Matthew's reviews of games in the Myst series
Okay, I'm a fan of the series, but I'm more than willing to critique it and be honest about it. This PDF provides my brief takes on the various Myst series games, starting with the original. In 1993, a puzzle-adventure game appeared on the market that was unlike anything that had been made before. It was called Myst. The game design was nonstandard for its time. No inventory, no way of dying, and little character interaction. Gameplay is laid back and mostly involves exploring, observing, and figuring things out. The solitary, laid-back exploratory nature of the Myst games is either a strength or a weakness, depending on who you ask. They have a strong ambience, even aesthetic brilliance, and a lot of content, but if you're having trouble moving forward and solving the puzzles, Myst games can quickly become boring, limiting, slow, and frustrating. Don't be surprised if you need a hint guide at some point while playing a Myst game. The upside is, it's mysterious and there is a sense of discovery and exploration. You feel like you've entered another reality, another world. I think that's a large part of the appeal of all fantasy and science fiction. It stirs the imagination. It's one of the reasons the Myst series has endured. The idea of traveling between worlds is wonderful as it allows for unlimited diversity in visual design, and the worlds in the Myst games have enough detail to feel real even at their most bizarre.
This is the start of the franchise, and the most successful game in it. Unfortunately, it's showing its age. Badly. The graphics and technology were stunning in 1993, and the game, one of the first high-quality programs to be released on CD, drove millions of people to buy CDrom drives for the first time.
The game sold anywhere from 6 to 10 million copies, depending on which source you trust, which made it the best-selling PC game of the 20th century. But is it good? Well, conceptually it's strong, and the art direction, sound design, and even puzzle design are good. But the technology is a huge drawback. Not only is it in a 640X480 slideshow format, but the 3d graphics have a lot of flaws. The terrains, in particular, look horrible. No grass texture, even. Just color maps. And yet, somehow, there is a genius to the design of the game that is difficult to quantify. Robyn Miller's ambient soundtrack is also quite effective. It set the standard which all later Myst games built on. It's memorable yet subtle, and enhances the experience of the game in key places. Sound effects are equally stellar. The puzzles don't always fit into the worlds believably, but they're well done for the most part. Myst's story is sparse but adequate. The designers should be credited with the way that their worlds help tell us about the characters in the story, something taken even further in Riven. Myst exists on PCs and Macs, as well as various handheld systems like the Nintendo DS, the PSP, and the iPhone. There's also a remake of the game on PC called RealMyst, which takes the game from prerendered format to realtime 3d. This is the best, most immersive form of the game available. It improves the textures, adds freedom of motion and lots of animation, and adds an extra world to the end of the game.
Riven is the acclaimed 1997 sequel to Myst. It improves on the original in a number of ways. Firstly, the sheer level of realism is stunning. Riven offers an immense, extremely believable photorealistic 3d world. The shame is that it is all reduced to a 640X480 resolution slideshow. A lot of money went into Riven after Myst succeeded, so the creative staff and production schedule were impressive. A lot of fans have clamored for a remake of Riven that would give it a high-resolution panoramic interface like the one of Myst IV such a thing could likely be done by Cyan Worlds for under $1 million in funding, but no publisher has stepped up for such a project, probably because of the financial failure of RealMyst. The visual design is very detailed, gritty, and realistically surrealistic. The story is darker and richer. John Keston's Gehn is a chillingly malevolent figure in Riven. The entire cast does well. The puzzles are more interconnected with the world, and to the credit of the designers, feel less like puzzles and more like features of a place. The game is a lot larger than Myst and has more animation. The music is atmospheric but perhaps a little less memorable. It's the sort of sound design that subtly supports the gaming experience and infuses emotion into it at key places. Sound design is good across the board. Riven's old slideshow format is its main problem. The fact that most of the game takes place in one world, not diverse smaller worlds, increases depth but hinders visual variety. The game is fairly difficult and the puzzles sprawl all over the very large world. The fact that clues are in disparate locations make some of the solutions difficult.

