Summary
It was unique. And it should have stayed this way
The Good
For a long time, I was a "Myst-hater". A hardcore fan of classic adventures who bitterly resented the degradation of the genre, putting the blame on "Myst" and its army of clones.
I still feel the same way about the fate of adventure games. I still think that the greatest harm that was done to the genre was the immense popularity of "Myst" and the fact that game designers preferred to follow its way instead of the way of great adventures made by
Sierra and
LucasArts. But I don't hate "Myst" any more.
For that, I have to thank
Real Myst, the wonderful remake that made me feel engrossed and immersed in its world. I was amazed to discover that I liked a remake of a game I hated. Many years have passed since I first played "Myst", so I decided to give it another try.
This time, it was different. I understood that there was indeed greatness in "Myst". Four things ruined this game for many adventure fans. First, the puzzles of the game were considered illogical and devilishly hard. "Myst" didn't have inventory-based puzzles. It was full of strange devices, and the player's task was to find out what to do with them. For the most part, the players felt utterly confused, unable to understand the goal of the game.
Second, there was unseen reduction of interactivity and lack of text descriptions. All the variety of actions you could perform in adventure games, all the text those games gave you to read - everything was gone, replaced by a silent game world with a lonely cursor. It was as if interactive fiction games,
King's Quest and
Maniac Mansion never happened, and the only primitive, rudimentary form of adventure was "Myst".
Third, the disproportional influence that "Myst" had on adventure games, the inexplicable desire of the developers to release more and more games that were similar to it enraged many admirers of classic adventure.
And finally, the lack of any movement in the game, coupled with the absence of text, made it feel very cold, and failed to immerse the players into its world. "Myst" was considered a collection of pretty pictures that weren't connected to each other and to the player by any sort of graphical engine.
Of all those things, only the fourth is a valid criticism in my eyes; I'll refer to it in the "Bad" section. The influence "Myst" had on other games is irrelevant to its actual quality. So I won't discuss it here, just dedicating a couple of paragraphs in the "Bottom Line" to this phenomenon.
The difficulty of the puzzles, the low interactivity, and the absence of text - all of that was part of the unique concept the creators of "Myst" had. Video games are art, and there is no such thing as "objective value" in them. For me, every game concept is as valid as any other, provided it was created with soul, and not out of sheer calculation. To love or to hate the kind of experience "Myst" offered is entirely a matter of taste. But it cannot be denied that this experience is unique.
The reduction in interactivity, the lack of text, the concentration on puzzles - those were the things that made "Myst" different. And the idea behind that was to immerse the player in the atmosphere of loneliness. Puzzles had to be tough in order to make the world feel more alien and in a way hostile. Interactivity had to be low because this way the game could feel sufficiently "empty", making the player feel like a stranger in a bizarre world. For the same reason, in-game text descriptions were removed. The player was left alone with the graphics that represented the world. Those graphics were now the focus, the main aspect of the game. The vision of "Myst" was to create a world that would be beautiful and immersive just because it looked this way, without requiring anything else.
This vision was most certainly ahead of its time. Today, in the age of advanced 3D graphics, many games are developed with a specific idea of making the game world as beautiful and as immersive as possible. This was also what "Myst" wanted to be; but in its time, there was no other adventure game that tried to do that. Adventure games were cerebral, not sensual. People didn't play them because they wanted to travel to a virtual reality so beautiful that it would be enough to look at it in order to enjoy the game. "Myst" was the first one that tried to be sensual. Unfortunately, it failed. Drawing pretty pictures was of course not enough to fulfill its demanding task. There had to be some sort of an engine to tie it all together.
Under a Killing Moon was the true realization of this vision, at least from a purely graphical point of view. The twisted irony of fate was that adventure games didn't follow the vision of "Myst", but only its faulty execution.
But in spite of this unsuccessful execution, "Myst" deserved credit for having a great vision. And even though its world couldn't really come to life, it was conceived with a lot of care. It is still possible to feel the bizarre, enchanting atmosphere of this world. It was unique among the worlds of adventure games, or any games in general. It was desolate and alien. Nothing happened in it. There were barely characters to interact with, and the communication with those characters was extremely vague and hard to achieve. Yet this world was also a creation of a human mind. That's where the puzzles of "Myst" come into play.
