Booting up Myst 27 years later after it's release, it's still impressive how much mystique and allure it has.
It's age immediately shows, but once you get past it's early cd-rom origins, you will find yourself in its now emblematic otherwordly, alien and mysterious island.
The static nature of its gameplay, combined with the lack of living beings on the island ( besides the presence of live action clips of the previous inhabitants and their belongings and writing) and sparse ambient soundscape creates a very unique and zen like atmosphere that's hardly replicated on other games of it's genre, something that probably helped it standout so much at the time. The obtuse and illogical mechanisms, buttons and contraptions scattered across the world of Myst invite the player like a moth to fire, speaking to a inner part of human nature that wants to solve and make sense of things.
The brilliance of it's design is in how it has every solution and path available to you from the start, you just dont have the information and clues required to know that those solutions and paths are already in front of you. In a stroke of genius, the game even has the final solution in plain sight at the start of the game. Some of the puzzles are duds, and some of the puzzles are a bit too obtuse to be taken seriously. The story is barebones, and only there to serve as some form of goal. There is sometimes the sense that you are playing a tech demo for the almight CD-ROM.
But Myst is still a classic, and if you never have, you should visit it's island and see for yourself the power of human curiosity and stubborness, and how that alone is enough to create a world worth falling into.
It's age immediately shows, but once you get past it's early cd-rom origins, you will find yourself in its now emblematic otherwordly, alien and mysterious island.
The static nature of its gameplay, combined with the lack of living beings on the island ( besides the presence of live action clips of the previous inhabitants and their belongings and writing) and sparse ambient soundscape creates a very unique and zen like atmosphere that's hardly replicated on other games of it's genre, something that probably helped it standout so much at the time. The obtuse and illogical mechanisms, buttons and contraptions scattered across the world of Myst invite the player like a moth to fire, speaking to a inner part of human nature that wants to solve and make sense of things.
The brilliance of it's design is in how it has every solution and path available to you from the start, you just dont have the information and clues required to know that those solutions and paths are already in front of you. In a stroke of genius, the game even has the final solution in plain sight at the start of the game. Some of the puzzles are duds, and some of the puzzles are a bit too obtuse to be taken seriously. The story is barebones, and only there to serve as some form of goal. There is sometimes the sense that you are playing a tech demo for the almight CD-ROM.
But Myst is still a classic, and if you never have, you should visit it's island and see for yourself the power of human curiosity and stubborness, and how that alone is enough to create a world worth falling into.