Myst

This is where you can deliberate anything relating to videogames - past, present and future
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JaySevenZero
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Myst

Post by JaySevenZero »

Here's where you can contribute your thoughts and opinions for Myst for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.

A friendly reminder that where the feedback for the podcast is concerned, we love it - but keeping it brief is appreciated. We do want to include a breadth of opinions where appropriate, but no-one wants a discussion podcast that’s mostly reading out essays. Better to save yourself time and cut to the chase if you can.
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Pconpi
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Re: 582: Myst

Post by Pconpi »

My memories of Myst are it being one of those ubiquitous PC games that everyone had but no one could get very far. Probably because everyone I knew was 10 years old. The whole game had a mystique and as we couldn't get very far in the game we would ponder at the box art. Why is there a rocket ship on this island, who is that falling through sky, what is the point of this game? As a 10 year old it felt more adult and cerebral than other games we were playing but the world was immersive and beautiful so we kept loading it up to experience it and maybe if we kept wandering around we could crack one of these codes and see something else. The furthest we got was to the part with the elevated wooden plank trails. It is one of those games where in my mind it is a fully 3D world so it was funny to load up a YouTube playthrough and see how static it was. I think the art style still holds up pretty well though and still evokes a mysterious sense of place. I am excited to hear more about this game as I have never revisited it and still have no idea what it is about or why that rocket is there.
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Alex79
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Re: 582: Myst

Post by Alex79 »

I remember when I was younger, Myst almost being a bit of a standing joke in some magazines which derided it for boring gameplay and being not much more than a pretty slideshow. I never played the game myself until the recent version that came out a couple of years ago. I have no idea if this was a remake, a remaster or just a sequel in the series, but I came to it with some interest as I'd really enjoyed other first person puzzle games such as The Witness and The Talos Principle.

Well, I bounced off Myst like a ball of rubber bands on a trampoline (would that actually bounce? Probably not, but you get what I mean). It turns out that those magazines all those years ago were right! (Or, perhaps more accurately, I agreed with what they were saying). I found the game terribly dull, the puzzles obtuse and I uninstalled the game after barely any play time whatsoever. Maybe it gets better the further you get in, but I'll never find out.
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moobaa
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Re: 582: Myst

Post by moobaa »

One summer holidays at uni in the mid-90s, I borrowed a copy of Myst from the local Apple User’s Group. New Year’s Eve, finding myself all by my lonesome, I decided to fire it up at about 9pm. At 10pm on New Year’s Day, I blearily completed it… and that remains the most intense single-sitting gaming session I’ve ever done. I still have all the notes I scribbled down while puzzling my way through the game; I can see telltale signs of sleep deprivation in the increasingly erratic maps and scrawls.

Myst was one of the first personal computer games I played after my foundational C64 days, and it's fair to say that I'd never played anything like it. The multimedia snippets sprinkled over the richly rendered worlds created a sense of place unlike any other; the sound generated tension throughout. But, nearly thirty years later, it's not something I want to revisit - there's no way that the game could possibly live up to my memories of it, and some of the puzzles felt obtuse even then.
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