Look, here's the deal: if you're gonna do the MYST 'thing' - i.e., have gameplay where you're wandering inquisitively around a strange, desolate world, experimenting with increasingly cryptic mechanical puzzles involving repetition and lots of legwork, investigating ornate painting-locations filled with tons of non-interactive decorations, etc., etc., then your interface needs to work a certain kind of way - that is to say, EFFICIENTLY. It just has to be snappy to support that type of experience. So, ignoring that dictum, this game has - as part of a surprisingly dramatic, holistic realignment of what the series is even trying to do - decided to slow the doing of things WAY down, and the results are basically fatal.
In what intitally seems quite cool and useful, you now, for the first time in the series, have a detailed, animated cursor - a little disembodied hand. It shows you, with fairly subtle gestures, what's interactive (and how), reacts to the environment in impressive ways, and has all kinds of whimsical little flourishes when it does stuff. Nice! The problem is that its animations are slowwwwwwww. You drag this little photorealistic hand around the crowded screen and try to parse the first couple frames of five different animations it confusedly shifts between, and then you're going back, and wait, where was the hotspot that made it do this one thing? nope, that's a zoom-in point, not a grab point, oops no, clicking on that just makes you tap on it pointlessly, no, no don't walk forward, oh where am I now, and so on and so forth. The result is having to very, very methodically comb through every square inch of every ridiculous screen while watching the thing like a hawk and letting every one of its little second-long animations play out in full so you can know what's what. It's tiresome. Bad enough for exploring the first time; maddening when you're just trying to move through a space quickly to try something out or revisit an obscure clue. Related to this problem is the new motion-control-y grabbing and dragging you do to work machinery. You don't just toggle things with a click anymore - since you're basically controlling your hand, you click to grab, mouse around to move something, and unclick to let go. I get it, but it just feels muddy and bad. And once again - slow!
Outside of the controls, the actual gameplay is oriented in a much more ponderous direction also. There are now occasionally forced animations of your movement between nodes because the world is much more elaborate and less static, so things are opening or shifting to allow you access, etc. And even when that stuff isn't happening, any movement at all now has a couple seconds delay between the click and refreshing at the new node. Doesn't seem like much but it really adds up and just feels wrong in a game from this series. Going places and doing things fast is just not a thing any more.
On top of that stuff is a hugely important new mechanic where a magical item allows you to revisit ghostly memories of characters talking or acting out a scene, tied to either an area or even specific items or clickables within a zoomed-in view on something. This amounts to a lot of little cutscenes and audiologs that - again, not to sound like a broken record - REALLY put the brakes on things. You are now really meant to comb through every little gewgaw on every screen for an FMV clip or soundfile to get a little clue or piece of lore or whatever and good GOD I just do not want that in a game like this, I am sorry. To me, MYST is about lonely quietude and inscrutability and scrambling around trying to put the pieces together and understated, private eureka moments - not hours of dialogue and lore.
So, this really feels like a big, misguided step in the direction of a more mainstream AAA-type deal. The franchise was with a big publisher at this point and it's clear that they had some ideas about sprucing up the rusty old MYST thing for a new audience. Big bombastic music! Tons of dialogue and verbal instruction directly to the player! Cutscenes cutscenes cutscenes! The new narrative focus is certainly a subjective taste thing (I'm sure some people loved it then and do now, and obviously it's not that crazy to have a bunch of story scenes in an adventure game), but the 'updated' controls and padding of movement are - though understandable in theory - fairly disastrous to the experience, I think. If you ask me, they should have just let this series be what it was and do its weird, quiet, nerdy thing.
In what intitally seems quite cool and useful, you now, for the first time in the series, have a detailed, animated cursor - a little disembodied hand. It shows you, with fairly subtle gestures, what's interactive (and how), reacts to the environment in impressive ways, and has all kinds of whimsical little flourishes when it does stuff. Nice! The problem is that its animations are slowwwwwwww. You drag this little photorealistic hand around the crowded screen and try to parse the first couple frames of five different animations it confusedly shifts between, and then you're going back, and wait, where was the hotspot that made it do this one thing? nope, that's a zoom-in point, not a grab point, oops no, clicking on that just makes you tap on it pointlessly, no, no don't walk forward, oh where am I now, and so on and so forth. The result is having to very, very methodically comb through every square inch of every ridiculous screen while watching the thing like a hawk and letting every one of its little second-long animations play out in full so you can know what's what. It's tiresome. Bad enough for exploring the first time; maddening when you're just trying to move through a space quickly to try something out or revisit an obscure clue. Related to this problem is the new motion-control-y grabbing and dragging you do to work machinery. You don't just toggle things with a click anymore - since you're basically controlling your hand, you click to grab, mouse around to move something, and unclick to let go. I get it, but it just feels muddy and bad. And once again - slow!
Outside of the controls, the actual gameplay is oriented in a much more ponderous direction also. There are now occasionally forced animations of your movement between nodes because the world is much more elaborate and less static, so things are opening or shifting to allow you access, etc. And even when that stuff isn't happening, any movement at all now has a couple seconds delay between the click and refreshing at the new node. Doesn't seem like much but it really adds up and just feels wrong in a game from this series. Going places and doing things fast is just not a thing any more.
On top of that stuff is a hugely important new mechanic where a magical item allows you to revisit ghostly memories of characters talking or acting out a scene, tied to either an area or even specific items or clickables within a zoomed-in view on something. This amounts to a lot of little cutscenes and audiologs that - again, not to sound like a broken record - REALLY put the brakes on things. You are now really meant to comb through every little gewgaw on every screen for an FMV clip or soundfile to get a little clue or piece of lore or whatever and good GOD I just do not want that in a game like this, I am sorry. To me, MYST is about lonely quietude and inscrutability and scrambling around trying to put the pieces together and understated, private eureka moments - not hours of dialogue and lore.
So, this really feels like a big, misguided step in the direction of a more mainstream AAA-type deal. The franchise was with a big publisher at this point and it's clear that they had some ideas about sprucing up the rusty old MYST thing for a new audience. Big bombastic music! Tons of dialogue and verbal instruction directly to the player! Cutscenes cutscenes cutscenes! The new narrative focus is certainly a subjective taste thing (I'm sure some people loved it then and do now, and obviously it's not that crazy to have a bunch of story scenes in an adventure game), but the 'updated' controls and padding of movement are - though understandable in theory - fairly disastrous to the experience, I think. If you ask me, they should have just let this series be what it was and do its weird, quiet, nerdy thing.