Ivy Allie

Myst in Retrospect

Myst

"You have just stumbled upon a most intriguing book, a book titled Myst." - Introduction to the Myst game manual

Myst is unique. It was a game that carved out a niche all its own; it was groundbreaking at the time of its release in 1993 and even thirty years later there are few titles that have successfully emulated its formula. Not to imply that it’s perfect; in fact, it’s very uneven overall. It’s a strange blend of the macabre alongside the whimsical, nonsensical design choices butting up against logic puzzles, and imaginative visuals stymied by the limitations of technology. But there is a reason that Myst sold six million copies and went on to spawn an entire series: despite its shortcomings, Myst was genuinely good.

Described in the simplest possible terms, Myst is a game about exploration. You have arrived in a strange place. What do you do? Naturally, you begin to look around. The game is your camera, your window. The cursor is your hand. The music is your intuition. The game involves no role-playing: rather, it turns your computer into a gateway through which you can enter another universe.

In many ways, Myst was an exemplar of the concept of “multimedia” that was prevalent throughout the 90s. The CD-ROM, capable of holding over 600 megabytes of information, was at the forefront of this. Even for the few people who had Internet access in the early 90s, it wasn’t practical for transferring anything other than text and some very simple graphics. But a CD-ROM could contain much more: not just images but video and audio clips as well. The most immediate application of this concept was in educational products, such as Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia, which shipped with a wide selection of articles, images, and video clips. Myst’s creators, the game studio Cyan, were also among the earliest adopters of the CD-ROM for educational purposes, their earliest releases being games for children. Myst was a natural evolution of the concept, using the principles and technologies of multimedia to build not a learning tool for children but an experience for adults.1

Myst was also part of another largely forgotten trend in video games, the “interactive movie” or “full-motion video (FMV) game.” These used realistic graphics and (often) live-action footage to create a game that felt more closely related to film than to the arcade. Early examples had been distributed on Laserdiscs, and Myst, along with contemporaneous titles like Phantasmagoria and The Seventh Guest, brought the phenomenon to the CD-ROM and by extension the personal computer. Myst was not billed as an interactive movie, but nevertheless wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve, displaying its imagery between black bars like a letterboxed film, and rolling credits not only during its intro but every time the game quits. And it utilizes live action as well, its characters portrayed by none other than Cyan’s founders, the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller.

The game’s control scheme is one that’s instantly intuitive to anyone who’s used a mouse. The world is seen through a series of static “shots”, and you click to move through the world or interact with objects. If you want to walk further up a path, you click the path. If you want to turn right, click on the right edge of the screen. If you want to pull a lever, click the lever. Myst’s frame-by-frame presentation has been derided as a “slideshow” in the years since, but it’s important to acknowledge how unobtrusive this setup is. The static framing of the scenery may be less immersive than the 360-degree views afforded by some of the later games, but they’re also less disorienting, in part because this method enabled the game’s creators to carefully compose every shot to make it clear what you can or can’t do, what is or is not important. The mechanics of playing Myst are so obvious and easy to understand that in the first edition of this book I forgot to even mention them.

Myst opens with a short cutscene: a man is seen falling into a glowing chasm, a book in his hands. He suddenly vanishes, but the book continues falling. You watch as it tumbles through a field of stars and listen to the man’s voiceover narration: “I realized [...] the book would not be destroyed as I had planned,” he says. “Questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me.” His monologue ends with the words “the ending has not yet been written,” spoken as you see the Myst book land on the ground. It is an efficient and effective opening: it alludes to a mysterious backstory, touches on the question of who might find the book, then reaches out to the player and indicates: You. You’re the one who finds it.

After picking up the Myst book, you are transported (“Linked”, to use the in-universe terminology) to Myst Island, which will be the central hub of your explorations. The island is essentially a junction that holds the rest of the game together. It is here that you will learn the backstory by reading journals, interact with the game’s characters, and solve puzzles in order to gain access to the game’s other environments (“Ages”).

