30 years since its release, it's very easy to see why and how Myst captivated so many back then and continues to do so even now.

You've heard of pen-and-paper RPGs, yet for entirely different reasons, this surely qualifies as a pen-and-paper puzzle game. There's no handholding, no onboarding, and very little in the way of tutorials on how the puzzles work. You're just dropped off on the island of Myst, and away you go. It's up to you to keep track of patterns, codes, and clues along your journey and piece together what and where they might fit in.

As for the how and why of your present circumstances, those answers are presented as you play in a pretty succinct and natural way by revisiting certain pieces of information along the way and putting together context clues from your environment. The lore behind the island and the story of Myst is simple yet surprisingly compelling, showing how too much power can corrupt the just and unjust depending on how they wield it.

Nearly all of Myst's puzzles and islands are incredibly well-designed, though the tram section in the second half of the Selentic Age is definitely the most boring and uninteresting of the bunch, though that's only because the rest of the roster is superb by comparison.

I suppose where Myst loses its appeal a bit is how the last part of the game works. It essentially involves a scavenger hunt in every region you've visited thus far for specific items (provided you haven't picked any of them up on your journey already), and only then can you achieve the various endings, with the true ending requiring even more busywork.

With no quick and easy way to return to the previous sections, the tedium lets the air out quite a bit as you're forced to retrace your steps. Admittedly, I ended up using the incredibly useful hint guide from UHS-Hints to skip some steps and get to the true ending otherwise the trek to the finale would have soured my opinion on this game far more.

Regardless, Myst, even in this nifty VR-Ready next-gen remake, still holds up as a classic of the adventure and puzzle genres and regardless of how many feel about the changes and visual aesthetic of this version, I am certainly grateful that it exists so I can play it using a controller with my current setup :)

7.5/10

about three years ago i tried playing this game and couldn't find the right approach to it. no doubt in part due to my inability to find catherine's letter (which also happened again here with equivalent time wasted) but i was also refusing to play ball with myst's framework. i had no desire to read the books in the library, didn't catch the impetus from atrus' message to catherine and as a result i never really found a foot in to the mystery of the island of myst, and i quickly lost interest.

this second go around i found it remarkable that once i actually got to another world, my progression snowballed and i was able to finish the whole game in two quick sessions on the same day i started it. myst is surprisingly not a difficult game, but it definitely requires that certain calibration towards it. what comes after isn't hurt in this way, it's still an incredibly charming world with a very unique aesthetic. it still has a surprisingly nuanced story effectively told entirely by exploration of environments. we read in the library of atrus the beauty of these worlds, these "ages", and what happened in them to better the lives of these people. and then you as the player see them in their total desolation and abandonment.

the remake of riven is a few weeks away at this point, and i cannot wait to continue what has started here.

Myst is a great game, but this remake is too concerned with fixing what wasn't broken instead of what was (and still is). Being built for VR is a neat idea for the game, but if you don't play in VR, everything is much more cumbersome that it was in the original; actions aren't as quick as they should be, and there isn't enough visual adjustment for environments that were only ever conceptualized for viewing from one angle. Whatever visual clarity comes from playing with an adjustable camera is offset by the sluggishness of moving through the world and interacting with the environment. As flawed as the original is, I still think it's the better way to experience the game.

Beaten: Aug 26 2021
Time: 4 Hours
Platform: Xbox Series X

Well, with the new remake of Myst coming out on gamepass, I figured it was time to finally give it a try! I've always loved every screenshot I've seen of the original, all this very clinical early-3D architecture that felt cold and artificial, but still somehow inviting. I was worried this remake would go too far in modernizing that look honestly, as it's one of the main draws of the game for me, but I'm surprised to say that it didn't really? Sure it's not identical, it's a remake after all, but that strange texture the original art had is definitely still here (as far as I can tell haha).

That surprised me a little bit, but seeing as this was made by Cyan, the original devs of Myst, I'm not completely surprised. What I was surprised by was how manageable the puzzles were? I'm not gonna say I never used a guide, if I hadn't I would've easily added 4 hours to my playtime and liked the game a whole lot less, but still, they didn't seem too bad? Maybe I'm just used to much more obtuse point and clicks, whether they be adventure puzzlers like Beneath a Steel Sky (which is INFURIATING) or games more similar to Myst, such as Tong Nou (which I would've cursed to hell without a guide). But this game? I managed to figure out solidly half of the puzzles with guide, and just needed a hint on all the rest of them. I never had to look up a solution, and that is RARE for me and puzzle games.

