https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/a-look-back-at-realmyst-2000/

The tech behind video games during the 90s and into the early 2000s was rapidly evolving. Games had moved from 2D pixel art and still images for it’s graphics with limited beeps and boops for sound to being fully 3D and seen in real time with proper high quality audio that allowed for voice acting, sounds, and music along with other features such as being able to play videos, all of which became available through dedicated video and sound cards along with the CD being the hot new format and able to hold all of this brand new technology easily.

And Myst was released right at the beginning of these advancements, only really seeing the beginnings of these new strides. So a remake of Myst wasn’t too absurd, and 7 years later, in 2000, realMyst was released, a fully 3D version of Myst where you could see it from every angle and not just the ones the developers had to provide.

It was developed by Cyan with some help with Sunsoft, realMyst was developed on the PLASMA engine as a way to test it out for the upcoming and then unnamed Uru, which was released 3 years later in 2003.

But when realMyst was released, it was released to a lukewarm reception at best from reviewers and a less than warm welcome even from it’s own creators. Billed as the version of the game that the creators (Rand and Robyn Miller) would have made if the technology at the time was available, Robyn Miller later went on record to explicitly deny that this version of Myst was what they would have made, calling it a pointless remake and saying “I only saw realMyst after it was released. As a remake, it was a lapse of reason and directionless; overt merchandising of the original Myst. It definitely wasn’t how we originally envisioned Myst, as was promoted.” [SOURCE: Retro GAMER Collection Volume Five].

Even the original version of realMyst is no longer considered to be canon and has been delisted from every available digital storefront, being replaced with realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, released 14 years after the original realMyst. Thankfully I managed to get my version of the original realMyst from GOG before it got delisted, but the only way to find that version now is second hand or to sail the high seas of the internet. Since it’s probably never going to go on sale ever again and Cyan is not going to get a cent from it ever again, just buy the Masterpiece Edition and get the original realMyst through other means.

But was it really all that bad? Let’s jump right into it.

Since there’s not much of a difference between the plot of realMyst and the plot from the original Myst, you can find a plot summary as well as a more in-depth look at the original Myst here.

Right off the bat, the original version of realMyst is buggy, even when it was released. Even the version that I luckily got from GOG, which is know for getting older games to work properly on more modern computers, or at least as best they can, still has bugs. I did have to some slight fiddling with the game to get it running smoothly, and even then it did crash on me once and when you alt-tab out of the game it crashes. It’s nowhere near the worst experience I’ve had getting an older game to work, but just be cautious about playing it. You kinda have to dedicate yourself to it without being distracted by stuff in the background of your computer.

The controls for the original realMyst are a little weird too. The default controls are W for forward and S for walking backwards, and shift lets you run, but no A or D for strafing. The left and right mouse buttons also move you back and forward too. There is also a dead zone in the middle of the screen where you can move your cursor around to interact with the world and if you try to move your cursor out of this dead zone you can move the screen. These controls are a little unconventional to say the least. It’s like the developers were trying to create a mix of first person controls and the point-and-click controls from the original.

These are changeable in the settings. You can increase the area in which your cursor can move, ranging from taking up the entire screen and only moving the camera around when the cursor hits the edge of the screen, which is pointless since you’re interaction with objects is still limited by the dead zone in the middle of the screen, to having the area that the cursor can move in effectively be so small that it’s closer to what standard mouse controls were at the time in that it moves the screen when moving the mouse at all, which is much more preferable method since you can still point and click on whatever you want without having to worry about the cursor dead zone.

The other option in the settings is the ‘Advanced Mappings’, which adds in strafing, so using both the ‘Advanced Mappings’ and no dead zone gets you the standard controls of every first person game. You can also change the settings of the walking, strafing, and cursor speeds too. Apparently the ‘Advanced Mappings’ were patched in after the games release too, which seems baffling in retrospective considering that it had be a few years since the release of Quake at this point and that was one of the biggest and most famous games on the PC at this point.

