Phases review: the Myst games

Wrote for Phases...will come back and put in hyperlinks to relevant sites later.

I’m partly lost and very fed up. This errand that my old friend Atrus sent me on started with a landing in prison, for one. Huh. A strange man in black killed the guard, let me out, and promptly ran away; I’m grateful but confused. At present, I’m trying to get into a building that looks tantalisingly like Atrus’ father Gehn’s workshop. I can’t figure out how to open the door, and have a sneaking suspicion that I will have to walk all the way back down to the beach to tinker with the boiler that powers everything on this wretched island.

I reach for my notebook. The front part is written up from a trip to China: addresses, numbers, sketch of clubbers at a Beijing café, hastily copied signboards. The back is similar, albeit without words: sketches of symbols and machinery, and pedestrian maps with many scratchings-out and corrections, from Riven. Breadcrumb trails of notes through strange places. Reality intrudes with the realization that even though it’s still a sunny midmorning in Riven, here it’s nearly midnight and I have classes tomorrow.

The Myst games are deeply immersive. They’re the kind you play with the lights off, whose puzzles and images float through your mind on its way to dreamland. My siblings and I used to play computer games as a group – one person at the keyboard, the others excitedly yelling directions. When we played Myst, we felt as if we’d gone on a journey together.

For people used to normal games like side-scrollers or first-person shooters, the Myst series will seem strange at first. On finding that it’s not possible to walk around using arrow keys, one’s reaction tends to be “WTH is this, a game or a slideshow?” However, the beautiful graphics more than make up for the lack of motion (and indeed, are the reason for it, since in the early 1990s when Myst was made, home computers weren’t powerful enough to render that kind of images). And it’s not just pretty pictures, since objects that seem like parts of the scenery or childish toys [insert heavy-handed hint for Riven] often turn out to be clues to puzzles you wish you’d taken notes on.

In keeping with the “God is in the details” (or “the devil is in the details”) nature of the graphical side, sound also plays a huge part in the Myst games. Again, don’t get too used to just clicking through devices, because the sounds can be more than just atmospheric effects...

Even though the time and effort needed to solve puzzles can be maddening, this adds to the experience – you spend so much time just walking around searching for things that you develop a sense of place. One thing that’s a bit annoying about Myst III: Exile is that unlike in Myst and Riven, some of the puzzles seem to be there just for the heck of it rather than being functional parts of the situations.

Each new installment in the series has some additional features. Riven adds a ‘zip mode’ which allows you to take shortcuts to places you’ve already been, instead of laboriously clicking through each slide. In Exile, while you still ‘walk’ through the world by clicking, you can pan around a 360° view of the spot you’re standing in. Revelation adds an in-game diary and camera, although taking notes on paper may still be helpful.

Myst, Riven, and Exile have all been out for quite a while so the CDs are cheaply available on the Internet (I will NOT recommend buying pirated software in a Christian webzine...and anyway the pirated copy of Exile I bought in my foolish youth didn’t work *sheepish*). Myst IV: Revelation and Myst V: End of Ages have free demos out, but if your computer is more than a few years old, it may not be capable of running them. Mine wasn’t until I downloaded the third-party Omega Drivers for my video card.