I played and enjoyed Myst and even a couple of the sequels, but I think the evolutionary branches from it are more in the Casual Gaming market with the bazillions of room escapes and logic puzzles, etc.
Another part of their problem is some of the puzzles are so obtuse the temptation to look stuff up almost becomes a necessity. I just recently (as in the past two days) replayed every single Monkey Island game, and for every brilliant, clever puzzle there’s one where there’s no way you’d get the answer. They also suffer from the limitations of being pre-programmed, in that there are often 10-20 solutions to the puzzle just given what’s in your inventory, but none of them work so you need Random Item 7A on the other side of the island. I think the only recent adventure game I can think of that avoided this is Telltale’s Back to the Future game.
That’s not to say I don’t love them, I really do, but adventure games do suffer from, well, like Yahtzee said “rubbing every item against every other item until you hop onto the train of logic unique to that game’s developer.” And when you’re stuck for 45 minutes having tried 15 logical solutions and you just look up “that one puzzle” it becomes very difficult to not “read ahead just a little bit.”
Jragon has given a couple of my peeves about Myst. I know that for at least a couple of puzzles, I tried every damned thing that I could think of, then asked my daughter for help, and then finally I looked up the answer in the book.
One of the things that I liked about Zork: Grand Inquisitor was that most of the puzzles (possibly all of them) were actually logical, and the game occasionally gave hints. One monster even said something like “Sure, dig into the old inventory. Something’s bound to work!” when you tried to use inventory items on it.