Weirdly enough, they’re not the worst controls that I’ve encountered throughout the years, both from games before and since, it’s still weird that they’re presented like this considering that a lot of games had made their way into 3D at this point. It could have been entirely a limitation of the engine or the developers didn’t quite get how to work a 3D engine yet.

But there are a few times where you’re walking up some stairs and the game takes some of the control away from them. Like the spiral staircase in the Stoneship Age. You don’t have to turn your camera to climb them, you can just hold forward and the game will turn you in the direction of whatever way the staircase is going. Turning around with the mouse on the staircase can get you a bit disoriented when the game tries to correct the direction you’re going up and down stairs. The same thing happens in the Channelwood Age when you’re going up and down the spiral staircases their too. Maybe there was a bug that interfere with the game where you couldn’t get get close to the edge specifically with the stairs without some weird glitch, or maybe it’s an aesthetic choice that mixes first person controls with point-and-click controls like I mentioned earlier. Again, it could either be a weird limitation of the engine this was the best thing that the developers could do.

Just like the original game, you can only carry one page at a time. I know it’s a hold over from the original game, but it does feel a little tedious, and only goes to show the limitations of the original game. But then again, if you could carry both pages, the time it would take to complete the game would be significantly cut down and the whole game would be over pretty quickly, so it’s a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation.

Even the odd puzzle got an update. The elevation rotation puzzle has removed it’s drift from the original and stops when you remove your cursor from the lever. I know this is going to annoy some hardcore fan, and spending years playing Myst only for one of the puzzles to be made easier in an updated version of the game could make you feel like you’ve been wasting your time for years, but I’m more indifferent towards this change.

But realMyst is not completely without new content. Aside from the overhaul in graphics, which we’ll get to later on, realMyst comes with a brand new age for Myst fans to explore called Rime. If you’ve already familiar with Myst, you can easily get to it pretty quickly.

There are no new real puzzles to speak of since much like the rest of realMyst it’s was made more of a tech demo, but it’s still worth checking out since it still provides something for older fans. Since the original Myst, Riven had come out in 1997 and Myst III: Exile was still in development and wasn’t going to be released until the next year, so Rime was made as an attempt to connect the original game with the rest of the series, specifically Riven, by adding new lore.

I like the atmosphere of this new age. Unlike a lot of the other Ages, Rime is permanently stuck at night in a perpetual snowstorm, and even has whales that circle the island. It has a nice serenity to it. It actually tries to add something to the game instead of just being a 1-to-1 remake of the original with updated graphics. It might just be a selling point for the back of the box, but I still liked it.

But since one of the selling point of this remake are the real time 3D graphics, let’s dive into that. The moment you boot up the game the changes are almost immediate. Even the intro cutscene is in real time 3D, and there is a smooth transition picking up and opening the Myst book.

One you actually arrive on Myst Island, everything is now running in real time as opposed to the limited still images from the original game. They water actually has waves that crash into the store, and you can can see things moving in real time, such as the hands on the clock face of the clock tower moving when you turn the valves to solve the clock tower puzzle, and seeing the boat rising out of the water when you solve the connecting puzzle.

Even seeing the wildlife in real time is neat, seeing the birds fly around Myst Island outside of a compressed video is nice, and even Channelwood has newly added wildlife in the form of a frog that jumps into the water. The Ages still have that liminal feel, but just not quite as pronounced.

But the biggest selling point of realMyst’s graphics are the newly added day-night cycle and weather effects. If you spend any extended amount of time on Myst Island, the sun will actually go down and the game moves from daytime to nighttime. It actually looks quite nice when it happens, moving from a blue sky to an orange sunset to a purple night sky. And there are even small details when it moves over to night, such as the steps leading down to the dock having lights on them that turn off when the sun begins to set.

