'Myst'. The name, of course, suggests fog (mist) shrouding or obscuring a scene, and the longer word 'mystery' which the title is a truncation of.

As a game, it definitely feels mysterious at the outset. You definitely go into it with a massive amount of confusion about what's going on... and how you should respond to it. There is no tutorial in the game, though earlier boxed versions included an introductory booklet and a simple notepad for jotting down notes.

The UI is very simple, deceptively so. Navigation is easy. After the initial cinematic, you'll find yourself on a dock, and you can use your mouse to navigate. But after that it's not so simple.

But if you're observant, and take the time to explore, look, listen, fiddle with things and see what they do... you'll start to figure out what happened here. Often information will be discovered, and you'll definitely want to jot it down. And yes, read the text. There are books in the library and some of that's very relevant. There's a note on the path leading between the dock and the library, and that matters too.

There was a player with the username Crimault [seen above] who beat Myst playing through it on YouTube, and his blind playthrough is a great example of the issues with the game for modern gamers - and how today's players need to adjust to actually overcome their overwhelming initial sense of perplexity and bewilderment.

In the first video, Crimault runs around. He does not walk. He clicks on stuff entirely randomly. He gets confused and frustrated.
Everyone in the comments has one bit of advice that overrides any other: Slow down!

To beat Myst, you need to slow down and take enough time to absorb what is there, and put it together. This is a puzzle/adventure title and as such the pacing is slow compared to most modern games. It also helps to assume intentionality. Every puzzle has a solution present, so the essential thing is to make those connections. There's a method to approaching games in this genre.

Crimault eventually beat Myst, and did so without any further hints or help from outside the gameworld itself.

The most popular internet meme around Myst replaces the title with 'WHAT' and the smaller text below with 'the f**k is going on here, I've been pulling levers for four hours.' This is relatable for many, but it's not actually fair - some players have actually beaten Myst blind from start to finish in as little as four hours, and the average time required to reach the end is usually somewhere between 7-15 hours.

This isn't that long a game. Compared to the likes of modern RPGs which require a hundred hours to finish, it's short!

The main problem for players, then, is unfamiliarity with the category generally, and how to approach it - many players, most even, were like my dad in 1994. He fiddled around on Myst Island for about 20 minutes and, lacking clear insight into how to proceed further with anything, just shut the game down and never continued.

That's a common experience. But it's also one that, err, myst most of what Myst actually contained.

Myst has a reputation for being both a defining example of '90s aesthetics, and yet - it's also somehow timeless. It's bigger than the one island too - there are four other similarly sized worlds (called 'ages') in the game, and Myst Island exists as the central hub connecting to all of them. Structurally, the aim on Myst Island is to solve a puzzle or two to unlock each of the links out to other worlds, then go to those worlds, solve several puzzles in each and retrieve pages hidden somewhere within them, bring those back to Myst Island. In the library, there are two linking books - red and blue - each with a person communicating to you through the linking panel from somewhere else. These are Sirrus and Achenar, and the endgame boils down to noting the things they've done across the game's ages, how they've impacted those worlds, and deciding who should be trusted [with freedom].

The game's a good example of environmental storytelling and how to use gameworld details to say something about the characters who've lived there.

Take the core of the thing and upgrade the visuals and it still largely holds up 29 years later. That's why Apple chose the 2021 VR-supporting [though not REQUIRING VR] realtime 3d UE4-based remake of Myst as Mac App Store GOTY. It's in practice still the same exact game as in 1993, just further overhauled visually, with more detailed graphics and modern graphics tech like DLSS. (In 2021, somehow, for about one month, Myst was the only title to support DLSS on both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, which meant it was the first time the differing implementations of the tech could actually be compared to each other.)

While the OG Myst is technically ancient by today's norms, the remakes keep it more or less up to date.

Sadly, many new to the series lately will play Myst in a modern remake form (because it's regarded as a gaming classic) and then ask themselves, 'what next'? And what's next is Riven, which has not yet been fully remade even once, which leads some to bypass it (and often Myst 3, Myst 4) in favor of Myst V or Uru 'because they are realtime' and that's just, err, not recommended. Not only does it mean skipping over some of the best parts of the franchise in favor of weaker entries, but getting entirely lost narratively.

Cyan, the studio behind Myst, had a breakthrough in making it, they created Myst with a $650,000 budget [financed by now-defunct publisher Broderbund] and had no idea that it would go on to sell nearly 7 million copies.

This was a hit - by the time it faded into the $5 bargain bins, it had made about $140 million in sales, becoming the top-selling PC title of 1993, 1994, and 1995. It drove the sale of roughly 2 million CD-ROM drives and in doing so, dramatically lowered the cost of CDs due to economies of scale, and pushed them into the affordable mainstream as a format. 