I'm not really sure there's much else to talk about here. At it's core Myst is a puzzle game with gorgeous art, and that's all here in this remake, and I loved everything on that front. There's the story, which consists of short, kiiiiiiinda poorly voice-acted but in a fun way movies, and a fair amount of Lore about the history of the island, and all that stuff is fine. Not amazing, not fantastic, but certainly not overtly bad or anything. It doesn't get in the way, and it does it's job. There's a goal, a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's figuring out what the hell even happened here before you got there.

But yeah, I had a really good and relatively frustration-free time with Myst, and that's more than I tend to get out of even the best 90s puzzle adventure games. I'll probably play the original version sometime now, just to see the original art, and maybe even get into the whole series! RIVEN HERE I COME

Myst's reputation, as far as I understood it, was as landmark in dense, obtuse, inscrutable puzzle gameplay. The sort of thing you couldn't get away with making today because gamers demanded things that were more accessible and fast-paced even in puzzle games. And the first impression this remake made validated that for me completely. You immediately find a dozen of what are obviously puzzles, but only one of which is amenable to a trial-and-error solution on its own terms. It seems like there must be some tremendous leaps of logic the game must expect you to make to get a foothold into these puzzles. I felt that way, stuck on everything at once, hoping that the one I did solve would somehow give me a clue to at least one more that would continue to chain off through the rest, wondering how long I would bang my head against this before looking up a hint, until I discovered that in my exploration of the island, I had failed to realize I could activate an elevator that brought me to a room that contained the literal solution to every single one of the beginning puzzles, just written on the wall. The puzzles look so hard because they were never solvable in the first place. They don't work on inscrutable logic, they're just combination locks. At that point my expectations for the game plummeted, and it more less met them.

Having played a decent number of modern puzzle games (Talos Principle and The Witness stand out as the most specific points of reference for Myst), it's hard to justify calling Myst a puzzle game at all. Its "puzzles" are only a step or two above the sort of puzzles you'd find in a Resident Evil game. They're video game puzzles: series of actions that require you to move around a map and interact with certain items (often just all or part of a lock combination) in order to access the next area.

They seem relatively difficult largely because they have a much higher level of friction between the logic of the puzzle and its execution than would be necessary in a game with other mechanics. There is no journal, so you have to write down your own notes. There's a rail-car labyrinth, for some godforsaken reason. I just bungled through on process of elimination myself, but looking up the intended "solution" to this, it's absolutely mindboggling they thought someone might have ever figured this out without information apparently only available in a different part of the game you may or may not have visited yet. If you did know the solution, though, it would still be an incredibly tedious process to input it. There's a timer in one level that requires you to spend 30 seconds or so round trip every time you want to make a guess on the puzzle. The first puzzle I solved requires you to go reset two separate breaker boxes every time you fail.

I was thinking before I went in that it would be nice to play a game that wasn't scared of a player who could think, wasn't afraid to ask the player to think. But Myst is terrified the player will realize there's nothing here to think about. It's constantly throwing red herrings and obstacles in your path and nesting its mechanisms together in a desperate shell game to take your eyes off the fact that there are no real puzzles here.

What I didn't realize about Myst is that, on top of being a puzzle game, it's a keenly '90s fantasy story, relegated to text and environmental storytelling due to technical limitations. On that score it's nothing particularly special; I didn't think the environmental storytelling was particularly effective and the mystery it's meant to convey is a bit inept. And while the remake looks great, the emptiness of all the environments feels more out of place than it might have in the original graphics. You could imagine a game that was mostly about this network of fantasy worlds and shows elements of the actual stories mentioned in the books, with some distinct set of mechanics (whether action, platforming, rpg, adventure game, etc) and the "puzzles" there to pace and structure them. As it is, the fiction of Myst only highlights the inadequacy and emptiness of everything else. The remake is very polished but the experience feels like a basically unfinished game.

After playing the game and finding out that it was a remake of a 1993 game, I can see how influential this game would have been at the time, and it's nice that this remake exists.

