My wife and I have been replaying some of the Myst games again. Man, I wish there was something this good coming out now. If you know of a Myst game that is as good as the actual ones, let me know.
Got me thinking, too. Which is the best one?
I’m sorry, I meant for this to have a poll. How do I add a poll after forgetting to select it on the original posting?
Thread tools?
I highly enjoyed Riven, but I admit I didn’t play any beyond that.
Thanks.
I choose Myst IV. It has some masterful puzzles and I prefer the long worlds over having a lot short worlds. You are in Haven and Spire and Serenia for a really long time, solving some cool puzzles.
Favorite puzzles:
-
Moving the monkeys by calling them with monkey sounds
-
The Slider puzzle in the chair of Spire(frustrating as it is)
I played them all up to Uru.
Myst and Riven were by far the most memorable. I can’t tell you how much I anticipated the release of Riven. And while it wasn’t really a disappointment, it just didn’t quite have the intrigue and novelty Myst did.
After Robyn Miller left Cyan, the games seemed to have lost their soul.
Rand Miller(whom I have met, by the way) did return for Myst 5. However, I think the makers/designers of Myst IV nailed it.
My brother and I also eagerly awaited Riven. We got it for Christmas and put it in that day. One of the few games(in those days) that worked perfectly right out of the box. We were blown away.
It was a bit too hard, I thought. Not in the fun way, either. Anyway, we adored it.
Myst was gold. I doubt you’ll get much argument on that. This was exactly what a free-roaming mystery was supposed to be, a variety of beautiful, lush environments where you pieced together different parts of the mystery one at a time. Where if you were thoughtful and persistent, you could succeed without requiring official books or in-game help or the Internet.
There are a few minor things that could’ve used improvement (path to tree elevator needed to be clearer, better idea of how to fix the power line if you went over voltage, at least one critical clue required the brightness cranked WAAAAY up), but otherwise, this was simply a great game.
Riven is quite possibly the most overrated computer game in history. It was TOO DAMN HARD. For starters, there is not a single complete solution anywhere in the game. You get part here and part on some other island, if you’re lucky. The amount of running around you need to do for some of them is beyond baffling (if I ever run into anything like the “get 4 animal sounds-get 10 Riven numbers after about 20 minutes of work-match numbers to animals-match fifth number to animal that doesn’t have a sound” again, it’ll be too soon). Sometimes you don’t get the rest of the solution at all, like with the marble orb symbols, and you just have to guess as to what the final piece is. Because the islands are haphazardly connected to each other, and you can move from one to another without really figuring out much, it’s difficult to tell whether you’re making progress. Back in Myst, if you found the way out of an Age, you knew you were getting somewhere even if you didn’t find the red or blue page in it. Riven, who the hell knows?
And that marble board…I’m sorry, but any puzzle where you have to place 5 of 6 pegs into any of 625 possible spaces (and of course you don’t even know which peg is the wrong one, oh, and did I mention that one of the peg locations is hidden?) has no place in civilized society. How bad is it? In all the gaming I’ve done in my life, every platform, every genre, I’ve found one task that is comparable in stupid impossibility, the Grand Puzzle in Zork 3.
What happened? How did the Millers look at the phenomenal, groundbreaking, industry-changing success that was Myst and decide that the proper way to follow up was to crank up the difficulty 500 notches? Did they secretly have the burning desire to make the most tortuously difficult game imaginable, and they realized that they could get away with it because all anyone would ever talk about would be the eye-popping graphics and surrealism and riveting story? Or, given by how the later games turned out, they made it tortuously difficult because that’s what the players wanted? (Which, personally, I would find disturbing as hell.)
Exile…eh. Played for about 6 minutes, got friggin’ nowhere, got serious motion sickness. Uninstalled and never paid any attention to this franchise again.
(Myst has appeared on at least 11 platforms. Riven just got a 5th, and Exile has 4. I think that says a lot.)
