Myst in Retrospect
Uru: To D'ni
“[L]ooking back at the others about the table, he smiled and raised his goblet. ‘To D’ni!’ he exclaimed. A dozen voices answered him robustly. ‘To D’ni!’” - Myst: The Book of Ti’ana
“There’s a couple things that the fans will like. I think the first is the fact that they get to go to D’ni. And anybody who knows our stuff on a little bit deeper level knows that D’ni is someplace you want to go.” - Rand Miller, interview from Myst 10th Anniversary DVD Edition
Access to D’ni was one of Uru’s strongest selling points among fans, yet Ages Beyond Myst offered only cursory glimpses of the Cavern: a couple small balconies, a rooftop, and a tiny office. Sure, you could catch a glimpse of Kerath’s Arch (a well-known D’ni landmark), but unless you were one of the lucky few who’d participated in Uru Live, D’ni seemed to be nearly as far away as ever. It wasn’t until the collapse of the multiplayer game that the Cavern was opened to all in the form of this first expansion, To D’ni. It was made available free of charge, implying that Cyan wanted to extend access to D’ni to as many people as possible. To D’ni may not be the most impressive game in the series, but it finally gave us the trip to D’ni we’d always dreamed of, and for that at least it must be considered a success.
To D’ni begins with the addition of a single new Linking Book to the player’s bookshelf, one which links to Bevin, a small neighborhood on the outskirts of the Cavern. Within Bevin there is literally nothing to do but wander around, and there’s no real suggestion of how to proceed. The only thing which might be considered a clue is a notice board which indicates that Teledahn steward Douglas Sharper visited recently. This is presumably meant to suggest that the player is meant to travel to Sharper’s office, where you will find a new diary that sets up the the backstory of To D’ni: a D’ni Restoration Council member named Phil died in a tragic accident, and as a result the DRC has decided to call it quits. Sharper’s journal also foreshadows elements of the next installment (mentioning the phrase “Path of the Shell” for the first time), and provides a clue needed to solve the game’s final puzzle.
Sharper’s notes also lead the player to follow Phil’s trail, and you quickly learn that while he came to D’ni with the DRC, he ultimately took up Yeesha’s quest as well, and has come around to her perspective that the DRC’s mission will “only rebuild[,] not restore.” As he writes in his diary:
rebuilding is about slicing and fixing on the outside
rebuilt trees make fences and walls
restoration is about growth and life on the inside
restored trees make fruit and shade
she [Yeesha] is making sure that the tree has begun to grow again
To D’ni thus brings the theme of reconstruction vs. rebirth (as introduced back in The Book of D’ni) back to the forefront, and the game’s thesis definitively takes sides in the previous installment’s established conflict. According to To D’ni, and indeed according to the series overall, rebuilding D’ni is wrong. The right thing to do is to follow Yeesha’s vision of restoration, despite the fact that her actual aims remain pretty vague. To D’ni will attempt to make this conclusion more relatable by showing you how some named characters ultimately came around to it, but even so it’s a bit hard to understand exactly what its preferred philosophy implies on a practical level.
This first act of the game is a fairly disjointed one, often requiring a walkthrough just to figure out what the objective is, but it’s also the only part which feels something like a story, arguably even more so than Ages Beyond Myst. ABM contained only one diary written by a named character (not counting Yeesha’s miscellaneous inscrutable scribblings), but To D’ni includes three. The ability to visit some of Phil’s personal spaces, small and inconsequential as they may be, is also a welcome change of pace. Much of the Uru experience is austere and impersonal, and this brief chapter spent with the stories of Sharper and Phil is a welcome change of pace.
Once the Phil chapter is over you gain access to Ae’gura (D’ni’s capital), and to the Great Zero, a high-tech navigation system used to find coordinates throughout the Cavern. From here onward To D’ni’s gameplay comes into its own: another glorified Easter egg hunt. To activate the Great Zero and complete the game, you must find a large quantity of calibration markers. There are no clues as to the locations of markers, so finding them consists simply of stumbling across them, one after another, until you find enough to satisfy the Zero’s quota. The search forces you to wander to every (accessible) corner of the Cavern, but since you probably wanted to do that anyway, the tedium of the search actually somewhat detracts from the exploration rather than improving it.
