Doom brought the first-person shooter genre to its current status. Half-Life brought in story-telling to a stale shooter genre. Half-Life 2 showed physics and high-dynamic-range lighting. DOTA showed the genre of Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas. Counter-Strike showed the competitive side of shooters. Half-Life: Alyx proved that VR can be a playable platform. Crysis was the global benchmark for games for simply not being able to run at its release date's hardware. Minecraft is the most-bought game that returned the style of pixelated art to the modern era.
Every gamer knew most if not all of these facts, but did you know about Myst?
In short terms, Myst (and its sequel Riven) brought the era of CD-ROM, full-fledged audio, and full color as a simple point-and-click adventure game launched in 1993. If you had a computer back in the 1990s, you will surely have heard about it.
It was originally released for Macintosh OS in 1993 and was released in Windows 3.1 in 1994. This was said to be one of the main reasons which pushed the young PC community to install CD-ROM players and audio cards.
Myst has been re-released three more times with different remakes, with the fourth one coming this December.
Mild spoilers for Myst series as a whole.
Myst
To be fair, I wasn't born in 1993. I wasn't there when I saw realMyst and the Masterpiece Editions launched, I wasn't there when I saw the Myst 25th Anniversary came to Steam, and I wasn't there when Cyan launched their other games, but I saw their games first. The first mention I had from it was when I played The Room and showed it to be fellow writers at an SCP Foundation Discord that focuses on writing for SCP-914's Experiment Log, and they advised me to check out Myst as The Room was a point and click puzzle game, and so is Myst. I think Myst is the first point and click puzzle game and other games simply followed in its footsteps.
Anyhow, I will be reviewing realMyst: Masterpiece Edition with three criteria: Gameplay, Graphical Environment, Story.
Gameplay
This is a very primitive game, in terms of design and movement. You move by clicking the screen (classic)/movement keys (free-roam). You solve puzzles by clicking buttons and dragging levers, all for one simple task of opening a safe or ensuring that you see what you needed to see. Nowadays, you can only see these types of gameplay design through games like The Witness or The Room, but most of the core ideas came to be because of this. The reason this game is a point and click because the first version was made in Apple's old software, a precursor to the modern browsers, HyperCard, a set of cards with clickable areas. Other games were remade to modern engines, but it kept the same feeling as it always had.
realMyst: Masterpiece Edition's main difference in Myst is that the areas that were once pictures are rendered in 3D in real-time, allowing to show previously unknown areas
There's also the fact that if you stick to classic movement and press Shift, you can see the original image when it was back in 1993.
Graphical Environment
Unlike the imagination-filled Myst and the explanations you get in books and Uru, Myst Island is surprisingly smaller than you expected it to be. They're still very good eye candy and scenery porn if you have good equipment and right angles. Until then, you are simply walking around environments made for 1993, only with updated textures, meshes, and even a day-night cycle. This day-night cycle proves that these Ages are alive in a sense, but seeing realMyst and even Myst playthroughs made me think it was lost part of the environmental charm it had back in the original 1993 version.
You'll also be happy if you did play Myst, that when the game needs it, all characters are live except the end.
Story
For the first game of the series, the story is relatively simple:
A Stranger is in a new place after touching a magical book, and the clue you can find is a piece of paper to Catherine from someone named Atrus. If you entered the central building where there's a shelf of burnt books, you'll find two books, a red and blue book, and find out someone's trapped in each book. You'll soon realize that everything is wrong after you read the non-burnt books and see that... well, it's all unto you to learn.
For the backstory, here's what you really need to know that you will know at the game:
There's a fallen civilization called the D'ni that can write books towards places called Ages and these books are called Linking Books.
In the greater scope of the story, it's not much applicable to who you are. Who are you in this story? Why are these brothers trapped? Where did you get the magical book? How will you escape?
All of it was answered in the sequel Riven, except for who you are, as Cyan had suggested, that you are the Stranger, and the Stranger is you.
All in all, it's the start of a beautiful journey that ended with the D'ni surviving in a new Age and explorers are exploring some random crack in New Mexico.
It's one of those things that I like a lot about games, where the story is told through the environment and not through various exposition.
Verdict
It's a really good game, it shows its history and it has a small fandom despite its indie status because it never grew larger. I can blame Ubisoft for that.
Go play realMyst here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/244430/realMyst_Masterpiece_Edition/
