Myst in Retrospect

End of Ages

“Consider it a ‘Myst’ opportunity” - Esher

Considering what a vast and varied journey it’s been, definitively wrapping up the Myst series is a tall order. We have loose ends from Atrus’s family turmoils, we still don’t know Yeesha that well, the question of what will happen to the D’ni legacy is still in the air, and that’s not even mentioning the Bahro. A strong conclusion will need to cover those points, but should also allow us to revisit a few of our favorite old haunts and see some new places as well. Myst V: End of Ages hits some of these notes. It has a handful of nice character moments, a few spectacular Ages, and the occasional pinch of nostalgia. Unfortunately, it also has some serious flaws that greatly diminish the experience. Is it a fitting end for the series? Considering some of the high points we’ve seen, for the most part it isn’t. At best it’s a predictable end to the series, delivering most of the elements we’ve come to expect, both the good and the bad.

The game opens, as is convention, with an Atrus voiceover. He talks about how he’s lost everything and everyone he ever cared about, including (he thinks) Yeesha, and ends by saying that he will soon go on to a better place. The implication seems to be that he’s dead, which Yeesha shortly later emphasizes by saying that Atrus’s “time has passed.” It’s a grim start; it feels like finding out about the death of a friend secondhand. Yet at the end of the game it turns out that Atrus isn’t dead at all; the whole thing was just a metaphorical way of saying that he is no longer leading the D’ni. It’s hard to guess why the game is set up this way. Nothing is really gained by this deception, unless making the player depressed right at the outset can be considered beneficial. Even when you find out Atrus is still alive, it’s not so much a relief as it is an irritation, because then you feel like you’ve been lied to. It’s a minor point, but it does affect the tone of the game, coming at the beginning as it does.

Once the intro is complete the player¹ arrives in Atrus’s old prison in K’veer (where you first met him, at the end of the first game), without any real understanding of why you’re there or how you got there. The place is crawling with Bahro, which up until this point have been seen only once, at the end of Ages Beyond Myst. This is the first time you get a clear look at them, and up close they appear to be a cross between a gorilla and a praying mantis. These are the creatures that Yeesha has been exalting since the beginning of Uru, the creatures that the D’ni supposedly oppressed in order to build their empire. After Ages Beyond Myst they faded into the background, but now their time has come: End of Ages is almost entirely about the Bahro, and the game establishes that right away by showing dozens of them throughout this first environment.

Also noticeable right from the outset is the new game interface, a real-time 3D world with point-and-click navigation. The game defaults to a “classic” mode in which we have the fixed viewpoints familiar from the Myst and Riven era, with the addition of smooth transitions between points. There’s also a “classic plus” mode, which is similar to that of Exile in that it allows the player to look around smoothly by using the mouse. This seems ideal to me; it makes the world seem free and immersive without the nuisance of steering around things (although there’s an option for that as well, for anyone who prefers it). This node-based navigation is not without its quirks, though. The nodes can sometimes be far apart and at strange angles to each other, and the transition speed is noticeably faster than a walking pace, so sliding between them often feels unnatural. Still, it strikes a nice balance between the freedom of real-time environments and the simplicity of the point-and-click system, and overall I think it’s the best navigation scheme of any of the games.

As for the real-time graphics themselves, it is a very noticeable difference, though not necessarily in a good way. The environments, while very attractive, aren’t as realistic as those of the pre-rendered era, and the first-person perspective calls attention to this more so than did the third-person perspective in Uru. And while real-time environments can hypothetically allow more dynamic surroundings, the amount of movement and wildlife onscreen fails to measure up to the standards set by Revelation. The jungles of Revelation’s Haven, for example, are teeming with animals, most of them not visibly looping, whereas End of Ages’ Laki’ahn has only one animal species, and all it ever does is run in a tight circle. Some effects are nice, such as the waves at the water’s edge and the swaying grass, but these Ages do in general seem more static than anything we saw in Revelation. (To be fair, Revelation set a remarkably high standard in that regard.) The Ages also seem quite small, in terms of explorable area, compared to many earlier examples. I’m not asking for a gigantic world like Riven, which is obviously beyond this game’s scope, but many of the Ages here have less variety than even relatively tiny Ages like Stoneship.

This is not to say that the Ages are unattractive: some of them are among the most beautiful of any of the games. Noloben in particular was well-known from early Uru screenshots (where it was known colloquially as “Linker’s Beach”), and it doesn’t disappoint. As real-time environments go, it’s hard to say anything bad about them, but in carrying over the control schemes of the pre-rendered era, their shortcomings are more apparent.

