Myst IV: Revelation - IBM PC / Macintosh / Xbox (2004)

American Cover

Myst IV: Revelation

Myst IV: Revelation

The fourth installment of the Myst franchise was once again handed out to a third party studio, this time to Ubisoft Montreal. The storyline undergoes a retconning in the fourth game, as Atrus' two sons, Sirrus and Achenar, are no longer lost forever after their prison books were burned in the original Myst. Not only are their books no longer destroyed, but they are also full-fledged ages without an exit door, instead of one-man prisons. The game thus takes place 20 years after the first Myst. Forced exile and family troubles are really recurrent themes in Myst, aren't they? You can probably guess that your task is to explore these prison ages and see what happened to the two brothers. You are introduced to their kid sister Yeesha at the beginning of the game, but she gets kidnapped very early on, so you'll have to save her as well. The opening video once again shows Atrus pondering about the past on his writing table. Interestingly enough, the drawings of his two sons on the desk are now actual photo portraits. That's probably because they are important characters this time around, or maybe they noticed the drawings were a little weird in Exile. They still kept Jack Wall's over-the-top orchestral music, though, as he returns to work on Revelation as well. The first moments of the game are absolutely gorgeous: a classic Myst ride on a monorail, this time through a sunny canyon over a river. The music hits the right notes as Yeesha tells you a little bit about her family and gives you the chance to take a picture of their very photogenic house. Sadly, after those first few shots, the graphics never reach that same level again. The first area, Atrus' home in Tohmana (the same place where Exile begins), is also very well done. However, every area afterwards seems a bit less impressive, to the point where there were moments where I wasn't sure if there's was step up from Exile in terms of graphics. At least Revelation lets you choose your resolution up to 1024x768. There's a bit more live-action this time around, it's just too bad the acting is not that great. Rand Miller is fine as always as Atrus. Sirrus and Achenar are no longer played by Rand and Robyn Miller, but by completely different people. It makes a lot of sense, since you're going to see them up close and not in some tiny book window. While Sirrus is mostly okay, despite being guilty of chewing the scenery once in a while, Achenar sounds really unconvincing and unconvinced. Isn't he supposed to be the impulsive, aggressive brother? He does pick up the slack near the end, though. Yeesha has grown up from the baby in Exile and is now a young girl. The little girl portraying her is adorable, but she does have a French-Canadian accent. Some people might find it annoying, but it's actually quite endearing. It's a chauvinism thing, okay? Anyway, nothing is as bad as all the priestesses that show up later in the game, all of them pointless and annoying. My favorite is the girl that has a hard time wrestling with the idea that she could take spare parts from one machine to fix another machine of the same type. It's a huge leap in logic, but could this even be possible? Does the idea even make sense? More on these girls later on. The upside to all this acting is that every journal can also be read to you by its author, book on tape style. It's an alternative if you're a lazy reader. While Revelation has kept the spherical stills from Exile, it has replaced the hyper-simple pixellated hand cursor for a fancy, animated 3D one. Who knows why they did this, the old cursor is almost sacred in its simplicity and usefulness. It's like the classic arrow cursor in most operating systems: it works fine the way it is, why mess it up by trying to upgrade it? In its defense, the new cursor does react when in front of a hotspot, telling you what can be examined and what locations you can travel to. One problem is that the hand reverts too slowly to its original position, giving you the impression that there are hotspots everywhere if you move the cursor briskly across the screen. You also need to open doors and operate levers by holding the left mouse button and dragging the object. The problem with that is that doing such an action changes the camera from being centered on the cursor to only panning when the cursor reaches the edges of the screen. This is a switch you can do at any time by pressing the right mouse button, but the game decides to do this by itself any time you drag an object. It sounds minor, but it's tiresome in the long run. To top it off, that 3D hand just looks ugly. Even worse: transitions between stills are slooow. In Riven, you could move as fast as your hand could point at the next hotspot. It might be the 360 degree spheres or the 3D cursor, but moving around in Revelation is long and tedious. Exile's movement was a bit slow too, but Revelation's is much worse. All of these things add up to one big glaring flaw. Myst is supposed to be known for its simple interface. Exploration should be as hassle-free as possible so you can spend time thinking about the bigger picture: the puzzles. Revelation's zip mode does mitigate the problem, since it lets you instantly teleport to any important location in an age, but it's simply not enough. On the other hand, some interface changes were for the better. You are now given a photo camera and the ability to add text to your snapshots, so it's a great feature for those who are not too keen on using pen and paper to note things. If something looks important, you just take a quick picture, so it's five seconds of clicking instead of five minutes of recopying. However, it can be difficult to look at a picture and then input the information from memory, so paper still has its advantages. Luckily, you can also print your photos on paper to solve this problem. Another item has been added to your inventory, one that I find a bit more controversial. You find Yeesha's amulet lying on the ground early on and it lets you see visions of the past when looking at certain objects. Well, actually you mostly hear the visions, very few are videos. The problem with these visions is that they're kind of useless: they very rarely have anything to do with the puzzles and the storyline details they offer are kind of irrelevant, not to mention that there are much better ways of giving them to the player, like subtle elements in the environment or good old journals. I have no idea why they thought they needed to resort to magic or ESP, but that pendant sure doesn't fit the Myst theme. Anyhow, some of those visions are important, so you'll have to check the amulet every time you hear the noise signifying there's a vision associated with an object, just in case. One last feature is that when you cursor is not on a hotspot, you can left-click to go "tap, tap" on any object to make a noise. Tapping on different objects will produce different sounds, like metal instruments clanging loudly, a wood table producing a dull ring and a stone wall making a very muffled sound. Anything your hand can reach, you can tap on. It's hard to describe why this is interesting, but it sure is. Instant aural gratification. Ever since Myst IV, I sometimes tap on stuff in real life to see what kind of noise it makes. I guess you really have to like sound work to understand.

