What exactly was Myst IV's Revelation?
Myst IV: Revelation is a weirdly uneven Myst title. The game looks gorgeous, thanks to the sprawling 75-person team at Ubisoft Montreal that cut their teeth on this project before later gaining massive success with "Assassin's Creed' in 2007. The game has a 360-degree panorama-based UI that's much like Exile's but is significantly higher resolution. Within that UI is some truly beautiful and intricate visual artistry, across a series of four substantial ages. I really loved the visuals in this game.
Jack Wall returns here as composer, and he does some amazing work - the main theme is quite strong as are many others, even if certain music tracks feel once again too obvious with their use of cues - like Serenia's 'angelic' choir, reinforcing the 'spiritual/mystical' aspect of the age in a way that's a bit overdone and perhaps too on the nose.
This leads us to the central issue with this game and the specific stuff which pushes it at times, wildly off the rails.
Sure, the puzzles are uneven too, sometimes rather illogical and super difficult to solve, and the timed puzzles are physically difficult to complete correctly even if you basically already fully grasp the solution. But the presence of a few really painful puzzles in the mix is not unique to Myst IV. For every puzzle here like the spider chair, that is just ridiculous, there are at least two or three elsewhere in the series that are similarly unreasonable.
But where Revelation really divides fans, in a unique way, and often underwhelms its players is in its storytelling, particularly the leaps in logic and the weird use of, essentially, magic with Serenia. Cyan always straddled the line between the fantasy genre and soft SF in some sense, and here we get full-blown drift into fantasy that's not only fantasy but 'soft' fantasy, with rules that don't exactly make sense or aren't explained, and logical inconsistencies - some very basic. We're not even sure, having finished this game, what specifically the game's big Revelation was. Was it the fates of Sirrus / Achenar? Because that was shown immediately in the trailer months before release. Was it the goofy scheme that was hatched by one of those brothers? Because that plan felt like it belonged in a bad '50s scifi. Basically, there are holes throughout this story and this is impossible to ignore given that the game is so focused on telling said story. Revelation has 75+ minutes of actors' FMV. That's actually more than in the first three Myst titles combined. Where those games played on environmental storytelling and figured 'less is more' and chose FMV use sparingly and wisely, here we see story delivered directly, in clunky performances that are weakly handled in every single case. Rand Miller's performance here as Atrus is more awkward than usual (try moving the slider!) but even so it's arguably the best of the batch. Rand Miller has no theater background (the others cast in this game DID) but that doesn't make the cast around him stronger than he is. Every last performance here is sort of uncomfortable and sometimes just bad. I guess the fault lies with whoever directed the FMV and them being assigned way too many scenes to get done, and the nature of acting with greenscreen, but here? More fails to add up to better. We're seeing a weird story that branches off a bit from what we'd expected from Myst's particular sort of fantasy worldbuilding, and executing that odd story choice with largely bad acting which makes it worse still.
Right now we're seeing Cyan going fantasy-steampunk in something not-Myst (Firmament) and it involves 'spirits' or 'ghosts' as a plot aspect, and between that and the vaguely flat-earth title, put it all together and I'm REALLY hoping it's not going to veer directly into Myst IV illogic territory.
I'm okay with the fantasy genre. But even in fantasy, it needs to be internally consistent. So I'm really hoping Cyan does this about as well as we know they can do it, and gives us some sort of grounding to what we're being shown. Does not need to be much, it can involve Clarkian technology, devices, systems that are kind of crazy, looks like magic, is not fully explained *how* it works exactly. I'm reminded of the Star Trek transporters. They're an impossible technology to build, as it's inherently impossible to know both the position and rotation of subatomic particles in the same moment. Any attempt to rebuild a person from a particle beam will therefore invariably be unable to reconstruct everything perfectly, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So the Trek transporters have 'Heisenberg compensators' and nobody has ever explained how exactly that works... only that it does. And that's okay. Because they gave it enough logical consistency in its usage that viewers more or less went along with it.
We saw that with linking books throughout Myst. They clearly, obviously are in the range of fantasy magic fodder. But they at least have consistent rules refined and thought through, as to how they work and how they can be used (or not) and when Cyan changes any such rules there's of course a huge fan uproar. (see: trap books).
So one hopes that here they've thought this all through. They know how the 'magic' in Firmament works and doesn't work, what can and cannot be done with it and why, and what the costs and implications of using it are. This is the sort of stuff that is great to have fully thought out - it sets up worldbuilding in a rational and consistent way but it also makes for great puzzles where the player can learn what they can and can't do and there's a reason why that sort of makes sense, which is core here. I'm really curious what they're doing with that this time. And I pretty much have faith that the things in Firmament that don't make sense now will start to once we uncover the story.
