Certainly successful at creating an intriguing, mysterious world to explore and try to comprehend - significantly less so at allowing you to navigate or interact with said world and unravel its secrets. The puzzles are, yes, in fact, MYST puzzles - maddeningly unclear yet undeniably evocative and built into the world in exciting ways - but their legendary obtuseness would actually be much less of an issue if the solutions weren't so labor-intensive. Every time you get that wonderful "a-ha!" moment, it's usually tamped down by the realization of all the places you have to go and crap you have to do to enact the results. This and the trial-and-error nature of the worlds' machinery is obviously anti-fun and certainly not intelluctually stimulating - it just exists to extend the experience. (The fact that the 100% no-glitch speedrun record is sitting at about ten minutes speaks to this, also.)

But the game was a hit and was influential for a reason, and it does still hold some power. Tinkering around, wondering at the sights, desperately trying to make something, somewhere happen. The visuals actually hold up a lot better than 99% of early CG because they were smart about their designs and didn't overextend themselves, and I love how the FMV being (mostly) confined to little windows in glitchy magic books masks the low quality. Aside from the terrible hotspot navigation, it actually stands up and is fairly playable today. But, to stoke a very pointless old rivalry, it's no THE 7TH GUEST.

[review from 2022] The first time I came across this game was on GOG when they were having a sale on some of the old games, including the Myst series. I was curious about what it was about but never gotten interested in the series until I watch a video from Adumplaze and wanted to play it myself. This is a game that requires a LOT of patience. The puzzles are certainly not easy to figure out, but once you’re able to solve it and get the hang of it, it is extremely rewarding. There were a few times where I got stuck in two of the worlds (or Ages as they’re called) and had to resort to looking up what to do from a walkthrough. There’s no doubt that a lot of passion when into not only the environments for Age and each puzzle, but also the world of Myst and its characters. I would recommend playing this game as your first entry to the series, although I think any of the later tiles in the series, like Riven or Myst 3, would be a better starting point than the first game since they improve on a lot of things over Myst 1. Also, if you were to play Myst 1, I would probably recommend the realMyst version over the original Myst, although I haven’t played that version yet to compare the two versions of Myst 1. Anyway, realMyst replaces the slideshow screenshots from the original version with a 3D world to explore, and might be a better experience for you despite the recent Masterpiece edition of realMyst that changed the original graphics with more “modern” and “realistic” graphics for the 3D world. I haven’t played the sequels yet, but I definitely look forward to trying them out when I get the chance.