Though Myst Island has become iconic, its design is less coherent than anything else in this first installment. Its jumble of unrelated objects and lack of standard living facilities make it feel more like a mini-golf course than a functional environment. Creating believable worlds is always a tall order, and one which this series generally succeeds at fairly well, but its most familiar location falls somewhat short of the goal.

The Library on Myst Island is the game’s primary repository of story content, which comes in the form of journals. There is one for each of the Ages, and they take the form of travelogues. The author describes something called The Art, a method by which he is able to travel to other worlds by writing about them in special “Linking Books.” While the author’s name is not revealed within the journals, you can infer that it is Atrus, a name you learn from a note that is among the first things you find on Myst Island. The journals also discuss his sons, Sirrus and Achenar, and his wife, Catherine.

In addition to establishing the principal characters, the journals also construct a mental image of the Ages for the player. This means that when you finally visit an Age after reading about it, you not only experience a feeling of familiarity, but also are strongly cognizant of certain disconnects between the worlds described in the books and the worlds as they are in the game’s present. The historical accounts paint them as vibrant and inhabited, but what you find will instead be barren and lifeless. It’s definitely the same place you read about, but something has gone horribly wrong. In this way, the game plays words and images against each other to form a larger narrative within the player’s head.

Elsewhere in the Library, the player will also encounter Sirrus and Achenar, who have somehow become trapped in a pair of Linking Books, through which the player can see and hear them. They are blurry and distant at first, and they plead with you to find red and blue pages that will set them free. They each claim to be innocent of wrongdoing while implicating the other. With every page retrieved, the brothers’ “signal strength” improves, enabling them to speak more clearly.

The game’s central question, which the player must answer, is which of the brothers is telling the truth – assuming either of them are. While you likely need no coaxing to explore the game’s environments, this setup establishes the narrative that you’ll be playing in the game’s “present day.” To learn the brothers’ stories, you must find as many red and blue pages as possible, which you can only do by visiting the Ages.

Each Age has a corresponding puzzle on Myst Island which, when solved, grants you access to a new Linking Book. These puzzles are designed in such a way that they cannot be solved without first finding relevant clues from the journals, which prevents the player from arriving in the Age without first being acquainted with its backstory.

All of the Ages follow the same structure: you must solve a series of puzzles in order to find the red and blue pages, then you must solve a second series of puzzles in order to return to Myst Island. While searching the Ages, you will also discover clues that reveal the events of the past. The lively places described in Atrus’s journals have become cold and lifeless, and are littered with evidence of the brothers’ wrongdoings. It is through this ephemera that the player learns the truth about Sirrus and Achenar: that both have committed heinous crimes and neither deserve to be released.

Yet none of the pertinent details are revealed through exposition. The story of the brothers’ conquests is told entirely by their castoff possessions. Achenar’s spaces are filled with macabre trophies, instruments of torture, and weapons. Sirrus’s are filled with gold, jewels, finery, and drugs. While these signs are hardly subtle, the way in which they convey the truth about the brothers was groundbreaking. The game’s creators trust you to put the pieces together without hand-holding. Twenty years after Myst, Gone Home would be praised by critics for its use of environment as a storytelling device, but it still utilized extensive voiceover narration, not trusting the visuals to convey their story without help. Myst proves that this can be done.

Myst includes four separate Ages (not counting Myst Island). Compared to what you’ll see in later games, Myst’s Ages are relatively small (in part due to technical limitations), but each one is varied enough to give the sensation that there’s something interesting around every bend. Much of this is conveyed through the visuals, which still hold up fairly well overall. The images are richly detailed and believable. The textures especially have a veracity to them which was absent from most of Myst’s contemporaries and imitators. A great deal of care was taken in the rendering of most foreground objects, so the environments feel very rich despite a relative lack of detail in the terrain.

Sound contributes to the atmosphere as well. Evocative ambient noises are employed throughout the game: dripping water echoes through a dark tunnel, birdsong and creaking timber drift through the walls of an abandoned treehouse. But music is even more important, setting the mood for a space even before you begin to explore it.

