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Myst by Blackwater 03/20/2021, 11:54pm PDT Certain things will always remind me of the 1990s. Seinfeld! Ace of Base! That one really shitty Batman movie that had Arnold Schwarzenegger in it. And... Myst. I was motivated to replay this game when I read Jimmy Maher's excellent article about it. Jimmy comes at it from the perspective of a text adventure game connoisseur, trying to fit the game into the overall arc of video game history. I come at it from the perspective of a dumbass who didn't get very far in the game when I first played it, and who was curious about how well the game had aged. I think both perspectives have value. Or at least, I think you're too lazy to click the close button this tab. It comes out to the same thing, basically. The first puzzle I had to solve was how to actually run the game. Emulating Mac OS classic was too much of a pain in the ass to consider. I definitely didn't want the remake named "realMyst" (like most other products with "real" in the name, it's fake.) Luckily, GOG had the 2000 remaster which just upped the color depth and some other minor things, but otherwise left everything alone. It's called "Myst: Masterpiece Edition" and GOG claims it runs on Windows XP. Since I have an old XP box that I keep around for these sorts of things, that sounded like the way to go. Unluckily, it turned out not to really work on Windows XP. I looked up the error message and got a bunch of discussion about how this is the error you get if you use a new-ish Microsoft compiler on some old code and it accidentally pulls in libraries that didn't exist on XP. So I think the devs just screwed up here. Fortunately, after some experimenting and one inexplicable installer crash, I managed to get it working on Windows 8.1. Anyway. Myst! The music is instantly recognizable, especially the intro. The game even has quitting music which is pretty good. When I write it out like that, it sounds bad, but I actually like it, even though it's unskippable. Myst was, of course, one of the last point-and-click adventures to be released for the mainstream market. You move through a series of pre-rendered shots by clicking on the right spots. It's a much different feeling than how games play today. In a way, it kind of reminds me of the early Resident Evil games and their fixed camera angles. Myst is judicious with its camera angles and movement... mostly. There are a few spots where I felt that the navigation was a bit bullshit. The worst offender was that place where the trees grow directly out of the swamp, and there's a maze of pathways on the ground floor. One of the problems is, sometimes turning around moves you 45 degrees, and sometimes it moves you 90 degrees. Similarly, sometimes you take a short step forward, and sometimes quite a large step. If the scene gets too complex it just gets confusing. Myst has a typical adventure game plot: you arrive on a deserted island and must find out who killed everyone (cue spooky music). As Jimmy would no doubt hasten to point out, this is traditional for a reason: getting rid of NPCs avoids a lot of clunky interactions that don't feel very #aesthetic. And Myst really is all about the aesthetic. Well, OK, I lied a bit: there are two NPCs. Two brothers, stuck inside magical books, who you can interact with in a very limited way, by bringing them more pages-- red pages for one broker, blue pages for the other. So it's kind of like a murder mystery, and you have two suspects... at first. I won't give away the ending, but I will say that you will probably see it coming once you're about half of the way through. In addition to the brothers, the plot is conveyed by journals written by Atrus, father of the two brothers. Atrus writes kind of like an old-timey explorer about the various worlds he has visited (or possibly created?) via The Art. The journals are well written and fun. They make you wish you could actually go to the places he's describing. And you can! Later in the game. The plot is not particularly deep, but the game makes it work well. The feeling of investigating a mystery gives meaning to wandering around the islands. And the general serious attitude of the game means that when you find something like a bottle of poison or a dagger, you say oh shit! rather than just shrugging and pressing the space bar to kill the millionth demon in DOOM. Plus, the game has a character who is into evil voodoo. I was surprised by how easy I found the puzzles this time around. The first time I played this, I didn't even get off of the main island. This time, I only really got stuck in one or two spots, and after a half hour I got unstuck without any hints. The infamous rocket maze section was annoying, but not really challenging. The main challenges I had were cases where there was something I could do that I didn't realize I could do-- a pixel I failed to click on, or just an action I failed to take. Once I figured out the action, the logic wasn't hard to see. One key thing that helped me a lot was taking notes. I don't remember doing that last time and that might explain why I never really got anywhere. Myst is scrupulously fair-- there are no walking dead scenarios, no cases where you have to learn by death, and no blatantly unfair leaps of logic. Mainly, when you make a mistake, the game just forces you to do something that takes time, like a parent putting you in the time out corner. My favorite Age in Myst would have to be the Mechanical age, with all the giant gears. It has the coolest things to find, and the most interesting puzzles, I think. My least favorite would have to be the Selenitic Age. There's not really anything much to find there, and the maze puzzle is tedious. Fun fact: the word "Selentic" doesn't apepar anywhere in the game. But fans noticed that the data file for the Age was named that, and so the name stuck. I feel like the ending of Myst was a bit anticlimactic. There's a cinematic, but it doesn't really resolve any of the questions I had about the setting. It also literally doesn't resolve your situation as a visitor to the island-- basically, a character tells you that your reward for winning is to keep exploring the island. That's a bit silly and takes away a bit from the feeling of winning, if you ask me. Telling you that your reward is to keep playing was lame even back when Super Mario Brothers did it. Anyway, I don't regret playing Myst again. And in an era of GPU scarcity, could this be... the future of video games? Just kidding. No, it's definitely not. But the important part is that I won.

Myst by Blackwater 03/20/2021, 11:54pm PDT