Developer: Cyan Worlds
Publisher: Cyan Worlds
Year: 2020
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

Since I’m doing a post in place of a log every time I complete a game, this means I’ve finally come across Myst after replaying it with a friend. I could have sworn I’ve done something more “reviewish” since I basically mention Myst in every other blog post I do, but I guess not? Maybe this site started after I played the remake. So this is going to be less of a formal Review and even more rambly than I usually do since everyone knows I love Myst and will recommend it to everyone anyway. The remake is great, go play it and immediately go into the options to turn on the FMV because it beats the 3D models. The rest of this isn’t spoilery but won’t make sense to anyone that hasn’t played it.

I just replayed the game with a friend over Discord, they had never played Myst before, and this gave me an opportunity to finally play the Rime age that was added last year. The Rime age was originally added to realMyst and appeared in realMyst Masterpiece Edition as well, but did not ship with this Myst remake. Previously it was a very tiny age that you get after you complete the game, something that’s just a nice little treat and you can play through in 15-20 minutes. It’s been heavily reworked and expanded to add more backstory and build on the relationships between characters in the game. Something that’s fun about it is how much closer it is to the style of puzzle design you see in Riven, where everything feels like it’s part of a real world. As much as I love Myst, sometimes the puzzles and even some Ages feel more like puzzles or places just built because they look cool and a fun place to walk around in. By the time they got to Riven they had started to think a lot more about what a fictional world with its own rules would be like to walk around in. The new Rime age was a delight to explore and with development of new games slowing down at Cyan because of financial issues and the industry as a whole collapsing, I treasure every new bit of world design we get from Cyan.

It was also fun to see that my friend enjoyed it in our playthrough. I think. Or they were just being very polite. I think the design of the game largely holds up. The only Age that I kinda lose interest in is Selenic, where the maze goes on quite a bit longer past the point of “ok, I get it.” I think the Mechanical Age is what I have in mind when I think about the worlds that are built around looking neat rather than a real place that people could live in like later Myst games. Playing this over Discord really does highlight how much the adventure game genre is meant to be played with friends. Even when neither person knows what to do next, it helps to have someone to bounce ideas off of or just to have someone to talk to while dealing with the tedium of trying various bits. Most of the time when I played adventure games with this friend, it’s usually pretty awful FMV heavy adventures during the holiday season, so it was nice to play something that I consider to be good. It’s also one of the very few genres that can be played over Discord, where one person controls everything and the other player can sit and talk and take notes if they want.

At this point, this is the version of the game that I would recommend to others. I think the optional subtitles go a long way to helping with the sound puzzles that a lot of people struggle with, especially if you’re a bit tone deaf like I am. It also still feels very snappy, which isn’t lost from the move away from nodes in a Hypercard game. I think you kinda need to turn on the FMV, an option in the menu, because the default 3D models aren’t great and the FMV acting is charming to me. Even though this post is more of a ramble of thoughts and not really a review, I do think the soundtrack also deserves a shoutout. It’s wild that they were hesitant about adding a soundtrack until the publisher pressured them, and immediately realized it added so much to the game.

Finally, I should probably add that Cyan allowed the Video Game History Foundation to scan and archive everything they had and that’s all available here. It’s an incredible collection of Behind the Scenes materials and it’s wild how much they preserved, even company picnics!

Anyway, Myst is great and Cyan is my favorite developer.

Myst is available on Steam/GOG/basically every other platform for Windows and Mac.