I’ll be the first to say I liked Exile. It ramped down the absurd complexity quite a bit from Riven, it hearkened back to Myst and we got to see some of the damage Sirrus and Achenar did, the settings were beautiful (especially the basalt structures of the Marble Age) and anyway I’m a sucker for madman-exacting-revenge stories. Getting Brad Dourif as the (sympathetic) villain sold that game for me as well; there’s a moment in a cut scene where at the same time he’s cackling maniacally, a tear rolls down his face. Awesome.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played Riven, but I don’t recall any puzzles where you are supposed to brute force the answer… And if you’re not supposed to brute force the answer, who cares how many possible spaces there are?
Well, then how do you figure out the answer, because I’m with DKW and eventually I just went online and found a walkthrough for that puzzle.
I’ve only played Myst, Riven and Exile as when I was really invested in the series, I was in middle and high school and couldn’t afford to buy them right when they came out and I was never very good and remembering to look for them a few months later. Perhaps when I get around to getting a nice desktop I’ll get the others and see what they’re like. I did read some of the books of D’ni, though. I think my favorite so far is Exile.
IV is the best in the series and amazing, I think.
V is a let down, but still is not really bad. Very short, though.
I will say, I’m with you guys, IV was indeed great fun, especially after Exile… which after the blood, sweat and tears of Riven, seemed a bit watered down.
What I really enjoyed were the 3 books they wrote. For game novelization, I was pretty satisfied and found myself caught up in the character’s plight.
Exile is my favourite because a) it was possible to complete without a 200 IQ/a strategy guide, and b) it had a compelling and internal story. The soundtrack fucking kicks ARSE too.
I enjoyed playing 4 but struggled with it a lot, and couldn’t work out what to do once I got into the worlds of Achenar and Sirius (even with the hint system!). Maybe I’m just dumb. That said 4 definitely was far more cinematic, some of the visuals were stunning (the opening sequence gave me goose bumps!). I still haven’t played 5.
I felt IV was extremely cinematic and engrossing, perhaps the best in that respect (just the little details, like different knocking sounds for different surfaces and everything!), but its puzzles were ultimately rather lackluster. Particularly in that last stage, I recall thinking “Bleh. This is fun?”. I can’t recall the details of why I felt that way, though. (I also recall being unduly put off by Peter Gabriel, who I actually like, but still…)
Anyway, in my personal ranking, Riven is the top, hands-down. The original Myst has its flaws, but still gets a lot of points for just being so new and different. Those two had the best blend of atmosphere and puzzles, in my opinion. Exile was a lot of casual fun as well, purely on the merits of the puzzles, and comes in third. Revelation was ultimately, I would have to say, despite a great deal of initial enthusiasm, not particularly fondly cherished by me.
My favorite is Revelation, but Riven comes close. Revelation feels the most alive, it also has the best soundtrack in my opinion.
I didn’t find Riven to be oppressively hard, but it was clearly more difficult than Myst. The thing that got me was the frog. Seriously, why on earth would I consider the panorama to be of significance?
As for the marbles. I don’t remember the puzzle. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have to look up a solution or use brute force, but that was a long time ago.
For Myst, I didn’t need any hints. I took lots of notes though.
The rest are a jumble. I remember getting stuck once and having to look up a walkthrough (Yay! world wide web). Turns out it was a path I didn’t know existed.
The monkeys referenced above were indeed cool but exceedingly frustrating. The puzzle was poorly coded. I knew exactly what I wanted to do to solve the puzzle, but the UI was flakey so creating the right sounds and timing was a nearly impossible task.
Myst wins for me for having a wonderfully mysterious experience. The not knowing WTF was going on was enchanting. You can get Myst on your iPhone. I’m totally stuck! I had wayyyy more free time in college apparently. And possibly more brain cells.
A patch later fixed the monkey calling interface. It was too touchy originally and they fixed it. They also fixed the slider puzzle in Spire(the bad guy’s world). You had those vibrating crystals and in the original release, you only had about .5 seconds leeway on moving the sliders around, which made it exceedingly frustrating. In the patch, you have more time, which you mainly need because the sliders have a tendency to move a bit after you unclick the mouse button.
My favorite Myst by quite a bit, though.