Myst 3: Exile

Myst 3 was done by Presto Studios, not Cyan Worlds. It's a solid entry into the series in most respects. The worlds of Myst 3 are beautiful, if not quite as meticulously designed as Riven's. The game is still 640X480 but is in a panoramic format, which allows for improved freedom of viewing, if not real freedom of motion. This is very similar to the interface of my freeware game, Traveler's Enigma. Jack Wall's music for the game is epic and cinematic and generally great. Writing in the story is okay, but the performance of actor Brad Dourif (academy award nominee for One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Grima Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings) is the reason it works. His character is a rather sympathetic villain, somebody you fear and yet feel sorry for. There's a lot of visual variety, color, and beauty but not the kind of depth or believability that made Riven brilliant. The fact that the worlds in the game (mostly) were made to teach lessons of world creation to his sons gives the creators of the game license to make puzzles that feel like, well, puzzles. Moderately easy puzzles (by Myst standards), but a lot of them, spread over a lot of explorable environments. There are a few places where the 3d art is a bit disappointing, probably because the developers had less cash and a shorter schedule than Cyan did when they made Riven. Still, it's definitely better attention to visual detail than in the first Myst and miles ahead of most of the games that have tried to imitate the formula of the Myst series.

Myst IV: Revelation

Myst IV is a mixed bag. In some ways, it's brilliant, but in others seriously problematic. Firstly, Myst IV has amazingly good graphics. The panoramic format is used again, but with higher resolution. The environments are as detail-rich as in Riven, and they have a lot of variety. I wouldn't say they're as believable logically, but the whole thing is stunning to look at. Each world is large, and there's a good variety between them. The game is one of the bigger Myst games. This is a good thing. The sheer level of life and detail in Haven, especially, is incredible, but most of the imagery looks great, aside from a few of the realtime 3d animated elements. There's also a lot more animation. Jack Wall's music is passable. It's not bad, but it's predictable and unmemorable. There's a lot more story content, which should be a step in the right direction for a series of games that have fairly sparse story development, but it's not good quality. Acting is often poor and the writing is sometimes even worse than the acting. The story has a lot in it that doesn't work, including the ending. Puzzles are mixed. There are some timed puzzles that are pretty tricky and frustrating, but for the most part the puzzle design is on par with Myst 3. That is, the puzzles are basically moderate in difficulty and pretty well-designed, but not altogether seamlessly integrated into the worlds.

flawed in some way.

Myst V: End of Ages
This is Cyan's return to the helm of the Myst franchise. It's in realtime 3d like the fantastic and massive Myst series spinoff Uru, but it's singleplayer and self-contained. Myst V was made in under a year and a half. That means it's not as good as it could and should have been. The puzzles are pretty good. Inclusion of an image recognition system solving puzzles by drawing is an imaginative twist. The graphics are generally about as good as Uru's, but in some places, particularly Laki'ahn, they're outright disappointing. Realtime 3d means it's more immersive in terms of motion but not as detailed, even at its best. The story is thin but fairly well-executed. It feels a bit tangential to the rest of the series, as if it were more tied to Uru than to the other Myst games. There's a good variety of worlds, and a reasonably large number of them, but none of them are especially large, certainly not like Riven or Myst IV. This is a limitation of real-time 3d levels generally; polygon count limits keep artists from making really large, detail-rich worlds. (This was true of pre-rendered graphics, too, at one point. The original Myst for instance) Tim Larkin's sound design is good but not as good as some of the other games in this series. The overall impression is that the game is consistently decent, perhaps, but never exceptional. It's pretty good but not the amazing finale this series deserved. It can be said of all the games in this series, though, that they're all good and all worth playing but all
By this point, Uru is the biggest, most elaborate Myst game. There's a singleplayer version called Complete Chronicles (Uru: Ages Beyond Myst + 2 expansion packs) and also a multiplayer MMO format, which has existed or nearly existed variously as Uru Live, Until Uru, Myst Online: Uru Live, Myst Online: Restoration Experiment, and now whatever it's currently being called. There's some debate on the title, but after a few business failures in MMO form, Cyan is releasing Uru as an open source game. This means that dozens of Cyan's beautifully crafted worlds, puzzles, and so on forming an impressive persistent virtual fantasy metaverse will be available as a free download. You'll be able to explore, solve puzzles, and play minigames in a realtime 3d multiplayer setting. You'll also be able to add your own worlds and 3d content into the game. You can check this open source Myst game out at MystOnline.com. Last I checked, it was in the process of being released and isn't available yet. But hopefully it will be soon.