Myst

"We'll go down in historeeeeeEEEEE!!!

Remember meee for centureeeeeEEESSS!!!"

 

Fall Out Boy - Centuries

 

 

After being moderately pleased with Gabriel Knight, I thought I'd polish off another oldie, and in fact Myst makes a good counterpoint, having come out the same year (though its gratuitous weirdness combined with overreaching for rapidly outdated special effects yields a '70s sort of atmosphere) yet aged much more poorly than the likes of Sins of the Fathers.

 

Along with its sequel, Riven, Myst was one of the few games to make appearance on TV morning shows back in the days when TV only cared about games when some churchgoing pillar of the community * pulled his head out of his ass long enough to babble about satanist dice and gamepads teaching children violence - something children could never learn from, say... Anglicans... or Catholics... or Catholics again... or Methodists, then some other kind of Presbyterians, then Catholics again... or two different kinds of Catholics... or those same Catholics from two or three examples before... or yep, more Catholics, or Catholics on their home turf, or... fuck, how do the faithful even make time for anything other than raping and murdering children? I mean, you'd have to multitask. Do they stock a guillotine and anal lube in every pulpit before mass?!?

 

But I digress. Perhaps in response to the panic about games as ultra-violent splatterfests (oh, that poor Frogger) Myst lacks even the minimal cinematic violence or conflict of other adventure series, focusing on exploring for objects to activate in certain sequences by way of puzzle-solving. It's surprisingly freeform for 1993 when games already functioned on the precept of high scores (contemporary Sins of the Fathers even hilariously scores you on how many mystery clues you've found) and executing fixed moves, y'know, up-down-x-square-up, that sort of idiocy. Myst's walkabout was relatively rare, though it should be mentioned, hardly unique. Off the top of my head, Albion, two years later, made a much better show of open-ish world-building without blowing its budget on special effects. Also, I seem to remember text adventures from back in the '80s were more freeform in many ways than graphic "level design" allowed in the '90s... or 2000s... or 2010s... hey but I got a real good feelin' fer this decade!

 

Anyway, graphics. Myst and Riven made the news as graphic adventures, wowing audiences with the possibility of standing, turning, walking and looking around immersed three-dimensionally within simulated worlds which (impossible as it may sound) looked even more realistic than Tron! I remember the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago even featured a rapidly-outdated virtual reality exhibit back then looking... more or less like Myst except with actual animations allowing you to space some invaders or whatnot. And that, to bring this back around to our opening, is why Myst has aged so poorly. As a warning shot in the next decades' 3D arms race, the praise it received for its museum-grade technology overshadowed the many ways in which it proved a chore even by '90s standards, and still overshadows them in its fans' nostagia.

First off, don't let the 3D objects fool you. You're forced to view them from fixed 2D perspectives, switching between these and moving about by clicking objects or the edges of the screen. Unfortunately, with no indication of whether "right" means turning 90 degrees or 45 or 180 or move you five steps forward or ten or whether any particular empty space between a wall and pillar might constitute a clickable, walkable path, and in the absence of any indicators as to utility, Myst's vaunted "exploration" proves a stumbling, jarring mess of constantly struggling to get your bearings every time your next click changes your view angle unexpectedly, until you just memorize every single 2D image by rote. By the same token, its puzzle solving proves a matter of simian visual acuity, rote memorization and blind repetition largely divorced from higher brain functions. Those square buttons above? They're each marked with symbols you can't see until you click you way to each one indivdually. (Supposedly the game originally shipped with a paper notepad, just to add insult to the injury of a lack of in-character record-keeping.) Purportedly vital communiques from NPCs are delivered via scratchy, staticky full-motion video (another infuriating '90s fad). Your first clue is to "count the number of levers" and you do exactly that: walk around the island impersonating The Count... after which I went to the input device clearly marked for me on the map and was stumped. It took an online cheat-sheet to point out my difficulty was not cerebral but optical.

 

In fact, having not even bothered leaving the first island, I'll gladly wager that if you trace the memeology of games inspired by Myst, it will lead you not to mystery or puzzle-solving adventure but to hidden object games. Even your map is hidden in the options menu for some reason!

I didn't quit, however, until trying the generator puzzle. You discover a generator underground beneath a brick building and down a winding staircase, with ten buttons adding different percentages of power. Every time you get the pattern wrong and overshoot some unknown value around 60%, you have to walk click by click out of the room, through several screens of winding staircase, out the little brick shack, take several lefts and rights before you manage to click the invisible access between the shack and the main path to turn around to climb a ladder to a circuit breaker to reset the system (or maybe it's the other breaker a few more screens away) and then click your way back down to the main path and to the little brick shack and into the little brick shack and down the winding staircase and then farther down the winding staircase and even farther down the winding staircase and finally back into the room and HOLY MOTHER OF CRAP, MY KINGDOM FOR A WALK KEY! I finally quit Myst after a few exasperated trial-and-error attempts at this (having assumed turning the power on would be a logical first step toward activating the various levers) only to check the cheat-sheet and discover I shouldn't even be trialing-and-erroring it now, despite it being one of the few functional pieces of equipment.

Exploration is great, red herrings can occasionally be used to great comedic and dramatic effect, repetition can have its place so long as it's an optional alternative to other activities... but exploration plus red herrings plus repetition amounts to unrewarding tail-chasing frustration. Only in light of enjoying the environment for its own sake does criss-crossing the island a hundred times looking for a functional button actually make sense - just as stealth-archering hundreds of mudcrabs and bandits in Skyrim only made sense if you admit you just love hopping around river gorges and salt flats and ice floes... except Myst's fans seem a lot less willing to admit they were in it for the outdated graphic spackle than are TES'.

 

The lore books meant to spice up your adventure don't help much either. Aside from at least being written intelligibly (which is more than can be said for some games) their literary merit hovers around sixth grade composition, a child's impression of how adventure stories sound, overly-verbose and not particularly poetic (e.g. instead of "their rather remarkable adventure" you get "an adventure they had and it was rather remarkable") and hey, I'll gladly admit I share these flaws in my own feeble attempts at fiction... but then I'm not getting paid for this shit or lionized as a visionary of interactivity. As far as sound goes, just try to compare it to Sins of the Fathers' - 'nuff said. Visually, aside from being composed of 3D objects, it's also... not terrible for its time, but a bit like a frat house trying to decorate itself as "Greek" with a couple of plaster columns in the middle of the yard.

I can go back and play some famous, trendsetting or memorable old games (exhibit A / exhibit B) partway through and laugh at their cheesy, amateurish aesthetics or gameplay mechanics, not bother finishing them either because they don't suit my playstyle or they're too much of a chore, yet I'll still acknowledge the means by which they advanced their creative medium. Since I bought Riven as well in some package deal I'll be giving it its separate fair shake at some point, but with Myst, I'm just not seeing it. Freeform exploration would be one thing, but really, as far as I can tell here you really are faced with linear sequences of object interactions you're trying to reconstruct, and the "game" consists, instead of rational choice or connecting clues, of stumbling around mashing typewriter keys until they spell out the complete works of Shakespeare. And, by teaching its own audience to accept drudgery as intellectualized problem-solving, Myst inflicted just as much damage as Mortal Kombat and Doom ever did to theirs.

 

The only mental faculty I find taxed here is my admittedly snarly patience.

Good riddens.

 

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* This being before social justice warriors started biting the fundies' act.