Each of the Ages is significant, so we’ll look at each in turn, beginning with the smallest, Mechanical. The Mechanical Age consists only of a small fortress and two tiny islands. Diminutive as it is, it clearly demonstrates the principles by which Myst conveys its story. From the journals we learn that the inhabitants of the Mechanical Age were besieged by pirates, and that Atrus helped them fight back by constructing a special stronghold. When the player arrives, though, the fortress is abandoned, and littered with clues that suggest Sirrus and Achenar reversed its function and used it to attack the inhabitants. The fortress is littered with plunder, and a makeshift torture chamber has been constructed inside its walls. It’s the game’s most straightforward interpretation of its formula.

The expansive Channelwood Age represents the opposite end of the spectrum, and highlights a theme that would recur frequently throughout the series: the relationship between exploration and conquest. This often manifests as a stereotypical situation involving technologically “advanced” explorers encountering relatively primitive natives. Channelwood marks the first appearance of this theme: Atrus describes the natives as “monkey-like people” and states that they seem to worship him as some sort of deity. He’s uncomfortable with this, being a conscience-driven and secular person, and warns the young Sirrus and Achenar not to take advantage of the natives’ respect. But predictably, the reverence demonstrated by the Channelwood natives proved too enticing for the budding psychopathy of the brothers: in the game’s present day, the natives’ homes stand vacant, and a sacrificial temple with an altar to Achenar has been constructed in the treetops.

The Age itself is a maze of treehouses and boardwalks, which can be confusing to navigate, but it’s visually appealing and it feels very expansive. Where most of the other Ages are limited to a small cluster of rooms, Channelwood is a sprawling web of bridges and treehouses that take a while to explore. Channelwood set a precedent; Ages in later games would all be expected to measure up to its example.

Stoneship is another small Age, only marginally larger than Mechanical, but it has a number of visually distinct areas which make it seem bigger than it actually is. Sirrus and Achenar both have elaborate “bedrooms” which don’t have much in common with the rest of the Age in terms of overall aesthetics, but well reflect their personalities: Sirrus’s is decked out in palatial opulence and Achenar’s looks like the chamber of an evil wizard. Other landmarks include a ship (sunken but perfectly preserved), a lighthouse, a mountain top overlook, and an underwater tunnel. Where in most of the other Ages the various sub-areas stay fairly close to the overall “look,” those in Stoneship tend to stray away from the rocky, windworn look we see elsewhere in the Age.

Perhaps the strangest Age is Selenitic: it consists of a relatively large island, mostly featureless but with a few different areas and buildings scattered across it more or less randomly. There’s a clock tower, a geothermal power station, a “forest” of harmonious crystals, and so on, but their existence and placement seem practically random. Furthermore, since the Age was never inhabited and has no valuable plunder, it was of no interest to Sirrus and Achenar, and thus we learn nothing about them here. For that reason the Age has practically no story content. There’s nothing to do here but to find the pages and solve the notoriously frustrating Mazerunner puzzle in order to return to Myst.

But while it lacks story, Selenitic does have a distinct central theme: sound. Nearly all of the Age’s puzzles involve sound of some sort: gaining access to the Mazerunner requires a sequence of sounds collected from around the island, and the Selenitic Book itself has a musical lock (which unintentionally protects it from tone-deaf travelers). Myst, as mentioned previously, was a product of the “multimedia” era, and its marriage of realistic graphics with atmospheric sound design was one of its selling points, but Selenitic was one of very few parts of the game, and even the series overall, that made sound the focus of the gameplay. In a way, it now feels like an artifact of the time when the game was being created; one of the many aspects of its design that were experimental. And while it did not ultimately prove to be one of Myst’s more influential innovations, it was an interesting change of pace for the game.

If Myst’s primary strengths are its atmosphere and story, its primary weakness is its gameplay, especially its puzzles. The puzzles have always been an area of contention among players; some people really like them and others find them to be little more than a necessary evil.