Because Cyan at least, usually knows what they're doing in worldbuilding terms.
Jack Wall returns here as composer, and he does some amazing work - the main theme is quite strong as are many others, even if certain music tracks feel once again too obvious with their use of cues - like Serenia's 'angelic' choir, reinforcing the 'spiritual/mystical' aspect of the age in a way that's a bit overdone and perhaps too on the nose.
This leads us to the central issue with this game and the specific stuff which pushes it at times, wildly off the rails.
Sure, the puzzles are uneven too, sometimes rather illogical and super difficult to solve, and the timed puzzles are physically difficult to complete correctly even if you basically already fully grasp the solution. But the presence of a few really painful puzzles in the mix is not unique to Myst IV. For every puzzle here like the spider chair, that is just ridiculous, there are at least two or three elsewhere in the series that are similarly unreasonable.
But where Revelation really divides fans, in a unique way, and often underwhelms its players is in its storytelling, particularly the leaps in logic and the weird use of, essentially, magic with Serenia. Cyan always straddled the line between the fantasy genre and soft SF in some sense, and here we get full-blown drift into fantasy that's not only fantasy but 'soft' fantasy, with rules that don't exactly make sense or aren't explained, and logical inconsistencies - some very basic. We're not even sure, having finished this game, what specifically the game's big Revelation was. Was it the fates of Sirrus / Achenar? Because that was shown immediately in the trailer months before release. Was it the goofy scheme that was hatched by one of those brothers? Because that plan felt like it belonged in a bad '50s scifi. Basically, there are holes throughout this story and this is impossible to ignore given that the game is so focused on telling said story. Revelation has 75+ minutes of actors' FMV. That's actually more than in the first three Myst titles combined. Where those games played on environmental storytelling and figured 'less is more' and chose FMV use sparingly and wisely, here we see story delivered directly, in clunky performances that are weakly handled in every single case. Rand Miller's performance here as Atrus is more awkward than usual (try moving the slider!) but even so it's arguably the best of the batch. Rand Miller has no theater background (the others cast in this game DID) but that doesn't make the cast around him stronger than he is. Every last performance here is sort of uncomfortable and sometimes just bad. I guess the fault lies with whoever directed the FMV and them being assigned way too many scenes to get done, and the nature of acting with greenscreen, but here? More fails to add up to better. We're seeing a weird story that branches off a bit from what we'd expected from Myst's particular sort of fantasy worldbuilding, and executing that odd story choice with largely bad acting which makes it worse still.
Right now we're seeing Cyan going fantasy-steampunk in something not-Myst (Firmament) and it involves 'spirits' or 'ghosts' as a plot aspect, and between that and the vaguely flat-earth title, put it all together and I'm REALLY hoping it's not going to veer directly into Myst IV illogic territory.
I'm okay with the fantasy genre. But even in fantasy, it needs to be internally consistent. So I'm really hoping Cyan does this about as well as we know they can do it, and gives us some sort of grounding to what we're being shown. Does not need to be much, it can involve Clarkian technology, devices, systems that are kind of crazy, looks like magic, is not fully explained *how* it works exactly. I'm reminded of the Star Trek transporters. They're an impossible technology to build, as it's inherently impossible to know both the position and rotation of subatomic particles in the same moment. Any attempt to rebuild a person from a particle beam will therefore invariably be unable to reconstruct everything perfectly, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So the Trek transporters have 'Heisenberg compensators' and nobody has ever explained how exactly that works... only that it does. And that's okay. Because they gave it enough logical consistency in its usage that viewers more or less went along with it.
We saw that with linking books throughout Myst. They clearly, obviously are in the range of fantasy magic fodder. But they at least have consistent rules refined and thought through, as to how they work and how they can be used (or not) and when Cyan changes any such rules there's of course a huge fan uproar. (see: trap books).
So one hopes that here they've thought this all through. They know how the 'magic' in Firmament works and doesn't work, what can and cannot be done with it and why, and what the costs and implications of using it are. This is the sort of stuff that is great to have fully thought out - it sets up worldbuilding in a rational and consistent way but it also makes for great puzzles where the player can learn what they can and can't do and there's a reason why that sort of makes sense, which is core here. I'm really curious what they're doing with that this time. And I pretty much have faith that the things in Firmament that don't make sense now will start to once we uncover the story.
Because Cyan at least, usually knows what they're doing in worldbuilding terms.
