Asking the Wrong Questions

In a word: no. Just... just no. Can we pretend this game never happened? Can we? Please? The plot in a nutshell: Atrus' daughter Yeesha, previously seen as a bouncing, apple-cheeked cherub in Myst III: Exile , and more recently as a hilariously wooden young actress in Myst IV: Revelations , is all grown up, and has the facial tattoos and pretentious inner turmoil to prove it. She's also bugshit crazy but, surprisingly enough, not a homicidal maniac, which puts her ahead of the curve when it comes to her family. Yeesha and another D'ni survivor, Esher, send you on a dimly understood quest through the remains of the D'ni city and four other ages to collect four artifacts (the Slates) which will in turn release a fifth one--the fabulously powerful Tablet (not that we ever see even a hint of its power). The whole thing is very vague, and there are also some kind of alien creatures who respond to the Slates and the Tablet. In the end, you have to decide what to do with t...

A brief review of Myst forums reveals that I was wrong about a lot of things in my previous review of the demo. The Slate is used during the demo. Details that I had assumed were extraneous, such as the D'ni numbers and the symbols they correlated to, turn out to be vitally important. In fact, as it turns out I failed to make all but the most basic connections when I played the demo. And yet, I managed to solve the puzzle and get to the demo's end, simply by using a brute force approach. There are four revolving pedestals with eight symbols on each one, each affecting a different door. It's not a combination lock, so it takes less than 32 attempts to find the right symbols. Which right there forces me to reevaluate the entire puzzle. You're not supposed to be able to crack a Myst puzzle by trying all the possible combinations, and one of the most important things a puzzle designer has to keep in mind is that as long as the number of combinations isn't prohibitive...

(Available from Macgamefiles.com . The demo weighs in at 457 MB and is available only for Macintosh. The game's official site also contains a trailer and screenshots.) The first thing you always say about a Myst game is that the graphics are lovely, which, of course, they are. When it released the demo for Myst IV: Revelation , Ubisoft sacrificed image resolution in order to keep the file under a certain size, to the horror and concern of fans. It's good to see that they've learned their lesson, even if the result is a gigantic file that not everyone will be able to download. Beautiful as the game world is, however, I'm not certain about its Myst -ishness. Myst worlds are painstakingly detailed: whether it's indoors, where every surface is covered with books, scraps of paper that have been doodled on, pens, scientific implements, oddly shaped rocks, bits of string, pictures of loved ones, and even desk toys, or outdoors, where every bush, rock and blade of gr...

I played a lot of computer games as a kid, but the ones that I've kept playing are the Myst games. Commonly known as a game for non-gamers, Myst is brilliantly minimallistic. No cumbersome inventory management, no labored backstory, no complicated interface. Most importantly, Myst has a good story. I adored it as a young teenager, when it occupied my mind from morning till night for more than a month. Its sequel, Riven , was the Empire Strikes Back to Myst 's Star Wars --a wider world full of tougher puzzles with a more interesting story that ended in several intriguing ways, not all of them complete losses or wins. The series has persisted to the present day, with two sequels ( Myst III: Exile and Myst IV: Revelation ) and a related game originally intended as a multi-player environment ( Uru ). A fifth and final installment is scheduled for release this fall. All Myst games revolve around Atrus, one of the few survivors of a highly advanced civilization called the D...