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The Ages

	Spire As far as prisons are concerned, Sirrus really got the short end of the stick. Spire is, well, a huge freezing spire made of nothing but various types of stones and crystals. The only life form and means of sustenance is a little bit of moss. Yum. The various crystals lets the programmers use a bunch of fancy lighting and transparency effects, but otherwise Spire is a bit barren, even if intentionally so. Sirrus is supposed to be the intellectual brother, so his puzzles involve scientific activities such as figuring out the properties of rocks, directing electrical current and using vibrations. It's surprising that Sirrus could build complex electrical circuits from nothing but his two hands and an endless amount of stone, but hey, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief. I found the puzzles in this age satisfying and not too difficult. The final puzzle is a doozy, but you are given more than ample information to figure it out without too much trouble.
	Haven Achenar is the strong, hot-blooded brother, so he got an appropriate prison: a beach with a pirate ship full of plunder and a jungle full of animals to hunt. Haven has the most wildlife in any age of Myst so far: you can see many species from small insects to dinosaur-like herbivores, hammerhead pterodactyls and of course little cutesy monkeys. Not only can you see these animals up close, but you can also see them interact with each other, like a predator taking down its prey. With so many animals to see, you can bet that some of this is going to be important. It's also interesting to note that Achenar built several camps on the age and visiting each one betrays an evolution in his mindset: he goes from a gruff brute to a lovey-dovey nature lover that lives with monkeys. It's little details like these that make an age more than a support for puzzles. Speaking of puzzles, there's one in Haven that's notable for being particularly difficult: it requires you to send sound messages to monkeys in order to help them fight against a predator. The problem is that not only are the steps needed to succeed unclear, but the game also often fails to register the commands you're trying to send. You need to spin wheels to activate sound machines, but you're never told how long those sounds need to be or how many time the wheel must be turned. Stupid monkey, why won't you throw that rock? Ubisoft even released a patch to loosen the timing of the puzzle, something that has never been necessary in earlier games.
	Serenia The third and final age, which you can only complete with the help of information found in the two previous ones. If I had to name one reason why I don't like Revelation, it would be Serenia. It is supposed to be some kind of lush paradise, but the place is just wrong. It's full of New Age bullshit like floating soap bubbles, memory chambers, spirit guides, dream worlds, life stones, palm readings... and a bunch of chicks that are really into togas and face painting. Seriously, there's like six different chicks that show up and none of them have anything helpful to say except gobbledygook about dreams and spirits. There are too many people in there, so many that I started to feel agoraphobic. Well, not really, but Myst has never been about meeting people, especially not completely irrelevant people... until it became a MMO, that is. Yeesha loves the place, so maybe it explains why she turns out to be such a hippie crackpot later in Uru. Anyway, none of this fits the Myst theme at all, so Serenia is a complete miss.