But are puzzles truly necessary? Most of Myst’s puzzles are poorly integrated in terms of plausibility. In-universe they are generally explained as complicated locks meant to protect Linking Books from strangers, but puzzles are not effective locks, especially not when clues are left lying around. As a result the puzzles begin to feel contrived, clearly meant to slow down and/or gratify the player rather than to provide any plausible function. This may be why the game has become widely remembered as “that game with the annoying puzzles.” The puzzles are annoying, they are obtuse and obviously irrelevant to the environment they exist in.

Most of Myst’s puzzles require a “pen and paper” approach. These are puzzles that expect you, the player, to keep notes on the things you find during your explorations, or even to keep full-on journals as Atrus did. Some versions of the game shipped with a blank notebook in the box. (And many players took this invitation very seriously – in years past, “player journals” documenting one’s gameplay experience were a staple of fan message boards.) Myst’s puzzles require you to write down scraps of information and draw diagrams. The game is generous with its hints, but you must document them yourself, or physically return to the place where you found them if you need to see them again. This is a style of game design that has since fallen out of favor, but in a way it’s distinctly of an era: Myst was a game one would play at a desk in a home office, a space where pens and paper were close to hand already.

But putting aside the more overt logic puzzles, let’s return to the more subtle psychological puzzle that forms the core of the game’s story. You have visited all four Ages and seen the evidence of the brothers’ wrongdoings. You have collected the red and blue pages and heard the brothers’ version of events. Now they explain to you how to find the final pages, the ones that have the power to set them free.

This leads you into the first instance of a recurring trope that I call the Final Big Choice. By this point, you’ve seen enough to realize that despite their protestations, both brothers are guilty. The question of which brother should be released has been answered: neither of them, probably. But there’s one final catch: alongside the final pages there’s another book. Both of the brothers insist the book must be left alone, claiming that if you touch it, you’ll be trapped in it as they are. This is the Final Big Choice: you can either choose to release one of the brothers, or you can choose not to believe them and investigate the forbidden book. Again the game’s creators have placed their trust in you, the player. You know the brothers are liars, and you can infer that their insistence that you not touch the book probably indicates that you should, even though you don’t know what the book will do. The Final Big Choice became a defining moment for the series, one which would be emulated by Exile, Revelation, and End of Ages.

So you pick up the forbidden book, and come face to face, finally, with Atrus. He tells you his own version of events, the only one that lines up with all the evidence you’ve seen along the way: the brothers trapped Atrus in order to gain control of his library, before ultimately becoming entrapped in the prison books themselves. Now Atrus needs the player’s help to be set free from his own prison and bring his sons to justice. (Hypothetically you could choose to disbelieve Atrus and free one of the brothers instead, although I doubt anyone would.) Once freed, Atrus links back to Myst and destroys the prison books with the brothers still inside them.

When Atrus returns to the player, he thanks you for your help and apologetically offers, as a reward, permission to continue exploring his Ages. It’s a definite anticlimax, an ending with little closure and nothing gained except Atrus’s blessing. That said, I think this lack of an ending is actually intentional, and is meant to be taken as an invitation to continue revisiting the Ages despite the narrative being complete. As Atrus says: “feel free to explore, at your leisure. And I hope you find those explorations satisfying.” Most people expect closure, so as a storytelling tactic this does seem awkward at best, but still there’s something charming about it. It’s another experiment in a game filled with experiments.

Myst is a remarkable experience, and an incredibly confident artistic statement on the part of its creators, who seem to have known exactly what they were making despite it being unlike anything that had come before it. Myst is a story built up from disparate elements (visual, textual, acoustic, and musical), which form into a complete picture inside the player’s head. It set the standard that its sequels (and imitators) would follow, to varying degrees of success. It brought to the nascent CD-ROM format, and the multimedia era, a memorable tale told through vibrant graphics, memorable characters, and evocative sounds.

It was, above all, an adventure.

Footnotes

1. Myst has also been called the “killer app” that drove sales of CD-ROM drives on a wide scale: you didn’t need a CD-ROM drive for your productivity software yet, but you did need one if you wanted to try out this popular new game.

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