But Broderbund kept 85% of that cash. They'd financed Myst's production, after all, and neither they nor Cyan had realized it'd sell over 100,000 copies, much less over 6 MILLION.

So all it'd take was a single major misfire later on, to cause Cyan to end up in a bind. And as it turned out, RealMyst, Uru, and Myst V all lost money in the 2000s at launch, so Cyan really was lucky that they were able to later partially rebound - first with mobile ports of their games in the late 2000s, and then with crowdfunding during the 2010s.

Cyan is a famous studio, sort of, and it's three decades old, but it's still lean and indie, both in terms of size and resources, and the fact that nobody has ever actually acquired them... probably good, given the way publishers like EA tend to ruin every studio they buy - with a dev team of no more than 20 people, and projects that, in many ways, still feel very much like the original Myst. Obduction, for example, was crowdfunded at $1.4 million, and that is (inflation adjusted) almost exactly the same amount they had to make Myst with, over 20 years prior.

The world kind of moved on, but Cyan is still there, on the periphery of the gaming scene, doing their own distinctly Cyan thing. Good for them, I guess.

 
Myst on Steam                                     Epic Games Store    Good old Games    Humble Store          Mac App Store                                              iPad/iPhone - Apple App Store       Google Play - Android
Game Pass [Windows/Xbox]
Reviews of Myst in 1993? Glowing, breathlessly astonished. As in, lots of GOTY awards.

But not easy to aggregate those reviews today. And reviews from that era are getting less and less relevant anyway.

Reviews for the most recent version of Myst, released in 2021, reflects a more tempered and modern viewpoint that acknowledges both the legendary nature of the original, and the degree to which its foundational game design has aged.

 
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Myst [1993 original] - 85/100 Metacritic. I struggled to see major negativity at the time from any game reviewer for the first year of Myst's release. The backlash and tired cynicism largely arrived later. By the time the game had existed for 7 years, there were already two other PC editions - one was a rather minimal and weak remake called "Myst: Masterpiece Edition" which doubled the color depth of all the visuals at the cost of truncating some of the music tracks. "RealMyst", the second remake launched at the end of 2000, took Myst and made it fully realtime 3d in the in-house Plasma 1.0 engine, with weather and day/night cycles, and an extra age called Rime tacked on at the end of the game.
But PCs in the year 2000 weren't ready for that. Compromises in world detailing were insufficient to make Myst run smoothly on year-2000 PCs, and most players reported bad framerate. RealMyst tanked out of the gate only to see a slow burn of sales later on in the bargain-bin price range. At the time, its review average was 66/100, largely damaged by the technical issues many people had running it.
Cyan rebuilt RealMyst for iPad with the Unity game engine in 2012, making Myst accessible for mobile gaming, and it looked almost exactly the same as year-2000 RealMyst but using modern shader water effects, a plus, and with day/night cycles not implemented. The studio, having done all the work to rebuild the game in a new engine, went ahead with RealMyst Masterpiece Edition, which added new surface shaders, often making things a bit too glossy with more normal mapping than necessary, and a bit more detailing, extended draw distance with less fog, and added volumetric lighting, DoF, and other effects. That version appeared in 2014 and was regarded as yet another mediocre update to an old game, one that added less new to the experience than RealMyst had added in 2000.
Myst [2021] has an aggregate review score of 74/100 - reviewers are getting tired of reviewing seemingly endless remakes of a game from '93, but most grudgingly acknowledge the 2021 edition as clearly the best version of the game that exists today... and while the visuals of all of the worlds really look gorgeous this time, clearly overhauled with a lot of actual effort put in, and the entirety of the game ported once more, this time to Unreal, the central puzzle design is still exactly the same as it always was.

Upsides of 2021 Myst include:
-Technology. The game's graphics look really good, once again, and use [to great aesthetic effect] every visual edge provided by the last releases of UE4, to the extent that the game has repeatedly been used as a tech demo due to the fact that for about a month it was the only PC game that supported DLSS on both Nvidia and AMD cards, which made it the only available way to compare the two.
-Art direction. The graphics have been adjusted and changed thoroughly - nearly every texture and model redesigned from scratch after various iterations half-heartedly overhauling assets from the year-2000 RealMyst but not thoroughly rebuilding most of them. This version looks beautiful and richly detailed.
-Sound design. The audio is recognizably true to the original in every spot but adds subtle detail and auditory richness to all the old music tracks while keeping the motifs and notes entirely intact. Reverb and other judiciously applied filtering make the older sounds soundas good as ever. It all sounds the same but somehow finally a little bit better.
-VR support on numerous VR systems. This is the BIG SELLING POINT. Players can actually be immersed in these worlds like was never possible before. And the game, while acquiring only mildly positive marks from many critics, was lauded by Apple as the Mac App Store GOTY for 2021. Which is astounding given the fact that this is a remake of a game which came out roughly three decades ago.

