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Review: realMYSTReviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: June 12, 2002
I met Douglas Adams, once. Somewhere in my messy closet/office is a microtape of him talking about Starship Titanic, Macintosh, and his weak stomach for violence. He once passed out on a plane watching the overdose scene in Pulp Fiction.
For those of you who can't remember Myst (man, do I feel old), the plot: You (playing, apparently, yourself), find a book in the woods. Rather than kicking it or setting it on fire, as you would most likely do in real life, you pick it up and are transported to the apparently deserted isle of Myst. From there you begin the piece together the mystery of what happened to the family that lived there, as well as travelling to the mystic worlds linked to this one by the magical "Myst Books." Myst deserved its title of "instant classic," but it did have its flaws. Basically a game of static screens, it tried to integrate motion graphics and video capture, with varying levels of success. Pixelization was heavy. The acting of the two characters you see the most was over-the-top, and then there is the problem of the ending that never happened.
realMyst has two major changes to it, one of which is an improvement, the other, questionable. First things first; Myst now has an ending. I don't think I need to give you a ***WARNING!!! SPOILER SPACE*** to tell you that after crawling through the most fantastic lands yet put to CD-ROM, outwitting the twisted minds that brought chaos to the worlds of Myst, and cracking several fiendish puzzles, your reward at the end of Myst was...having a look around. I recall Hiner telling me once that the ending was so bad that he went to the bookstore to look in the hint book to see if that actually was the ending. It was.
The other big improvement is that the hypercard interface is gone. Like a first-person shooter, you can walk and run through the isles of Myst. Also, the integration with the video elements is seamless. Myst just looks better, if you can imagine that. And yet, at the same time, it feels like something's been taken away. The original Myst had an aura of suspense about it. You were so eager to see everything, yet you had to move so slowly. It felt like you were trespassing, afraid to move any faster for fear of being caught. The fact that you knew the islands had been inhabited at one point only added to this. But now you can move through RealMyst at your own pace. And if you feel like something might leap out at you, you can run away. It feels a bit like Quake or Unreal. Those games create some unbelievable landscapes, but in the original Myst, the visuals were there to be drunk in, savored...not hurried through like a bus terminal.
Going back to Myst was like going back to the cabin your family used to go to on vacation, and finding out they've added a refrigerator so you don't have to use the industrial freezer in the mud room. An improvement, to be sure. But then you remember creeping out of bed in the dead of night for a snack, crossing into the cold outer room, listening to noises and wonder if that hatchet murderer you were sure was out in the woods had seen you move by the window. I suppose they could have made everyone happy and put both games on the disk. But then, it's hard to think of Hypercard as an improvement. But such was the genius of Cyan that made Myst one of those games that everyone--including your mom--had to play. Even the late, great Douglas Adams admired it. I met him, once.
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Somewhere else in there he talks about the state of the adventure game, and how Myst contributed to its renewal. The amazing thing about Myst, he said, more or less, is that it turned a negative into a positive. It was written in Hypercard, which made it dead slow. But it parlayed that slowness into a sense of mystery and tension, as you literally crept along this deserted, fantastic island.
The game made a gazillion dollars, so there were sequels. Riven, which I hated (hint: don't put things which aren't puzzles in your puzzle game) and Exile, which I never played because Riven made me so mad. And now we have realMyst, which is an upgraded version of the original.
That bit's still in there, but now you have another area to explore: the Rime Age. The Rime Age is a better ending than the original, but again, we're talking about the worst ending in history that isn't Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. Since it's the only truly original part of the game, I won't spoil too much of it. It's a new Myst age, which is good. It's better than the original ending, which is also good. Just don't buy the game expecting, "It's a far, far better thing I do..."
The wonderful puzzles are still there, of course, and I was amazed at how much I remembered. I think the real puzzle of Myst was trying to figure out the logic, the way of thinking behind each world. Once you did that, the puzzles themselves were a snap. In fact, playing realMyst, I rifled through the original worlds in an afternoon. Five hours, and there I was, talking to Atrus. What is it like for those who have never been to any of the Ages to move down those halls, to lose their place on the catwalks?