Myst (Win3.x)

By: The J Man

I realized today that in the course of my PC reviews, I reference Myst nine times out of ten. This is not a sign of some extreme and deep-seated love I have for the game. It's an acknowledgment that Myst was, for a long time, the best-selling computer game of all time. It also created a style of gaming that became the next standard after the text-based adventure. As its style was copied endlessly after its release, it makes for good comparison. The game itself, however, is nothing to cream your pants over.

Anyway, since I talk about the game so damn much, I decided I might as well review it for those who may actually not be familiar with what I'm talking about.

Once we got up to about seven floppy disks to install a single game, people started getting a little understandably frustrated. Swapping disks out at a steady pace, and listening to that god-awful crunching and buzzing of the floppy drive for about thirty minutes, is enough to get on anyone's nerves. Enter the CD, with seemingly more storage space than the National Archives. A short time after those settled in, Microsoft was talking about Windows 3.1, and we were confused. Apparently, there was something out there that was EVEN BETTER than VGA, and we were just getting used to our DOS graphics in crisp 640x480.

These elements, along with improved CG rendering and ray tracing, came together to lay the groundwork for what would be Myst - a disc brimming with gorgeous computer-rendered worlds for our exploration. Tech-heads and artsy types loved it because it represented the next generation of computer graphics, and looked phenomenal. People who generally didn't like computer games liked it, because it was completely free of violence, and offered a passive chance to explore at your own pace. Adventure gamers liked it, because it hearkened back to Zork, but with pretty pictures instead of cold text. Mac gamers liked it because it was developed for them back in 1993, and looked best on their systems. The hard-core elite gamers said, "what the fuck?" and continued playing the much harder-core Doom 2.

The garden of the puzzle-stuffed Myst Island.

So what, you ask, was the revolution? Each of the game's six worlds were made up of rendered still images. Depending on where you "stood" in the world, or where you looked, a different image was shown. Now, take a look around the room you're in. 3-D games like Doom attempted to recreate the world in three dimensions, resulting in an infinite number of images and angles as you look around a full 360 degrees. Myst, though it certainly looked better, took the infinite images of a 3-D space and broke it down into, at most, four images, for the north, south, east, and west.

Big deal, right? Text-based adventures broke the infinite options of motion into four cardinal directions, and had been doing it for a decade. Nobody complained about that. However, that was based more on simplifying descriptions and commands, and even with only four options, gamers STILL got "lost." Myst, in turn, visualized everything for you, but absolutely prevented you from looking at things in detail, or from a different angle. If you wanted to take a look around the beautiful dock, watch the waves roll in, look up at the sky, or track the birds flying across the horizon, well, tough shit. You're looking at a slideshow, with a few scant bits of Quicktime integrated in to allow certain items to appear to move.

Maybe this does something.

Point and click adventures had been around for a long time, and many had done well, despite their various problems. Myst introduced a whole new set. First, the restrictions on where you could look. If you moved your mouse to something and the cursor didn't change, you weren't going to be looking at it. If there was an object on the edge of the screen you want to turn toward to get a better look at, forget it. Not happening. Furthermore, Myst was almost ironically a text adventure in reverse - it was a graphic adventure that contained no text. Whereas text players had to imagine what an object looked like from reading its description, Myst players had to imagine an object's description from what it looked like. It forced a shift for players used to getting clues on how to proceed from reading about how "the rock feels like it has something inside." Now, you had to look at an object, run your mouse over it to see if there was anything you could click, then scratch your head and put it back until you maybe found a use for it later.

Complaints aside, the game's interface was actually quite user-friendly, and good design decisions kept things from becoming overly complex or confusing. You have no inventory, but you don't need it. There are no on screen indicators of any kind, your interface is simply a cursor that changes shape when you can move, turn, or interact with an object. The strictly visual feedback from the game world was usually clear enough, and if it wasn't, it was probably because you hadn't seen an important part of the puzzle yet. The rendered graphics are primitive by today's standards, but dazzling for the time, and still attractive enough to catch one's eye. Good art design also helped here, making the worlds foreign to you, but still inviting. Coldly beautiful, if you will.

The story of Myst centers around a group of people, perhaps in another dimension. who write books about fantastic lands. Their skill is that their vivid descriptions and the books themselves literally make these worlds come alive, and by touching a living image in the back of the book, you will be transported to the world you just read about. The game begins as you find one of these books in a public library and touch the last page - transporting you instantly to the island of Myst, with no apparent means of returning to reality. The island itself is empty except for some fantastical machines, and messages from one of the mythical world-writers named Atrius. The island's library acts as the central hub, giving you books with access to five other worlds, as well as Atrius' two sons, both trapped inside books of their own. By finding pages scattered around the worlds, you can communicate with the warring brothers, try to find out what happened on the island, and eventually choose which one of them to trust.

Naturally, exploration is the name of the game, with frequent puzzles to be solved along the way. If you're enamored with the worlds, and curious to learn more about the conflict between the brothers, you're on the path to enjoying this game. However, roaming around worlds and collecting pages for the brothers' books is all that ever happens. There really isn't much a plot to speak of, and the only plot-centric areas of the worlds are the rooms of the brothers, containing notes and trinkets that clue you in to their personalities. The idea here is to help you decide whose side you want to take. However, that's it. There's little backstory to be found, and what exists relates to the brothers or Atrius' time within the worlds. There are no other characters to interact with, as every world is totally vacant, save for the puzzles and machines left behind. Occasionally you can read Atrius' writings about the worlds he created and their inhabitants, but you never see signs of their existence, or learn where they disappeared to. In fact, these worlds seem to be more like summer homes for Atrius and family, but again, you never collect enough information about them to make that kind of judgment.

The books often contain clues to the workings of the islands.

This is where the main criticism of Myst usually gets leveled - that it's a pretty game where nothing happens. To a point, this is true. Myst's greatest assets are on its surface, with very little substance underneath. It is fun to explore strictly for the sake of exploring, and it makes for a nice, laid-back little game. But if you're jonesing to save the world again, or do something beyond strolling through tall trees and gazing at constellations to solve a door puzzle, you're going to be bored out of your mind here.

Myst is a classic, defining adventure game, but more for its high-art visuals and new gameplay style, not for its plot. When I say a game is Myst-like, that's because it uses the same technique of exploring by clicking through still images, not because it recreates the experience of walking through the woods with nothing to do. That's not to say it's a bad game, and it's so completely inoffensive and casual that I can see why so many people bought it. However, some of the puzzles are pretty complicated, and since this game came out before the proliferation of FAQs and walkthroughs on the Internet, I suspect not many people ever finished it. If you're interested and want to check it out, you'll probably find it worth the trouble, but Myst is hardly a must play.

-reviewed 7/24/04 - game copyright 1993 Broderbund

Great visuals, friendly new style of point & click exploration.

High on art and design, low on plot and adventure.

	9
	8
	8
	5
	84%

Myst on MobyGames
"The Making of Myst" on YouTube