Yes, they are hard to solve. They are hard mainly because they are not presented as clear tasks. They appear in the game without drawing immediate attention to them, without explaining why they should be solved. It is useless to solve them by trial and error. You will never solve the puzzles of "Myst" if you just walk around and click on everything, hoping for something to happen. Unlike many other games with similar claims, "Myst" does require the player to
think. Recall your favorite classic adventure game - how many puzzles in it were really a thinking challenge? Nearly all of them were solved by experimenting with objects. The architecture of puzzles in "Myst" is
by far superior to any other classic adventure I know. The puzzles are hard, but they all have clues. Those clues are subtly placed, and looking for them is what makes this gameplay exciting. Every puzzle has to be researched, understood, and only then it will be possible to think of its solution.
The best part of those puzzles is that most of them are connected to each other. Nearly every puzzle is unsolvable if you just interact with it without any previous knowledge. There are no "puzzle game-like" puzzles in "Myst"; nothing that would require you to break your head over some tough mathematical tasks. The puzzles of "Myst" form an entire system; they are like a world in itself. Most of the time, you'll have to understand the function of a device, to find a clue for its operation, and to understand its meaning. For that, you'll have to explore other parts of the world, find other devices, etc. Most of the puzzles are surprisingly clear and logical, even though they require you to be so patient and attentive. "Myst" uses graphics and sounds to provide clues; many clues are also contained in the library, the central "hub" of the Myst island and of the entire game world.
The story of "Myst" can't be really called rich and detailed. The information we get is sparse; we begin to understand what approximately happened already after Atrus' message and the first brief conversation with his sons, and the story doesn't change much later. But much like with the interactivity and text issues, this was certainly intentional. The story of "Myst" is wide open to interpretations. The whole idea of setting this story in a
book, making the entire world a creation of human mind, is quite fascinating. A surreal feeling surrounds you when you first visit Myst, and stays with you till the end. The world of "Myst" is not similar to our world, but it also can't be easily classified under any other stereotypical setting category: medieval, sci-fi, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic - none of them applies. The world of "Myst" is the true hero, the true "character" of the story.
When the fable-like story comes to its concluding point, you'll have to make a decision regarding the entire story. Basically, the process of unraveling the story involves getting more and more information from the sons of Atrus, and finally deciding which one of them lied and which spoke the truth, or perhaps choosing to mistrust them both. The two brothers are quite different from each other, and you learn more about them during your exploration. You will have viewed the story from different angles, and your choice affects the ending.
Much of this story is vague and cryptic, but I enjoyed it the way it was. The process of hunting fro the red and blue pages, getting rid of all this mysterious "static" and finally making the sons speak clearly was exiting enough, and the story always retained the aura of mystery, true to the game's title.
The Bad
"Myst" had a vision, but it failed to live up to it. The responsibility for that lies entirely on its engine and controls.
In its general concept and idea, "Myst" was quite original and unique. But technically, it was a successor of interactive fiction. In text adventures, the player doesn't physically navigate a character through a game world, but perceives it through the text-based interaction and descriptions. Interactive fiction games were like books in a game format. Text played the role of the graphics. Text messages were there to create the atmosphere that the graphics could not provide.
But "Myst" didn't play at all like a book (somewhat ironically, since it was set
inside a book). It didn't have any text descriptions whatsoever. Its interaction was limited to one cursor. This decision had a meaning. It did so to create a feeling of melancholic solitude, to put all the emphasis on the atmosphere. But in order to do that properly, "Myst"
had to be a very graphical game. Graphics were its focus, they had to perform all the functions now; in fact, the whole idea was to make the player lose himself in the
graphical world. "Myst" should have been a 3D game. No true physical immersion is possible when the only thing you can do in the game is
view pictures. Sure, there are puzzles to solve, but those puzzles are just one aspect of "Myst". The other is the possibility to explore its world, to "feel" it. But how can you feel a world if you can't even
move in it? How can you become immersed in a world if this world is just a collection of pretty pictures? Even the oldest, most ugly kind of 3D would have been much better than that.
You
want to be there. You want to raise your head and to look at the sky over the island. You want to walk around this strange contraption, examining it from all the sides. You want to walk on the shore, exploring every corner, looking for clues. But you can't.