This objective notwithstanding, exploring D’ni is enjoyable. While you don’t get to visit many places directly related to the novels or previously established backstory, the sense of D’ni’s overall history is quite strong. The explorable area is fairly large by Uru’s standards, and the illusion of a continuous landscape is pulled off very effectively by means of its dense and organic structure and a beautifully realized skybox in the distance. D’ni is designed as a highly functional and practical landscape, making it easy to imagine the citizens who once inhabited it. The pride of the D’ni, as well as their predilection for efficiency and skilled workmanship, is evident in all the architecture.
The only thing that’s really wanting is a sense of the personal, something to offer a connection to specific individuals who once lived here. This omission is due in part to the fact that we’re unable to access the interiors of most buildings, but even those which are open tend to be empty, apparently cleared out by the DRC. The small “pub” accessible through a collapsed wall is about as close as the game comes to giving us a true sense of personal life, and it’s a nice moment that I would have liked to see more of. Whether or not one wants to go through the entire Great Zero calibration sequence (and to be honest, little is missed by skipping it), Ae’gura is one of the most interesting areas of the Uru trilogy, and is well worth a look.
Perhaps the biggest contribution this game makes to the D’ni lore is in the form of a huge amount of written background material. There are dozens of notebooks detailing the exploits of various D’ni kings. There’s a lot of information here: many generations of D’ni history are at the player’s fingertips, covering everything from political churnings to the rumblings of war. That said, it’s hard to stay motivated enough to actually read it all, as it really is the purest form of backstory: an unvarnished pile of exposition which will come across as forbidding to all but the purest D’ni-history diehard.
Once the Great Zero is finally activated, you can track down a mysterious coordinate mentioned in Sharper’s journal, which turns out to represent a weird sort of linking portal in the shape of a seashell. This shape, you eventually learn, is the emblem representing the Path of the Shell, tying the end of this game to the beginning of the next.
Upon leaping into the portal, you are transported to the Great Shaft, a vast vertical tunnel that runs between the Cavern and the surface. A spiral ramp, suggestive of the shape of a shell, runs up its walls. The phrase “Path of the Shell” thus appears to refer to the Great Shaft, though it will also be applied to other things before Uru is complete.
Though the Shaft was an established location in Myst lore (it was mentioned in both The Book of Atrus and The Book of Ti’ana), there’s not a lot to see or do there in To D’ni. Of immediate interest is a journal left behind by the fictionalized version of Richard “RAWA” Watson, who in Uru is one of the leaders of the DRC. In this journal, he expresses his sadness over Phil’s death and the demise of the DRC but looks ahead to the alternative restoration which Yeesha promises, recapitulating the reconstruction vs. rebirth dilemma one more time, and again firmly siding with Yeesha. Watson’s reasoning is that a “restored” D’ni would still be just as dead, and therefore it’s better to join in Yeesha’s quest to build a new, living D’ni. The sentiment is understandable, but Watson’s new quest is too vague to be a very engaging proposition. (Furthermore, from what we’ve seen of Yeesha’s quest so far, it seems to be less about building a new D’ni society than it is about demonizing the old one.) Watson writes that he will take a “leap of faith,” to “jump into something,” and “take a journey to places unknown.” Well, there’s only one jump that the player can take from this point: into the gaping darkness of the Great Shaft. So you take Watson’s suggestion literally and throw yourself into the abyss, catching a momentary glimpse of the ornate, brightly-lit chamber at the bottom before you link away to safety.
It is on this note that To D’ni chooses to end, and it’s an odd ending taken by itself. The final entry of the series, End of Ages, follows up on it to some degree (making the Great Shaft one of its central locations), but in its own context it feels somewhat empty. This ending does provide a sort of closure, but like most aspects of To D’ni, it does so in a somewhat awkward and contrived manner.
As I illustrated in the two opening quotes, the phrase “to D’ni” has an interesting kind of duality to it: it can be seen either as a dedication or a destination. As a game, To D’ni is about going to D’ni; as a work of art it can be seen as something made in honor of D’ni. Moreso than any other part of the series, this installment is about D’ni itself, and it lives up to its name perfectly. What it lacks in story it makes up for in atmosphere, and its only significant shortcoming is its repetitive objective. The players asked to explore D’ni, and that’s exactly what To D’ni delivered: nothing more, nothing less. It was an opportunity that sadly would not come again.