It makes no sense that these people would have to commune with the spirits of their ancestors in their dreams to find somebody that's two hundred fucking meters away from them. And everyone is on a tiny island! Less LSD, more observation, that's my suggestion to them. The worst bit is that you'll be forced to go on your own spiritual journey, with wonky visuals, trippy music, magic wormholes and everything. At least your spirit guide is voiced by Peter Gabriel, so that's pretty stylish. However, before you can go on your little mental trip, you need to give a gift to get a spirit guide. Can't travel dreams without one of those, don't you know? The difficulty is that the gift in question will break if you move the cursor too quickly and will also break if you take too long before giving it AND the spirit guide will change spots if you screw up. Later on, you'll also need to redirect water by blocking certain rivers. The problem is that you have to navigate in a maze where it's impossible to visually follow a river to see where it ends. Both these puzzles are done in the same area, so prepare to get sick of seeing the same scenery over and over again. Maybe it's the setting or maybe the game is too long, but I found all of the final puzzles extremely irritating. You think that the game is about to end so you start getting pumped up to see the conclusion, but then, bam! The game throws you a puzzle wall. And then another. And another. Puzzle walls are okay, but not when you're given the impression that the end is just around the corner. It really broke my stride and I just couldn't wait for this game to end anyway. In conclusion, Myst IV is the weakest of the series. While the production values are there and the graphics fairly high quality, a lot of things prevent it from being too enjoyable. The final third of the game in Serenia is much too long, the puzzles require a lot of tedious back and forth and the theme of the place is an aberration. The other areas are much better, but the awkward exploration makes the puzzles more tedious than they should be. There's also too much live-action, character visions and voice overs. All this chatter doesn't really suit Myst, but what makes it really mind-numbing is that the acting just isn't very good. Exile and Revelation proved that the Myst franchise is best left in the competent hand of Cyan, which is exactly where Myst V comes in.

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Myst V: End of Ages - IBM PC / Macintosh(2005)