Downsides to Myst 2021:
-No Rime. This is an actual step back from the last two versions. A visually overhauled age of Rime is coming sometime in 2023 though - but that's two years after the game launched.
-The mobile port of this Myst for iOS only supports the two or three newest iPad generations... and maybe one or two newest iPhone models. Which means for a while longer, for many iOS users, this won't run at all.
-The rather janky animation and somewhat cartoonish look of characters in this version undercuts the story. An option to revert to AI-upscaled old FMV exists, in the options menu. There's justifiable reason to replace the old video with 3d-animated versions of characters for use in VR, with 3d depth needing to be done well, but the characters in 3d as seen here just don't look as good as the rest of the game around them.

And as a side note on how far we've all come, in 1993 Myst's environments, which were considered cutting-edge, amazingly realistic and immersive, took the Cyan studio computers two hours to render a single frame of.

Today the game can run and look way better than it did then, at 60+ frames rendered per second, on a handheld phone.

Or you can run them also at 60+ fps on a headset, in 3d, which is to say rendered *two times* at 60 frames/second each, in such a way that you feel [almost] like you're really there.

In other words, your Quest 2 headset [or desktop, if running things at higher quality, tethered] is running renders of Myst at least 120x per second or 432,000x faster than the game studio's desktops used in 1993 were able to. That's an insane amount of computational progress in the last 30 years.

Cyan has gone 'all in' on VR lately because for them immersive experiences are important, and though VR has yet to go mainstream and perhaps might never do so, it's the best possible way to be immersed in a virtual space, and that pursuit of compelling experiences, is leading Cyan to soon have no fewer than 4 games that support VR experiences in their fantastical and beautiful settings.

(Myst (2021), Obduction (2016), Firmament(2023) and Riven VR (2024-2025?))

Promising, I think.

My take on "Myst" [2021]?
A historical landmark, and even 31 years later, still not a bad game.
Puzzles? More of them, and more realistically solvable, than in sequel Riven.
Storytelling? The game lacks the sort of nuance and extraordinary worldbuilding Riven managed, books in game have some odd and goofy moments, and the FMV delivery is cheesy, with the new 3d character animation trying and failing to improve on it. Yet the game's use of storytelling through the elements of those worlds themselves is highly effective, letting us know lots about the characters who traveled these worlds through the details of those worlds. The music tracks tied to particular spaces also amazingly are able to communicate additional information about who they are, providing an audible hint, not just the visual glimpse, of mental state and mood. And the story itself is interesting thematically - it dumps us into a world with a context we don't yet understand, and asks us to put the bits together, and in the end decide who to trust. The game asks us to consider what a race of alien but (biologically almost completely) human people would do [given the ability to travel instantaneously to other worlds] and concludes we'd be corrupted in the process, prone to arrogance, plundering, colonialism and violence. Myst makes the case that even people who have holographic interfaces and fusion power generators, can culturally stagnate and be 'stuck in the past' with an inability to move beyond greed, addiction, and foundational darkness of humanity. While the ending is a little bit anticlimactic, insofar as you're kind of left sitting there in areas you've already explored after the ending of the story has taken place and probably having gotten there, should just move on to Riven, most everything up to that vaguely odd coda works well enough.
'Myst' as a title feels like much of the game. It works well, it's mildly clever - a mixture of 'Mist' [a fog, a haze, beyond which is something unseen] and truncated 'Mystery' which is what the game as a whole is - a series of puzzles concealing fragments of a bigger picture you're being asked to make sense of over the course of the thing. But it is not *quite* as cleverly developed as Riven's title... or Riven's storyline.
UI? The new version actually makes Myst's interface and the experience of wandering through it, modern and as good as it's ever really been.
Art Direction? Well, the game looks lovely, even if the underlying original art design always felt a bit dream-logic and '90s surrealist, with things at times done because they were cool and not because they made total sense, the current iteration actually subtly improves on that design and makes it subtly more tactile and weathered and natural.
Sound design? Always strong, the main intrductory theme to this day gives chills, and later ambient tracks are distinct enough not to be boring but subdued enough not to be distracting. Modern sound engineering pushes that and makes it even a little better, despite the fact that it was good in the first place. Sound effects still have a charm too, and the classic creative imagination of the old sfx designers, like the use of a staple gun echoing through a vacuum-cleaner tube being used for something as simple as a button sound in a fireplace, is sort of magic even today.