Game Discussion of The Week: Myst

Yep, it's a point & click adventure. It's all about exploring the surroundings and understanding how things interact with each other so you can solve its puzzles.

I mentioned Myst because I don't think we had talked about this genre yet, and Myst is certainly the most influential game of its ilk. But, most importantly, I think almost none of the Myst imitators/successors really understood what was great about it (The Witness is one of the most recent disappointments in this area).

I gave it a 4 because, as scipioafricanus said, it has not aged well, at least not the original release - in the 90s, this would definitely be a 5 to me (on a side note, I've bought recently the new version of realMyst, which uses 3d environments instead of pre-rendered images; I'll see if it holds up). At the time, I was impressed by the quality of its graphics; nowadays, it's hard to not be annoyed by the slideshow of images, as beautiful as the art direction may be.

So, what Myst does so well? First of all, most point & click games are focused on pixel hunts (finding where you must click) and on inventories (knowing which items to use or combine with each other). Myst, on the other hand, always shows clearly which things you can interact with, with your cursor even changing to indicate that, and, most importantly, the game doesn't even have an inventory. Its puzzles are all about understanding how the contraptions work and how mechanisms interact with each other. Unlike other games in its genre, it's all very logical: you almost never feel that a mechanism is somewhere just as a puzzle to be solved; almost every mechanism seems to have a real function in that world. Compare that to what we see in, let's say, Resident Evil, in which the mansion or the police station can never feel like real places where someone could live or work (everytime you need to open a door, you first must hit the switches behind the frames in the correct combination, then find a jewel to put on a statue etc.), or in The Witness, in which the environment is there just to house the puzzles. The puzzles in Myst make some sense in their worlds; the first game does this to a good degree, while the second game, Riven, perfects this approach so much that no mechanism feels like a "puzzle": they are just very alien machines that you must understand what they do and how to operate them; once you do, they purpose is always very clear. But then, Riven introduces a few pixel hunt aspects that I hate, so it's not entirely flawless.

This is probably why Myst is probably the only longer point & click game that I ever finished without resorting to a walkthrough: in all the other games, when I got stuck it was because I failed to find a specific place to click or because I hadn't tried combining two completely random objects; in Myst, every time I got stuck I just had to give it some thought. There was never a random part in my entire playthrough, I completely understood how every puzzle worked.

Of course, Myst isn't just about the puzzles: the world itself is very interesting. It has this feeling that you are exploring abandoned planets that work diferently from each other: one is entirely mechanical, other has a treetop village and a lot of water-based devices, the other is built around sound... You know how in games like Panzer Dragoon or Dark Souls there's this feeling of a mysterious, decayed world that you can only know a few things about? Myst is one of the first games to do justice to this concept.

Myst was ported to a lot of different systems, and besides a few differences in image quality, they are all pretty much the same. Cyan later released realMyst, which used an actual 3d engine so you can walk around freely if you want (though the game wasn't designed with that in mind, so it's better to just play it as a point & click anyway) and it also added a new level. The latest version of the game is realMyst Masterpiece Edition; this one is the recommended way to play it nowadays, as it also uses a 3d engine (so no slideshow) and looks pretty good.