Another Thursday and another Throwback.  This time we’re setting the Wayback Machine to September 1993. Dream Lover by Mariah Carry and (I Can’t Help Falling) In Love With You by UB40 topped the charts.  The White House goes and launches a web site with Clinton at the helm.  Microsoft Windows replaces DOS as the best-selling software application.  It was a heady time of expanding PCMCIA slots, Internet dial-up providers and 66 MHz Pentiums.

I recall a good friend calling (on a land line – how 90s) and inviting me over to check out a new game he’d purchased.  “It’s like nothing you’ve seen before,” he promised.  Earlier in the summer, I’d checked out Return to Zork and was pretty sure this would be similar.  I figured it would be a graphic, colorful version of the Infocom games of the 80s or a first person POV take off of the Sierra On-Line games (e.g. King’s Quest, etc.)

Turned out to be a new kind of beast altogether.

Plot Characters: 7/10

The plot and goal of Myst are central to what set it apart from the herd.  You are the Stranger and the plot unfolds through a series of books found in the library.  Here, books hold power.  Books have the ability to imprison and link worlds.  You quickly meet two brothers, Achenar and Sirrus, each trapped inside a red and a blue book, respectively, and accusing one another of murdering their father, Atrus. The brothers are the only two characters you interact with directly throughout most of the game. 

In order to free the brothers, you must find four missing pages from their prison books before they reveal the location of the fifth and final page.   From the island, you can travel to four other worlds by way of linking books that grant passage to five other worlds (the game calls them Ages) where each of the pages are secreted away and can only be obtained by solving a yet another series of puzzles.

The premise is thought through with future installments in mind.  The characters you meet here reappear in later installments and the plot is carried forward.  Still, it feels a bit thin to justify such a series of meandering worlds and challenges.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s plenty of plot and solid writing.  It just feels like there’s so much meat in the game that the plot has a hard time holding it up and justifying it all.

Gameplay: 7/10

Every review I’ve read about Myst  uses this word at least once (I’ll use it twice):  immersive.  Okay, I’ll give in.  It is immersive.  Or, at least it was, back in ’93.  I remember the game filling my eyes and ears.  The game took up the entire screen.  There is no inventory and no need to bring up any pop-up menus to disrupt the gameplay.  Navigation is handled by a simple click on the screen of where you want to go and what you want to manipulate.  At times, I did end up moving to another location I hadn’t intended or selected one mechanism when I was trying to click on a device next to it, but those issues are forgivable.

Ambient sound plays through almost every scene.  Chains clank and gears spin as you press buttons and toggle controls.  There’s much toggling to be had.  It’s been said before:  you don’t play Myst so much as experience it. 

The puzzles range from painfully obvious to maddeningly obtuse.  One, in particular, drove me up a wall.  There’s an organ and a set of sliders on a control panel in the spaceship on the main island.  You have to play the right notes on the keyboard and match the tone on the sliders.  Getting those sliders right drove me up a wall.  I got to the point where I had to resort to a walk-through to make sure I wasn’t missing something.  I was on the right track, but getting those sliders in the right position, even with a walk-through, became infuriating. 

Graphics: 9/10

Myst presents itself in 640×480 and 256 color SVGA glory.  Sure, by today’s standards, that’s laughable.  But let’s return to September ‘93.  Doom was yet to be released later that year.   Intel had just starting releasing the first Pentiums.  Soundblaster cards were the gold standard for computer audio.  The game made use of the latest and greatest in hardware at the time and it showed – back then.  I remember being in awe at the integration of graphics and sound.   We took our time navigating the landscape and taking in the scenery, pausing to admire the attention to detail.  Each world has a distinct look and feel in terms of both texture and sound. 

Overall: 9/10

Some had criticized the hype around Myst calling it nothing more than a slide show.  Sure, a series of images shown in succession can be called a slide show and that’s a reductionist disservice.  Calling Myst a slideshow is tantamount to calling Lost just a series of digital signals.  You may notice that my overall score is 9 out of 10 while the average of the other categories comes out to 7.3. Myst is more than a sum of its parts.

The game is genre-breaking; at the same time, it’s genre-defining.  In retrospect, it had a steampunk element to it before the term had been used.  The story and execution combine to make a landmark game that still resonates nearly two decades later.  Some die-hard fans are even trying to put together a Myst-based movie.

If you’ve read this far in the review, you might have some interest in playing Myst yourself and might benefit from sidestepping some of the pain I went through.  Setting up the game on a current system wasn’t a straight forward process.  It arrives as a seven meg bin file which can be mounted in the same way you would mount an ISO image.  I’m running Windows 7 and used the free edition of Virtual Clone Drive.  No amount of setting it to run in any compatibility mode worked.  I was able to hear the familiar wind howling during the introduction, but the screen was blank.  I ended up using Windows XP Mode which is really a Win XP image that runs on Virtual PC.  Once I copied the bin file over to the Win XP image and mounted it with Virtual Clone Drive, I was able to start it up without having to tweak any compatibility settings.  One word of caution though.  This was one of the first games to be released on CD.  While it does install some files onto your machine, the CD (virtual or otherwise) needs to be available.  If you restart your VPC you’ll need to remount the bin image with the same drive letter used during the install, otherwise you’ll get an error when starting the game.  Such are the hoops I jumped through.  Your mileage may vary.

Tags: Borderbund, Game, game review, John I, myst, Retro, Review, Throwback Thursday, Ubisoft, Video game

About the Author

Written by John I

Software developer, home brewer, amateur photographer, avid griller, runner, reader, writer and zombie enthusiast. Northeast Philadelphia expatriate corrupting the suburbs of Philadelphia one development at a time. I enjoy literature ranging from the high-falutin’ to pop and endeavor to share my reading experiences with you.

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