[Game Review] Myst

I think I've played through the original Myst at least 5 times now.  While it doesn't stack well against its sequel, the challenging Riven, Myst still stands up in its own right as that classic that captured PC players in the early 90s.  Well, maybe not perfectly.

For me, Myst's strengths were always in how it utilizes its world and mechanics in exploration and puzzle solving.  The world doesn't feel believable in even the most generous of perspectives, but it does feel intentional, and not immediately apparent in how it all works.  Myst is the kind of game that will have you searching for that lever, or button, and when you've found it leaves you wondering what the hell that just did.  Looking at the mechanism you just interacted with usually holds the hint, and checking out where the cables, pipes, or other parts of whatever it is you just interacted with goes to can usually lead you to the solution.  Myst and the rest of its series has gained infamy for occasionally opaque puzzle design.  Replaying the original Myst for the 5th time probably doesn't put me in the best position to comment on a first timer's difficulty, but to my understanding there only seemed a couple puzzles that truly felt misleading or otherwise painful to deduce.  The issue here is much less that the puzzles are difficult, but that each of these puzzles were required in order to leave the stage you were on, called "Ages".

Myst comprises of a hub world, the Myst Island, and four Ages, each with usually a handful of puzzles.  When first starting Myst, your first task is to figure out how to unlock the other ages.  Once that is done, entering any of these Ages will have you stuck until you solve the puzzle that leads you back to Myst.  This means if you land in an Age and can't figure it out - like, perhaps, the Age has a notoriously difficult puzzle to get back - you were stuck until you figured it out.  There wasn't any going back and trying another Age so you could return with a fresh mind.  You either figured it out or you quit.  Likewise, each of the Ages are usually just two or three interlocking puzzles, meaning on several of the Ages finding your way back to Myst requires solving the entire Age.  This is incredibly bad design for a puzzle game, since puzzles are usually less frustrating to tackle if you are allowed to try multiple simultaneously, allowing you to refresh before re-approaching the puzzle less frustrated and perhaps with a better understanding of how the puzzles' underlying logic is designed.  There are two cases off the top of my head that are likely to get you stuck, one of which has you flowing water through pipes (with little indication water is actually flowing or not outside of the sound of flowing water, which is extremely difficult to discern in the low quality mono soundtrack), and the other is the infamous submarine puzzle.  The submarine puzzle, in hindsight, makes sense but is tedious if you make a mistake, or while you are troubleshooting your ideas for solutions.

Myst has dated poorly, but it is more than playable, and as a matter of fact is still a hell of a lot of fun to play today.  The atmosphere is great, the puzzles are short but head-scratching.  Myst's most damning drawback is that it is outclassed in just about every way by its sequel Riven.  If you want to dive in to a classic for the sake of history, Myst isn't too painful and incredibly fun, but if you are trying to get into this very specific type of puzzler then you are much better off checking out Riven.



 9.0