Myst IV: Carry on the saga

The Myst series is one of the best series to hit the gaming world. I remember playing Myst with my brother when I was young, and even Riven. Now the new ones have come out, and I will focus here on Myst IV.

I love the Myst series myself, and Revelation is somewhat of an exception. I bought the product for two major reasons, one, I wanted to see how the story goes! I have read the books, played all the previous games. Two, I loved all the worlds that were created for this game and wanted to see what new beautiful worlds they could create.

I Love a lot about Revelations, The worlds have wowed me, as i wander through a jungle casted with details, or a crystal age that is so dismal, I feel alone. They have once again made a phenomenal game in creating extraordinary worlds that I can sit and look at for hours. The music is also, as always, excellent! The scores really put emotion into the worlds.

I do not like a few things in this game. One, what happened to the URU interface? (full free movement). I want to be able to walk the paths, not click, click, click and get lost because I forgot how many times I have clicked on the path, or forget where I came from. Reading other reviews on URU, it seems they have ditched the full movement because no one liked it. I guess if you fight it, the original Myst was fun because it was picture after picture, but technology develops.

That however is a minor detail, it is still an excellent game. I do have one other major problem with this game, if we look back at Myst, it was a simple yet complicated puzzle world, and the reason I love URU was the point was to explore, and not get to the end of an age. In this game, it seems they have gone back to the rush through it to see the plot feel, and I want to explore. Now sure, I could explore all I want, but I need to solve the puzzles in order to go further, and what is the deal with some of these puzzles? (SPOILER FOLLOWS!) One puzzle requires you to stand at three sound horns, and correlate sounds to some monkeys names. This would not be that bad, if it weren't several steps of tedious timing. You have to be so precise with how long you turn one wheel, down to the half second, any longer and you will not get results. As well as in another age, you must do either a lot of guess work, or way to much math to want to sit and play a game to tune three ropes, and vibrate four crystals based on three strings of 12 decibels, and any combination is possible. It is said there are papers floating around that can help you, but on one of the papers I found a combination that claimed to be a correct one yet it was not, one of the numbers was off by two.

What I think happened here is that somewhere along the way, the designers changed a few things, but forgot to change everything related to it. I sometimes use the level one helps in the options (which is a nice feature) and rarely, (twice actually) used the level 3 helps and they have both times been incorrect. One said to move a slider to the right when it was not possible, seeing as how it was step one there was no way I could mess up previous steps. As well as the sound one, the timings they gave are either incorrect or they are absurdly accurate with the time and it begins to get frustrating.

All in all, the worlds created are still thoughtful and beautiful as well as the soundtrack. But unless you are a devote, hard core puzzle solver who likes to really stay in one scene while moving your cursor all over to see if there are any clues for at least five minutes a scene, you are incredibly observant, and love to spend time on one game, this game is not for you.

To be honest, the original Myst and Riven were an excellent combination of puzzle solving and fun. Puzzles did not wrack your brain all day, yet they had some challenge and the clues were there. As technology develops, it is harder to make a game where you can truly experience a world and not find the clues in seconds, but I want to think that Myst was created so that gamers can feel another world while going "Yes! I got into the cavern!" not "was that .5 seconds, or 2.5 seconds to trap the lion while i ring the middle bell 1.5 seconds so that another one can throw something."

Again, I still enjoyed the game, just a little frustrating at times.