Just cracked into Exile this evening. Love the way it looks and I like the way you can look around in 360 degrees. Really helps to create a sense of space and it makes all the difference in the world when it comes to mentally mapping out the land and understanding where things are relative to each other. Now the puzzles are the obstacle, not being confused where you are relative to the last place you were and it makes it much less likely that you’ll not realize a clickable object.
I’ve got the first big puzzle on the first Age, J’nanin, solved tonight. It’s early in the game, but I’m liking it more than Riven.
I read the first, and maybe the second, Myst book. I enjoyed them at the time, but then, I was also a kid at the time. I suspect that if I went back and read them now, I would find them to be a little more, um, like Rand Miller’s acting, I suppose. (Passable for what they’re supposed to be, but nothing more).
The first time I played Myst I laboriously mapped out the whole pipe system with the underwater fish sub until I finally found the right place. Several years later, I popped it in to see how hard it was a second time. I’d forgotten most of the puzzles and had to start a new notebook since I’d lost my notes in one of my moves. This time, it dawned on me after a few intersections that the sounds corresponded to directions :smack: I needed one hint, in the Mechanical age. It never occurred to me that there would be a delayed action possible there.
In Riven, I had two stumbling blocks: I didn’t recognize one of the clues when looking through the underwater telescope, even after looking at it several times, and I missed a passage that was well hidden behind a door. The constant disk switching was a total PITA the first time I played it. When I gave it to my wife to play, we were able to rip all but the last disk to disk images and mount them all, so each island loaded without disk swapping except for the endgame. That was much, much nicer.
I haven’t played any of the later games. I might check out III or IV sometime, due to being reminded of them now.
I got stuck there too! That one really annoyed me when it happened, because there was no clue that it should have even been there. Everywhere else doors close on their own as soon as you walk away from them, but that door didn’t - keeping the passageway hidden unless you decided to close the door yourself, from the inside, and then looked around. :mad:
Sachertorte, my husband and I got stuck on the exact same shape. That’s the nice thing about playing with a partner, he could look things up and give me non-obvious hints whenever we got stuck. (We actually play most games that way, taking turns by game with the controls.)
I loved Myst and Riven. I enjoyed what I played of Exile, too, but I got distracted and didn’t finish it, even though I got pretty far into the game. The first puzzle in Exile was one of the most beautiful and challenging that I’ve done; reading this really makes me want to pick it up again.
I used the screen capture feature of Windows and Pasted the clipboard to a graphics program. I then printed out the puzzles for reference later. They looked cool hanging on the wall by the computer too. It saved a lot of sketching.