Real Myst didn't happen but seven years later. All you can do in this original version is jump from picture to picture, and no matter how many times you do that, no matter how carefully you examine the pictures, no matter how pretty and detailed they are - they are just pictures. They would have been great in an interactive fiction game, even in a Japanese adventure, which is all about text. But here, we don't have text, we have nothing but those lifeless pictures, and they can't immerse. "Myst" should have looked and played like
Under a Killing Moon, the true great revolutionary of adventure genre. Instead, it looked and played like a non-interactive collection of puzzles with pictures.
If at least there was something to connect all those pictures together, to bring them closer to the player, to make them feel like a real world - quiet and cold, but still a world - "Myst" could have become much more immersive. But after having deprived the protagonist of the ability to move, "Myst" also doesn't let him do anything with its lifeless screens. When you move from screen to screen, you know that you are not really moving. There is even no such illusion. The camera angles used to make those screens, even their extreme detail give away the fact that they were conceived as screens, not as organic whole. You never really enter the world of "Myst"; it is just shown to you. You feel like an observer in the game, not like a participant. And that is the reason why "Myst" can get boring.
Ironically, the very thing that made "Myst" fail to catch up to its own creative idea - the game engine - was also the one that was most stubbornly retained in all the "Myst clones". Dozens of games with pretty still pictures connected by utterly lame navigation controls began to pour onto the market. Adventure games turned from technologically ground-breaking products (think of all those
Sierra and
LucasArts games of the early nineties) into weird outdated puzzle games in which nothing ever moved and in which the player couldn't even walk properly. And at this very time,
System Shock was slipping into a modest cult status. "Under a Killing Moon" was hardly even noticed. And the market began to give way to the "brainless" FPSs that conquered the world of video games with their advanced graphical engines...
The Bottom Line
Why do so many people hate "Myst"? It has a
very limited appeal, and it is entirely possible to miss the whole point of the game. It requires a lot of attention from the player and a great deal of concentration. The original version of "Myst" (not the
remake), that doesn't allow any movement, has a particularly suffocating effect on the player, depriving him of basic game activities and testing his patience.
So, are those the reasons for the steady hatred the game has received from the "hardcore" community? Not only. The main reason is that this game should have never become so popular, so mainstream. "Myst" is anything
but mainstream, it was conceived as a one of a kind experiment, and it was probably the least suitable game to have any major influence on gaming. But we all know what happened: "Myst" shipped together with CD ROM drives, "Myst" was marketed to people who knew nothing about video games, "Myst" was falsely described as the only alternative to "brainless action games", as if other adventure games had never happened. "Myst" was admired for what it was not, and its popularity was so disproportionally huge that other games began to imitate it, starting the era of "Myst clones". The very idea of cloning such a unique game was flawed from the beginning. Most of the clones were just technical imitation of "Myst", lacking the true inspiration and the vision of the original. The market was flooded by boring, graphically outdated, mind-breakingly difficult, obscure, incoherent adventure games that all inherited the non-existent engine and the awkward interface of "Myst".
But it was not the game's fault. The negative influence "Myst" had on other games has nothing to do with its merits as a game. Most adventure fans love
Loom. Can you imagine how we would feel about it if it had achieved the status of "Myst", initiating endless cloning of its unique concept? Can you imagine game companies releasing countless adventures in which the only thing you could do was play notes on a musical instrument? People would hate "Loom", the game that had caused that. But it didn't happen. "Loom" was unique, and fortunately stayed unique. "Myst" had a different fate.
Now, when I've finally put an end to the hatred I was feeling towards the game, I'm looking at it with mixed emotions. Part of me still wants to accuse it for everything that was done to the adventure genre in its name, thinking with rage about the outstanding
Under a Killing Moon, that should have taken its place as a template for future games. But another part, the rational one, tries to see the game the way it is, free of its disproportional popularity, of its dubious status as a "game for people who don't play games" that it acquired over years, of the monotony and depression that entered the world of adventure games after its release. And when I look at it this way, I see a game that was an intellectual challenge thanks to its clever puzzles and subtly placed clues, a game that was ahead of its time, because its creators had their own distinctive vision of atmosphere and immersion in a game world.
But this vision was fully realized only in its remake, aptly named
Real Myst. I wouldn't play "Myst" again, because "Real Myst" is what the original version was supposed to be. "Myst" is to it what sketches are to a finished picture. And this picture is, indeed, a great game - one that turned my hatred into love.