The other issue introduced by real-time graphics is the depiction of in-game characters. End of Ages represents its characters by projecting the face of an actor onto a motion-captured CGI body, an effect which tends to land squarely in the Uncanny Valley. They look more realistic than the CGI characters of Uru (which is important considering how much time you will spend looking at them), but certain elements of the character models (irregular specularities on the faces, drawing errors at sharp angles, and seemingly random gestures) are off-putting and distracting. It’s disappointing that Cyan decided to go this route, considering that realMyst demonstrated that it’s possible to combine real-time sets with full-body actor video, but in general this method does at least work well enough.

Getting back to the game itself, the player finally gets to step outside the locked room in K’veer and head down the hallway outside.² At the end of the hallway the player finds a room containing a weird giant bubble surrounded by tusks. The walls of the bubble constantly shift to show other Ages, which makes for some nice subtle foreshadowing.

Shortly after finding the bubble, you are accosted by Yeesha in the first of many, many speeches you will have to endure. Yeesha has aged visibly since the events of Uru, and despite the fact that she had become a demigod when last we saw her, she’s now little more than a sad old lady. Her ramblings are even more incoherent than usual, and her vague description of the journey ahead doesn’t really enhance your understanding of anything. “What you still don’t understand,” Yeesha says, “you have failed to hear or don’t need to know.” As the game progresses, that statement begins to feel like an apology for the mess of plot holes and dead ends that make up much of the story. But we won’t be subjected to much Yeesha-rambling after this initial speech. In fact, we won’t be seeing much of Yeesha at all, because most of the speechifying will be performed by Esher, a survivor of the Fall who has taken it upon himself to follow the player around and lecture you at every opportunity.

Up until this point we’d never met an actual D’ni citizen in the games. This means that the events of the games are always viewed from an outsider’s perspective. Since you, the player, are yourself an outsider, there’s something to be said for that arrangement, but it’s high time that we got a peek at the D’ni interpretation of events for a change. We needed a D’ni character, one who could fill in our understanding of its history from the other side. Esher is not that character. At times he seems to have depth, to be as wise as his advanced age³ would lead us to expect, and other times he’s a vitriolic and embittered one-note villain. Esher doesn’t provide any real insights on the D’ni mindset because he’s so dead-set on his cartoonish agenda, speaking over and over again on the same points: he hates Yeesha, he hates the Bahro, and he wants to see D’ni returned to its former glory. He makes many, many speeches over the course of the game, reiterating all these points ad nauseam, yet rarely if ever lets slip any details about his character or backstory, the very details that might make you care about his position. The deeply personal soliloquies of Gehn or Saavedro are not in evidence. These are lectures, plain and simple, giving you no insight into either Esher himself or to the world of the D’ni at large. The frequency of his speeches could perhaps be forgiven if he was at least saying something interesting, but in general, to hear one of his speeches is to hear all of them. And if somehow you manage to convince yourself that he’s an interesting character anyway, you’ll be disabused of that notion in the endings, both of which reveal him to be a delusional psychopath. The character had good potential, and seeing it wasted this way is disappointing.

After enduring speeches from both Yeesha and Esher, you find yourself atop the volcano near the Cleft, where the passage to D’ni begins. We saw only glimpses of this in Uru, and won’t get to see a lot of it here either, but it’s still nice to be able to visit it firsthand. The area surrounding the Great Shaft (previously seen in To D’ni) becomes a sort of explorational hub, functioning much like Myst Island or J’nanin in that it contains Linking Books connecting us to the game’s various Ages.

Strangely enough, the books we find in the Great Shaft don’t link directly to the Ages, but to an intermediate age called Direbo, from which you link to the Ages via magic pedestals with nary a Book involved. In fact, Books will be used only for Linking to and from Direbo; all other Linking is accomplished by Bahro magic, and occurs very, very frequently. There’s so much Linking in this game, and so many ways to do it, that it begins to feel mundane. It’s a big change from the pre-Uru era, where Linking was performed rarely, and under very specific conditions, which made it feel exciting and special. End of Ages utilizes Linking as a puzzle mechanic a lot, which while not an inherently bad idea, does make Linking banal after a while. It no longer means you’re about to transition to something special, it’s just a means to an end. Even the iconic Linking sound becomes a lot less intriguing when you hear it six or seven times in the process of solving a puzzle. Linking has a mystique, if you’ll pardon the pun, one which suffers considerably when overused as it is here.

