Myst Rerun
When I was reinstalling my computer my eyes happened to pass over Myst and Riven in my TV-bookcase and I remembered that I still haven’t finished Riven and I remembered all those hours I’ve spent playing Myst as a child. It was the first game I ever played on a computer together with a children’s game named Willy’s World. Of course I was only five-six at the time but me and my sister continued to play it, or rather just click around the game watching the beautiful scenes and the funny animations. It wasn’t until much later, when I got my own computer that I actually tried to play it for real.
Well, Myst is, the only game I truly and really like for computers. I appreciate a lot of other games that’s true, but Myst is the only kind of game that really thrills me and that actually could say is good just because I feel that the game has everything I want from it. It’s not for inspiration or solely for wasting time but because it’s pure and simply good.
So what is Myst then? Myst is a game where you start by finding a mysterious book under a starry sky and you open it and find a moving picture inside the book. Naturally you click it, or as it’s described in-game you touch the picture and get sucked into the book. And yes, this is where my idea for The Book of Transportation came from to begin with even though my book was made a little bit different than the Myst books. Well, once inside the book you find yourself under an open blue sky on a dock with a sunken boat on your side and a lot of natural ambient sounds coming from everywhere and with a lone and mystical undertone.
You don’t need to imagine yourself as anyone or anything, just think of it as yourself, being sucked into this book and find yourself on this dock. What would you do? Explore is one natural option. You quickly find yourself on an island full with strange buildings and structures and as you explore you find notes a lot of books to read in a library, and sooner or later you’ll get the hang of what has happened on the island. And starts helping one of the three different people you find notes or indirectly meet.
As a game it’s very mysterious with a well-made story and a lot of logical puzzles and problems that are both mathematical (read logical) and systematical and everything is pure and simple deduction by experimenting and testing your way through. There is no real game-over. The game only requires a lot of patience and observation not to mention you cannot, or rather should not, stress through it. If you are to enjoy it you should take your time to read, and analyze and speculate and draw the lines between everything. Everything in Myst has a purpose, even if it’s even to just characterize a person or give you a hint of what has happened or just to describe why something is where it is to describe the culture more.
Well, enough about Myst, which is the game and it, is the only game I will ever admit that I truly like for what it is. And well, I decided to play Riven again only to find that I’ve completely forgotten about almost everything I did in Riven so I have to play it from the beginning re-discovering everything. So why not try to play Myst from the beginning too? Okay, I can solve the game in five minutes since I know the solution to the puzzle by heart but what I can’t by heart is like everything else even though I had a rough idea about most of it.
Well, I invited Rasmus to play a rerun of Myst with me beginning with the first of the five games; Myst. Myst would be a warm-up for Riven. Mainly because I would let him lead on since I know too much already. But also to give him some sense of what Myst is all about before we set into the real hard part, Riven which is much more complex and advanced compared to Myst, at least in my opinion. And from my first experience with Riven it’s so much harder to keep track on everything than in Myst and thus it could be both easier and funnier to play it with someone. So yesterday (read Friday) we started with Myst and almost completed about 40-50% of the game before we called it a night. I don’t know how it would have been if I hadn’t known all that I do, but it sure was fun to play it with someone I must say. Two heads is better than two, right?
Well, for those of you who wants to try any of the five Myst games or even the sequel Uru, they are all in the game-folder under PC/Myst on the server. There is two versions of Myst on the server. Myst ME1 and realMyst, Myst ME is only a revised version of the original where some small glitches and shit have been fixed. realMyst is a 3D remake of Myst with a free perspective where you walk around like it would have been a very strange FPS-like game. I don’t like the controls in realMyst, but it’s easier to navigate and get a perspective of the different areas in realMyst. There is also one additional Age2 in this version.
You might run into some problems with getting them working, well, the games are quite old I must tell you so it’s why. But with some trixing you can get it working. It’s not easy all the times but I know at least how to solve most problems in Myst, Riven and Exile3. As for the other two, I guess that using the crack should fix most things. But it’s only to try your way forward, that is if you dare to try these games, because it’s no real action in them and they require loads of patience which I know some of you haven’t got a lot of.
As an end notice I just want to say that much in my way of thinking while creating riddles, puzzles, and mysteries comes from Myst, not to mention that I’ve taken a lot from Myst to some cultures and people in Nianze. Just recently I’ve taken some from Myst and applied it on the Xin of Exile, hehe.
Best regards,
Herid Fel
Recent Comments