John
(he/him)
In the old forum, we had a nice thread from when Obduction was fairly new, talking about Myst and various inspired games. It's that time again!
MYST (2021) - The OG puzzler from Cyan has been remade five or six times, depending on what you consider different games. Myst: Masterpiece Edition first upgraded the graphics from 8-bit color to 24-bit. RealMyst was the first big departure, switching out point and click for a FPS-like control scheme, and rendering everything in objectively worse polygons instead of a pretty slideshow, but it added a new small Age as a coda. That version was upgraded over a decade later as RealMyst: Masterpiece Edition, which used the Unity engine to bring the polygons on par or exceeding the original renderings. In 2020 that version was ported over to Unreal Engine 4, and released as a VR exclusive title for the Oculus platform. Under a year later, they slightly tweaked that version and released it on computers and Xboxes as MYST, coming full circle.
I've purchased and played every one of these except for the Oculus version, and consider the original one of my formative gaming experiences. My mother was a teacher, and got the educator's discount on Apple products, so the family computer through my middle/high school years was a Macintosh Performa. It meant I couldn't play all the fun DOS and Win95 games that I would read about in magazines, but I did get Myst before the PC owners could. As a 13yo, my brain was at the perfect age to absorb the concepts of a game being created as both a puzzle and as art, and postage stamp sized FMV on a 14" monitor sealed the deal. The one-two punch of Myst and the Marathons impacted me just as much as Mario did when I was in early elementary school.
I played through the new version on its PC release last year, and thought the game as a whole still stands up. They tweaked it for modern tastes, now you can pick up both red and blue pages in each age on a single run, no need to go back in afterwards for the other one. I appreciated this from a time perspective, but as a kid without having anything spoiled, I legitimately agonized over the decision of which pages to give to which brother, especially as the game got closer to the conclusion.
The only detractor from this version (when I played) was they had replaced the original FMV with 3D renderings, which were not on par with anything else in the game. They have since added in a patch to restore the original FMV, and I say turn that on immediately. The Rime Age from RealMyst hasn't been recreated yet, but is alleged to be coming in a later update.
If you haven't played the original, or just haven't played it in years, it's highly recommended (by me). You can get the new one on computers/Xbox/Oculus, and RealMyst Masterpiece on Switch/Mobile. As for me, a few years ago I started replays of the series and got midway through Myst III: Exile before burning out. I'll be picking and choosing a few games to peek in on, but not committing to the full series again.
MYST (2021) - The OG puzzler from Cyan has been remade five or six times, depending on what you consider different games. Myst: Masterpiece Edition first upgraded the graphics from 8-bit color to 24-bit. RealMyst was the first big departure, switching out point and click for a FPS-like control scheme, and rendering everything in objectively worse polygons instead of a pretty slideshow, but it added a new small Age as a coda. That version was upgraded over a decade later as RealMyst: Masterpiece Edition, which used the Unity engine to bring the polygons on par or exceeding the original renderings. In 2020 that version was ported over to Unreal Engine 4, and released as a VR exclusive title for the Oculus platform. Under a year later, they slightly tweaked that version and released it on computers and Xboxes as MYST, coming full circle.
I've purchased and played every one of these except for the Oculus version, and consider the original one of my formative gaming experiences. My mother was a teacher, and got the educator's discount on Apple products, so the family computer through my middle/high school years was a Macintosh Performa. It meant I couldn't play all the fun DOS and Win95 games that I would read about in magazines, but I did get Myst before the PC owners could. As a 13yo, my brain was at the perfect age to absorb the concepts of a game being created as both a puzzle and as art, and postage stamp sized FMV on a 14" monitor sealed the deal. The one-two punch of Myst and the Marathons impacted me just as much as Mario did when I was in early elementary school.
I played through the new version on its PC release last year, and thought the game as a whole still stands up. They tweaked it for modern tastes, now you can pick up both red and blue pages in each age on a single run, no need to go back in afterwards for the other one. I appreciated this from a time perspective, but as a kid without having anything spoiled, I legitimately agonized over the decision of which pages to give to which brother, especially as the game got closer to the conclusion.
The only detractor from this version (when I played) was they had replaced the original FMV with 3D renderings, which were not on par with anything else in the game. They have since added in a patch to restore the original FMV, and I say turn that on immediately. The Rime Age from RealMyst hasn't been recreated yet, but is alleged to be coming in a later update.
If you haven't played the original, or just haven't played it in years, it's highly recommended (by me). You can get the new one on computers/Xbox/Oculus, and RealMyst Masterpiece on Switch/Mobile. As for me, a few years ago I started replays of the series and got midway through Myst III: Exile before burning out. I'll be picking and choosing a few games to peek in on, but not committing to the full series again.