The puzzles are well-designed and blend seamlessly into the world, adding to the overall fantastic atmosphere the game provides. For a puzzle game, that's definitely the most important part. There was only one puzzle in the game I got stuck on, which seems to be a sticking point for everyone else, as it was the only puzzle in the game that was really unclear on what it wanted from you.

However, for a remake, the game looks rough, especially the human models, and man are the voice actors extremely grating. There's also some weird performance issues and graphical hiccups, even playing on PC. Overall it's a great puzzle game, with poor presentation.

Despite being a point & click adventure game player all my life Myst was the one "huge classic" of the genre I always wanted to to get into, but couldn't. The game was just so very hard, and the lack of characters and any easy-to-understand story was always putting me in my place. I just didn't quite understand what to do, or (barely) how to play it.

The meme about being stuck in a place forever and not knowing what a lever does is probably how many experienced it. I could never be sure if the game wasn't for me, or if it was my fault. I always suspected the latter.

So, I actually bought Oculus Quest 2 just to play Myst, and try to get into it, and I'm very happy to report it worked. I'm finally one of the Myst fans, which strangely feels like an exclusive club.

VR is an amazing way to experience Myst. It feels like you are there. The universe is immersive. It's like Myst was always meant to be played like this. It's been said before by many people, but yes, the game and the puzzles is usually pretty hard or even very hard (depending on your skills in puzzles), but it's always so incredibly rewarding when you get something to work.

There's also a quite rich plot when you get into the game. The story with the two brothers, who both want you to help just them, while telling you to NOT trust the other one, is classical, and keeps the tension going to the end.

Myst does need patience though. However, if you stay with a problem long enough, you'll eventually figure things out. You have to imagine being stuck on an island where there is nothing else to do than to figure out a mechanism or a puzzle of some sort. It's also very peaceful and meditative to play.

Either way, I can finally understand the hype. Better late then never. If you have a similar experience with Myst. Keep at it, it's worth staying with to the end.

As a VR game, I think it was pretty neat but as a 2D game, I think it would be pretty boring and I'd give it a lower score. The environments were very immersive and beautiful to walk around in and explore and for the first couple of hours, I was captivated in VR. Beautiful landscapes and it has an interesting story that I didn't really understand until the end lol. It also sets up a lot of possibilities for future games which I guess is why there are like 8 sequels.

There are a few stupid puzzles that were really frustrating and annoying and also some audio puzzles that were stupid. I think that people are just really nostalgic over playing this game on their dad's PC in the 90s (#1 Selling Game on PC until Sims 1 came out). Which is fine but like playing it in 2022 it's just a pretty decent and short puzzle game.

4/5 for the VR version and 2.5/5 for the console version.

Myst has always been an extraordinary touchstone of interactive worlds, architecture and intricately layered puzzle design. This remake faithfully translates all the ingenious qualities and dazzling environments into the present day without skimping on its core design philosophies (namely no hints or inventories - just you and the world). In VR, Myst is spectacular, the first of the myriad of ports to actually justify itself and improve even upon the original. Naturally interacting with objects in the world makes the game easier, but that loss in difficulty is more than made up for by its incredible immersion. If it weren't for Alyx, it'd be a strong contender for my favourite VR experience.

However, on console and to a lesser extent the 2D PC version, the Myst remake is overly finicky and loses the original's quiet magic through distracting controls. The hitboxes on objects are just too small, even for a mouse, resulting in a nightmarish controller experience. The choice to go into fixed camera modes for certain puzzles feels obnoxious given how these perspectives often mask critical information or make objects far harder to even use, let alone solve. One early example falls victim to the new lighting system where sunlight actually masks important numbers when viewed from the forced perspective, an issue that never arises in VR where you can always move freely. Unfortunately, whilst the magic of Myst is still there, it winds up a lesser experience to both its VR mode and even the original game. That VR version though!

i respect what this game is doing a lot - it doesn't hold your hand at all, and gives you a bit of freedom when deciding what order to solve the puzzles. the setting and presentation are excellent, and most of the puzzles are fun and well-designed (i got extremely lucky with the train puzzle and didn't suffer through it the same way many others did). i don't have the benefit of nostalgia with this game, so after playing it in 2021, i mostly just feel "whelmed" with this game - it neither disappointed me nor blew me away. it was just fine. and sometimes that's all a game needs to be :)