All of the Ages follow the same basic gameplay structure. Upon arriving in a new Age, you gain access to its Bahro Slate, a stone on which the player can draw pictograms that the Bahro can interpret.⁴ This pictogram-drawing system is the most original puzzle mechanic that this game introduces, and while it’s novel at first, it’s also highly formulaic and quickly starts to feel repetitive and predictable. Most of the pictograms are used to enable Links to various inaccessible locations throughout an Age. Each Age also has exactly one pictogram that instructs the Bahro to use their magical abilities to temporarily alter the physical characteristics of the Age, causing windstorms, rain, or (in the most absurd case) speeding up the passage of time. Each Age has at least one puzzle that requires the player to utilize the Bahro magic to proceed. The end goal of the Age is to place the Slate onto a central altar that itself contains the game’s most important talisman, the Golden Tablet. The Golden Tablet is said to hold the key to the full power of the Bahro, or something along those lines, and once all four stone Slates have been placed on the altar, it will be unlocked. This is in service of Yeesha’s quest, which in this game is to find a person worthy of holding the Golden Tablet and wielding control of the Bahro. We’ll come back to the nuances of this later on.

The non-Slate puzzles are, by and large, varieties we’ve seen before: trial and error, machines without manuals, and locks whose combinations are left lying around. While puzzles have never been my favorite element of this series, those seen here have a particular tendency to feel phoned-in. Most have no clear in-universe function (such as the weighted podium in Laki’ahn) and none of them feel remotely original. The crystal organ and mangree puzzles in Revelation were frustrating, to be sure, but they were at least interesting, and both were tied directly to the game’s storyline. If I’m going to have to think to solve a puzzle, I want to see some evidence that the creators put thought into creating them.

As mentioned already, the Ages are small but visually impeccable, and while they often don’t offer many things to do, just looking at them and wandering through them is a worthwhile experience. The Bahro pedestals (the waypoints of the pictogram puzzles) actually complement the Ages relatively well from an explorational standpoint; in placement and function they are similar to the Journey Cloths in Uru, but provide a more interesting mechanic to work with, because the ability to Link between pedestals enables some novel spatial puzzles. While navigating from one pedestal to another can still be tedious at times, it’s not as incremental as searching for Journey Cloths over and over again. The pedestals, while not perfect, are in many ways what the Journey Cloths should have been, interactive objects which enable easier movement throughout the landscape. (Despite my gripes with the overuse of Linking, it is a convenient system, particularly in games without the Zip Mode function that had been present in the pre-rendered games.) Like Uru, End of Ages is primarily about taking in the scenery, and to that end it works well.

We’ll examine each of the Ages in brief, starting with Tahgira. It’s probably the smallest and most inconsequential of any Age we’ve ever seen, and while pretty, it’s the most forgettable part of this game. It’s a Prison Age, and a pretty brutal one at that: it’s nothing but a huge frozen rock surrounded by an unending ocean. The explorable area is largely a featureless wasteland, nothing but white ice and a small handful of funny-looking trees, around which the prisoners built an elaborate heating system. It’s not that Tahgira is ugly or uninteresting, it just doesn’t have that much to see or do. There’s no sign of any of the former inmates, no personal effects of any kind. Aside from the trees, Tahgira doesn’t have anything that you can’t see in the Rime Age from realMyst, and in fact Rime contains a number of elements which Tahgira doesn’t. And yet Rime is just a “bonus” while Tahgira is one of this game’s central locations. The concept of exploring a Prison Age is a fascinating one, particularly if we could get to know the stories of the prisoners, but Tahgira instead seems to be little more than a dry run intended to demonstrate basic gameplay mechanics.

Progressing down through the Great Shaft, we next come to Todelmer, an Age designed to be conducive to astronomy, and one of the most visually spectacular Ages of the series. Todelmer’s sky is dominated by every astronomical feature imaginable, everything from garish nebulae to colossal planets, and it’s hard to look in any direction without seeing something mind-bogglingly beautiful. The explorable area is located atop improbably tall rocky spires which rise from a very intriguing-looking surface, completely inaccessible but begging to be explored. What also helps Todelmer is the plausibility of its concept: any astronomer would want to study from such a place, given the ability to travel to one, so it’s a natural step for the D’ni to Write this. Among the highly mundane Ages we encounter so often in the Uru era (recall Nexus: the Age of Public Transportation), Todelmer stands out as one which was written for a specific function, but takes full advantage of the all-encompassing power of the Art.