European Cover

Myst V: End of Ages

Myst V: End of Ages

After two more or less successful attempts by third party companies at replicating the Myst formula, it was time for Cyan to get back behind the wheel again. As its name implies, End of Ages was meant as the final entry in the series: after the failure of Uru, it was decided to produce the franchise's curtain call. In fact, End of Ages is actually made up of unused concepts meant for Uru and you can also spot that some assets were taken straight from it as well. On the other hand, that doesn't meant they skimped on the original content. Most puzzles are solved through the new mechanic of drawing on special tablets and you can finally meet and interact with the Bahro, creatures that were hinted at in Uru, but rarely seen. Mere seconds after booting up the game, End of Ages gave me an intense feeling of coming back home. It is in part the locales: the game starts out in the same room where the first Myst ends and Riven begins. Shortly after, you are transported to the inside of the crater that you see in the desert at the beginning of Uru but can never reach. That crater is in fact the entrance (or rather, the exit) of the Great Shaft, a tunnel built by the D'ni that links the surface of the Earth with their underground world. It's a place of significant importance to the Myst universe and is one of the central areas of the Book of Ti'ana novel. However, the feeling is not just in the places: it is in the art design in general. Jack Wall has been replaced by Tim Larkin as music designer and the latter delivers a much more atmospheric score. The buildings once again sport that unique blend of tribal architecture and steampunk stonework that is the style of the imaginary D'ni civilization. The game boasts some of the best texture work out there. It's in the skies, the caves, the clothes, the architectural details, everywhere. I just don't know how these guys do it, but you just can beat solid texture work like that. Plus, a game with really inspired texture work will weather the test of time much better than a game with a few more polygons than its contemporaries. There's magic in them textures!! The story in End of Ages is even more barebones than usual. You just pop into existence, touch a stone tablet and then Yeesha shows up and gives you a speech as well as the quest to restore the tablet by touching others like it in the game's four main ages. There's also something in there about freeing the Bahro from enslavement, a species of monkey-like creatures with the innate ability to link. The game takes for granted that the player will think that freeing them is desirable. You're just supposed to hear the word "slavery" and hop to it, no questions asked. Cuz' freedom is good, right? Maybe they're evil, dangerous creatures that are just begging to ravage the Earth and egg your house as soon as you let them off their leash. Could be. Not only that, but anybody that isn't on the side of the liberation of the Bahro will obviously turn out to be utterly evil under the surface. Boy do I love black and white morality. Also, slaves of what? There doesn't seem to be too many slave drivers around: everybody's dead! The other main character of the game is Esher, a D'ni surviror played by David Ogden Stiers. He does an excellent acting job, although some fans say that his D'ni accent in not authentic, whatever that means. What is more notable, however, is that he pronounces "D'ni" as "duck knee". It's easy to see how this can be distracting. Esher shows up quite a lot in the game, many times per area. That doesn't make End of Ages a verbose game, but it's still more than the other games, Revelation excluded. The people at Cyan decided that End of Ages needed a bit more character interaction to give a better sense of the setting for new players. Esher is also meant to hold your hand through the puzzles, so he gives out hints as well. It's a good thing that Cyan's definition of "holding your hand" is telling you things that you don't quite know if they're supposed to be hints and advice like "this place is different" or "the door is locked but you can find another way around". End of Ages is supposed to be set some 200 years after the other four games, sometime around the present day. End of Ages is set after the events of Uru and Yeesha gives subtle hints in her journal that the DRCs' efforts to revive D'ni civilization have failed. I guess she means this both in the context of the game's story and outside of it, since Uru was a commercial failure. That could explain why End of Ages has a certain tinge of bitterness to it. The time the game is set in has also raised a lot of speculation because the characters seem to recognize you as the same person in every game despite the fact that they are now hundreds of years apart. Are you D'ni? Are you a time-traveler? Or an immortal? Maybe you're the Wandering Jew? Here's another mystery for you to ponder. Much like Uru, Myst V is completely in 3D, except that navigation is exclusively first-person. End of Ages offers a control scheme to please everybody: frame by frame like Myst and Riven, sphere by sphere like Exile and Revelation or full 3D movement like realMyst and Uru. All modes work very well, but it's hard to use something else once you're given the option to move freely. The cursor actually goes back to being a simple and efficient 2D hand, but retains the upgrade of reacting when flying over a hotspot. So it's the best of both worlds. There is no more FMV in End of Ages, as all character interactions are handled through polygonal models. The characters' movements are actually really fluid and natural. The face texture is obtained by filming the real actor and then putting it on a polygonal model (similar to the technique used in the Siren games for the Playstation consoles. It works, but it's also a bit creepy. The puzzles in End of Ages use a new mechanic: Bahro stone slates. Basically, they work like this: you draw on them with the mouse, drop the slate to the ground and a Bahro will pick it up and react if the correct symbol is drawn. Each age hides symbols that act as checkpoints. Drawing those allows you to reach areas you couldn't otherwise, pretty much like how Journeys work in Uru. Each of the four main ages also has one special symbol that affect the environment, much like a magic spell... those Bahro can pull some fancy tricks that you'll have to discover by yourself.

