitely wouldn’t have gotten through it all without that, as these games are hard. A big part of the reason I played them all was that one of my best friends, ArcticMetal, has been a huge Myst fan since childhood and wanted me to experience a series that meant a lot to him. You might have heard of the classic 1993 puzzle game Myst and its first sequel, Riven, but not a lot of people know that there are a total of six installments in the series, as well as some novels that expand the lore. Over the course of about a year, I played through all six games in the Myst series.