Next we arrive at Noloben, the Age where Esher lived following the Fall. As mentioned earlier, the aesthetic of Noloben is unique and attractive, a rich combination of surreal beachscapes, windworn rock, and lush grass. Where Todelmer is beautiful in a stark and titanic way, Noloben’s beauty is more personal. The only real problem with it is in its story content, in that there hardly is any. This is a place where Esher lived for decades, if not centuries, and yet his “lab” has the appearance of a recently-rented apartment that he has barely started moving into. He has a cage, some grim-looking tools, and a few scraps of notes, and it’s just not enough to create a believable workspace, let alone a living area. (I suppose it’s possible his actual living quarters were on a different island, but still we should be allowed to see them, because therein is the strength of this series.) Noloben presented some opportunities for a dramatic exploration of character, in much the same vein as Gehn’s legacy on Riven – and Esher was effectively stranded in his Age for something like three times as long. The scenery is nice, but there should have been more stuff here.⁵

The final Age resumes the theme of the Evil D’ni, because Laki’ahn is an Age dedicated to blood sport. Specifically, it is dedicated to watching the Age’s indigenous inhabitants battle ferocious marine animals in order to harvest valuable gems from within their bodies. The Age is very conspicuously meant to draw on tropes about ancient Rome, very explicitly drawing a connection between D’ni and the modern-day associations with another oppressive empire. Esher does his part to ensure that any potential for subtlety is quashed by crowing about what terrific fun it was to watch the bloodbath.

Like many of the Evil D’ni exhibits in these games, the messaging is so heavy-handed that it’s hard for me to resist playing Devil’s Advocate (and I did in earlier editions of this book), but to do so is not productive, so I will abstain. Yes, Yeesha, the things that happened here were bad and worth condemning. But it’s hard to enjoy this protracted unearthing of sins that the D’ni Arc came to be. While this series never shied away from depicting dark themes, I don’t think anyone wanted to see the entire legacy of D’ni reduced to a parade of evildoers.

As for the aesthetics of the Laki’ahn, it’s attractive but somewhat bland. It’s a tropical-resort kind of place, and while it has a handful of unique elements (the huge smooth boulders, the weird bird-things) it doesn’t have anything we haven’t seen before. It is expansive, easily dwarfing all the other Ages in the game in terms of explorable area, but (once again) there’s not much story content, and overall it tends to look fairly uniform.

Once the Ages are complete, we are linked back to K’veer and granted access to the Golden Tablet, initiating the game’s final act. Throughout the game it is implied that the Tablet is a “One Ring” type of object, a thing of such power that its holder will be immediately corrupted. At the beginning of the game, Yeesha insisted she herself is unworthy of wielding it responsibly, and asked that you refrain from giving it to her once you held it. Still, she does want it badly, she admits, and Esher wants it too. Given that there’s no compelling reason to give it to Yeesha, and that Esher is clearly not a great guy, the path to the good ending is fairly obvious: you’re meant to drop the Tablet on the ground, thus surrendering it to the Bahro themselves and effectively freeing them from its control.

But Esher, ever conniving, comes up with his own plan to get his mitts on the Tablet: he plays on the player’s nostalgia by telling you to bring it to Myst Island. Naturally you want to go to Myst Island, especially since the descriptive panel reveals it to be destroyed by tempestuous weather. The first time I played the game, I could clearly see the route to the good ending, but I figured I’d just go ahead and link to Myst and surrender the Tablet after I had a look-round. Well, it doesn’t work that way. Going to Myst is an automatic bad ending, because if you drop the Tablet there, the Bahro don’t show up. The only choice left is to give it to Esher and watch him make a comical fool of himself, cackling maniacally, handing out gratuitous insults, and explaining how he’ll defeat Batman. I’m tempted to apologize for this setup and say that it’s actually an ingenious way of playing against the player’s desires, offering you something you want, but only if you’re willing to lose the game to get it. Could it be a metaphor for the Tablet, which the characters want but which comes at a cost of their humanity? But anything sounds good if you just analyze it to death, and I do think this is something of a problem. I knew not to give Esher the Tablet, but I just wanted to see good ol’ Myst Island again. The Bahro can and do travel everywhere else; there was no indication that they would not go there. It’s a minor point to be sure, but I’ve always been a little bit miffed by it.

As for the good ending, the Bahro snatch the Tablet quite readily once the player drops it, and Yeesha falls to her knees and thanks you for accomplishing the “impossible” task of relinquishing the Tablet. It’s an odd note, because despite the vaunted powers of the Tablet, to the player it does literally nothing. It can’t even be used to invoke the pictograms from earlier in the game. The decision you must make is not so much whether to keep it, but rather who it should be given to. Granted, it would be difficult to make the Tablet as tempting to the player as it is to the characters, but it’s disappointing that in practice it’s about as desirable as an empty soda can.

