

I was alone- truly alone-and if I wanted to get off this damn island, I would have to dig deep and do something I normally hate to do in games: read and pay close attention. In an age of constant voice overs and omnipresent ‘helpful’ NPCs telling you where to go next, I found the old school approach to game design to be surprisingly refreshing on some level, and actually more immersive at points. However fastidious, there’s still something to Myst, and even more so now that it’s in VR. I can see how nostalgia may fill the gaps for anyone who wants to experience it all over again though, but in the plush, interactive environment of real-time graphics. A few are genuinely cool and make you think.īut in many cases, puzzles can be (putting it mildly) less than fun at times for new players. That’s not to say that all puzzles are like that.
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Image courtesy Cyanįor a modern game, sometimes the linearity of Myst’s puzzles seems positively obtuse though: find a hidden note to find a hidden code to push a button to reveal a lock to open a door. It’s no more difficult than assembling an IKEA shelf-lose a plastic widget though, and you’ll be stuck in an infinite loop of despair until you can find it, slot it into place, and continue on your journey. You need to look everywhere and write down clues. If you’re looking for a new challenge, the new Myst also lets you randomize puzzle solutions. You can’t break the clock any worse than it’s already been broken by fiddling with its gears, but you can’t fix it that way either.
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Playing the new Myst on Quest feels a bit like teleporting inside a giant mechanical clock that someone’s intentionally broken, and then filled with scraps of paper on how to fix it. They didn’t seem very nice.įorget the nostalgia though. My nostalgia for Myst is pretty surface level, since I never actually played the game and only have fleeting memories of spaceships, switches, and two fantastical brothers locked inside books who would shout at you. My mom admits she never finished it she was too busy writing novels and trying to not go insane from the constant moving around the country with two rambunctious kids in tow, a built-in feature of my dad’s former life as an officer in the US Air Force. I was 10 years old when I first, and probably last saw Myst in the flesh. The original Myst (1993) | Image courtesy Rock, Paper, Shotgun Eventually I got into puzzle adventures with Riven (1997), the sequel to Myst, but only after I got my own computer and my brain was decidedly less mushy and stupid. I would quizzically peer over my mom’s shoulder, not really knowing what the hell was going on as she worked her way through the game’s many puzzles on her home office desktop. I remember only brief glimpses of Myst as a kid in the ’90s. I’ll also be diving into the game’s overall implementation on VR headsets. Some of our readers have probably played Myst before, either the original or the remaster on PC from 2000. Much of the game is completely new to me, so I’m approaching the review as an (almost) entirely new player. Note: My first and only encounter with Myst was in the mid-90s, and I never finished it as a kid. Peeling back the nostalgic sheen, it’s clear there’s still something special about Myst, although it’s undoubtedly a product of its time.Īvailable On: Oculus Quest (SteamVR release TBA) Cyan, the same studio who help pioneer the adventure game genre with the original Myst, have now rebuilt the game from the ground-up for traditional monitors and VR headsets, launching first on Oculus Quest. Real-time 3D rendering was still in its infancy back then, so there was something unique about Myst’s rich pre-rendered environments and its simple (but effective) story, which was told across 2,500 point-and-click stills. Originally released on Macintosh in 1993, Myst immersed players in a first-person adventure that was truly ahead of its time, both visually and conceptually.
