Myst - Review

I mentioned that I think the reason that I had never finished Myst is because I played it when I was too young. Having now beat Myst I can say that I was 100% correct in thinking that.

I'm split on how I should feel about Myst. On one hand I thought it was a fun game that made me think and was also very interesting. On the other hand I had a hard time with the pacing and I felt that the game was extremely counter intuitive.

Myst is different than any game you've probably ever played before. There are no bad guys, there are not time limits, there really are no rules, no one tells you where to go, no one tells you what to do, and there's a total of three characters in the entire game. You're pretty much just plopped down into a world and you decide what you do next. Which I greatly enjoyed, I like non-linear games. Though with Myst I really wish it had given me at least a little direction. For the first 30 minutes I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I basically wandered around the island wondering what the hell I was supposed to be doing, which can get frustrating at times.

It took a while to finally figure out what I needed to do, but than I ran into a problem when I tried to do it. Myst is full of puzzles. Throughout the game you're going to be solving all sorts of puzzles. Which is okay, puzzles in games that should have puzzles are great. Except with Myst I felt like I was missing about 20% of the information I needed to solve most the puzzles. Don't get me wrong not every puzzle had me stumped, but there were quite a few that I had to give up on and go check a walkthrough to see how to finish them... and even once I knew that answer a lot of the time I still wasn't sure how they arrived at it. It's things like that which got on my nerves. Myst puzzles occasionally feel like a connect the dots only half the dots are missing and you're just not sure how to complete it.

Let me give an example: In one puzzle you're supposed to put exactly 59 volts of power into a rocket, you do this by clicking on ten different buttons. Each button will add X amount of volts to power the rocket. There's two screens, one that shows the amount of volts currently and one that shows the amount of volts going to the rocket, well if you go over 59 volts all of the sudden the screen telling you the amount of volts going to rocket goes blank. I had no idea how to fix it, finally I checked a walkthrough and apparently I tripped a circuit breaker and I had to go fix it. Not only did I not know that, I wasn't sure how I was supposed to know that.

Despite the fact that occasionally I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do and was often somewhat confused by the puzzles I still enjoyed playing Myst. It does a good job immersing you in it's story and the visuals and sound/music are all very interesting (even though the visuals are dated). I had a good time playing it, and can understand why it's as popular as it is. It was interesting to play a video game that I don't think I could actually compare to any other video game I have ever played. If you haven't played it before I would suggest giving it a shot some time even if it's just with a walkthrough in hand.

Squid.