It varies from age to age, with the sunset in the Selenitic Age being more of a darker orange. The Mechanical Age has more of a lighter blue. The Stoneship Age now has a permanent storm, complete with lightening, thunder, and rain. I know that the ship being part of the rocks has a lore reason in that the Age was written when the author wasn’t quite use to writing Ages yet, but it does help explain why the ship couldn’t see the rocks or broken lighthouse.

Channelwood unfortunately doesn’t have a day/night cycle. Maybe it’s because the age has a bigger draw distance and the developers either didn’t have the time or couldn’t figure out to have a bigger draw distance and day/night cycle at the same time. All of these weather effects and changing of the time of day gives each age it’s own distinct feeling. It’s one of those details that the developers didn’t need to add, but it’s a much welcome one.

But aside from the obvious transition to real time graphics, realMyst includes other changes, specifically on Myst Island, that also connect with the lore of the series, not only the games but the books to, and I’m not going to spoil what for those unfamiliar to the series, but it’s another nice addition. It actually makes you feel like your making progress throughout the game. Or make you feel like your wasting your time if your not good at these types of games.

I know that a lot of Myst purists are going to hate me for saying this, and I don’t necessarily disagree with them, but I do like some of the graphical updates and changes in realMyst. I’m not saying they’re better by any means, but I do appreciate putting a little effort into the remake instead of just making a 1-to-1 remake just to leech money off of fans, which, considering the backlash even from it’s own creator, it probably still was that to some extent.

But that’s where the positives that I can say about the game end, and a lot of problems rear their ugly head.

The draw distance is awful in a lot of places. On Myst Island, you have to practically be on top of the trees for them to move from their low quality versions to their high quality versions. Plus the whole island has a fog on it, along with the other Ages. Games usually have the low quality versions of objects and parts of the map off in the distance and transition between them and the high quality versions smoothly enough when the player gets close enough to them that the player doesn’t notice.

This is done to have a game run a lot smoother since if all the high quality stuff was running constantly, it wouldn’t run smoothly on most computers. Which is extra bizarre here since Myst Island is quite a small area. Channelwood has a bigger draw distance, but it leaves Channelwood looking a little bit empty as a result.

And to make things worse, it ran poorly on computers at the time, even the high end ones, which was not exactly selling the game to many people outside of fans, since 4 years before Quake had came out, and many other games running in real time 3D had come out since then that ran smoothly on the same computers that realMyst would have had trouble running on. Plus, for some reason, the anti-aliasing doesn’t even seem to work, it won’t even let me enable it.

The game also includes the video clips from the original, the ones that featured actual people in front of a camera. They largely remain the same from the original game sans one. I’m assuming that the re-recorded it to make it more cannonical with the rest of the series like they’ve made certain changes elsewhere.

But since the release of the original game, there have been numerous games that used FMV footage of real actors actually appearing in front of the camera in the 7 years since the release of the original Myst. Maybe the developers didn’t have the money to properly update these videos, and the do look out of place, especially since better hardware and more space had become more plentiful in those 7 years, with even Riven having better looking videos 3 years before this, so going back to those videos was a little rough.

But on the upside, the audio quality, for all of the sound effects and music has been upped in quality, making the whole game sound much nicer. Maybe you could sit down in your favorite age and close your eyes and listen to the atmosphere while relaxing with a nice tea.

Even being optimistic, realMyst is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s less of a remake of a game and more like a failed experiment that was more concerned about being a tech demo and beta test for a new engine than a proper remake of a beloved classic point-and-click game. But it’s not completely without it’s merits. It’s neat seeing the whole game in 3D, and a fully 3D version of Myst could work, even if it’s just the original game over again.

Would I recommend the original realMyst? Not unless you’re nostalgic for it, want to seek it out for the sake of curiosity, or a completionist. Especially since other remakes have come out since the release of the original realMyst and the casual fan probably would just gravitate to the remake that’s going to cause the least amount of issues to play.

I can see why it was disowned, but I can’t hate it no matter what the reception to it is.