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The Ages

	Direbo A tiny age serving as a shortcut connecting the other ones. It's purple!
	Taghira A prison built on icebergs and the first main age. Criminals were sent there and left to fend off on their own. You can see some of the structures they built to take advantage of thermal currents and bulbous trees also survive thanks to the heat. The puzzles here are really simple, as the ages are placed in ascending order of difficulty.
	Todelmer An age under a perpetual starry sky designed as the perfect spot for an observatory. You'll need to use telescopes to locate things around the area. The final part of this age is quite a surprise...
	Noloben A beach island with a grassy plateau and a weird egg structure in the middle. A vanilla sky can be seen above, probably one of the most stunning skies I've seen in a game. The island is surrounded by what sounds like Northern Gannets, nesting and flying around. The only real challenge here is finding your way into the egg hut, but it's the most difficult puzzle in Myst V.
	Laki'ahn A tropical island used as an arena where humans fight large sea creatures for sport. The sky here is deceptive... a solid block of blue after so many great skies in every age? Right when you think Cyan dropped the ball, here it comes: Laki'ahn undergoes a showy eclipse every fifteen minutes or so. As the final age, Laki'ahn is also a bit longer than the other ones.

All of the game's four main ages are found along the way as you go down the Great Shaft. You can either solve them one by one or go all the way down the shaft and then solve the ages. Myst V is a bit shorter than Myst IV, it's also less tiresome so maybe it's a good thing. The puzzles in End of Ages are a bit simpler than those in its predecessors, but they aren't especially easy either. There's nothing in there as bad as the worse head scratchers in Uru or Riven. The only problem with the puzzles is that the drawing recognition was a bit, well, sketchy. You shouldn't expect great precision from drawing recognition programs or great drawing skills from the average gamer, but there are still some major bugs. For example, while the game is usually lenient with your drawings, there was one symbol it would just refuse to recognize. It took several tries to get that mystery detail that made the game accept my symbol. Even worse, the game once wrongly interpreted one of these drawings as the key to the next checkpoint, letting the bypass an entire section of the game. The last major bug was when the tablet got stuck on the floor and it was impossible get it up from there, requiring reloading from an earlier save. As an aside, it's interesting to note that you can finish the game in a few minutes provided you know all the right symbols in advance. It's similar to the first Myst in that respect. End of Ages is supposed to be about the player making an important choice deciding the ultimate fate of the D'ni (says right there on the box: "Decide the fate of a civilization"). Who knows how they came to that statement. End of Ages is like all the other Myst games: one good ending and a few bad ones that punish your stupidity. It's always been an adequate formula. It's strange how they can pretend that this game somehow offers a more interesting or more important choice at the end. All of the endings are a bit sappy and awkward. They tried to give the series a definite conclusion in a few minutes of dialogue so the whole thing comes across as forced. You're asked to perform an action that has incredible consequences, but you've never been told what those are exactly and haven't been given reasons to care much either way. You're supposed to be righting hundreds of years of wrongs in one gesture, so that also comes out extremely forced as well. What those wrongs were is very vaguely alluded to in Yeesha's journals and might not be obvious even if you've played the earlier games, since Myst has always been stingy about storyline details. It's very hard to consider End of Ages the ending point of anything, especially since the series' motto is "the ending has not yet been written". However, one of the perks of finishing the game is that you get to return to Myst Island. The age has become a dilapidated dump since your last passage there, but it's still cool to revisit it, especially under a different light. Unlike the spoof in Pyst, Myst Island doesn't become a pile of ruins because it was trampled to death by tourists, but because it was completely forgotten over the years. Myst went from a place full of unassuming mystery to an abandoned wasteland, a progression that reflects Cyan's unfortunate fate as a company. It's certainly a lot more interesting than Yeesha's nonsense speech about curses being lifted, kingdoms being earned and shackles freed from. The sad fate of Myst island reveals much more about the franchise and says it in a manner befitting Cyan's storytelling specialty, that is to say without uttering a single word.

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