Now that the Bahro are their own masters, they teleport you to Releeshahn, where you get a reunion scene with Yeesha and a suddenly-not-dead Atrus. Yeesha talks in her usual arcane pablum and Atrus does the thing where he thanks you for your trouble. It’s an insubstantial sequence, made worse by the fact that it highlights the limitations of this game’s character-rendering technology. Atrus looks particularly disconcerting, and Yeesha stands awkwardly in the middle distance making a face like a petulant teenager. Partway through Atrus’s speech, the Bahro show up with Esher as their prisoner. He screeches about how he’s the Grower and overall succeeds in painting himself as a total lunatic. Esher had so much potential as a good character, and it’s sad that neither ending allows him to keep at least his dignity if not his sanity. In any case, the Bahro take him away to an unspecified fate and the game ends with an expansive view of Releeshahn. It’s not a great ending in its own right, but as the grand finale of the entire series, it’s particularly weak.

There’s one other element to this ending that merits special consideration. There’s an implication, one never voiced outright but nevertheless in evidence, that the freedom of the Bahro means that the Art will no longer work. (See, for example, Yeesha’s diaries, which suggest that the Art is dependent on the subjugation of the Bahro, not to mention the game’s very title.) Beyond the fact that this contradicts extensive amounts of established canon (Riven established that all the materials needed to practice the Art were derived from natural resources), it’s a pretty depressing way to end the series, since the Art was the thing that made it so exciting. (It also taints all the preceding games, as even Atrus becomes complicit in the enslavement of the Bahro.) The “happy” ending here is predicated on turning your back on the premise of the series and passing the torch to the inscrutable Bahro, which aren’t so much as mentioned in the vast majority of the series’ installments. I don’t hate the Bahro, but I’ve certainly not been given much reason to care about them.

This ending is only positive in the light of the Evil D’ni interpretation, in which the Art was nothing more than a tool of oppression. But as we’ve seen, the Art is far more than that. It’s a means of escape, a medium of art, a source of pleasure, a tool of science, a supplier of food, a freaking mass transit system. Anyone who would advocate extinguishing the Art, especially on pretenses as ill-founded as Yeesha’s, is not a hero. That person is a villain – and a very short-sighted one at that. If the Art is dependent on the subjugation of the Bahro (and there is little evidence of that beyond Yeesha’s say-so), then that is a problem which much be addressed. But it should be addressed in a way which is amenable to everyone: strike a bargain with the Bahro that enables their freedom and pays them fairly for whatever it is they contribute. Uru’s condemnation of the D’ni was hard to take, but End of Ages comes across as a condemnation of the Art itself, a twist which any Myst fan will find depressing.

We’ve already discussed problems with characterization and premise, but even beyond these issues the game’s story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The existence of the Slates and the Bahro are never explained in any way. Esher implies that the Bahro placed the pedestals, but why they can’t just release the Tablet themselves is never discussed. Nor do we learn why or how they’re bound by the system in the first place. Yeesha leaves a series of journals lying around Saavedro-style which provide a mention of how she discovered the Tablet and the Slates in the first place, but no real detail is given. Her journals also give us brief insight into a friendship, possibly even a romance, which she struck up with a D’ni survivor named Calam. However, in characteristic Yeesha fashion, the details of this are obfuscated and glossed over, even the seemingly critical point that Calam was murdered and that Yeesha killed his murderer. That seems like something we might want to know more about, but there’s nothing. It’s vagueness all the way down.

There’s an interesting distinction to be drawn between End of Ages and the original Myst. In Myst, you start off knowing nothing about the world or the story. Gradually you are able to put together the pieces until nearly all the story elements are revealed. There are a few things which remain unknown, such as the specifics of Sirrus and Achenar’s final crime, but you get all the basics. In End of Ages, you start out with a limited understanding of the world and the story, and the game never really builds on that. The questions which are unanswered at the beginning are by and large still unanswered at the end. “Myst” was the perfect title for the first game: it’s a mystery, and it takes place in a metaphorical fog which slowly evaporates to reveal the hidden truths. In End of Ages, the fog remains.

I feel bad treating this game as harshly as I have. It’s not terrible, really: it has flaws, but nothing that completely destroys the experience. Like Uru, it’s little more than a bunch of Ages to explore, but its story is stronger than that of Uru. The thing that makes this game so frustrating is that it’s the last one, and a final installment could have been, and should have been, a lot better. Considered as Uru II, it’s an improvement, but as the culmination of the series, it just tends to pale in comparison to its predecessors. It lacks the sharp, original storytelling and atmosphere of Myst. It’s not sweeping and realistic like Riven. It doesn’t have a strong central character like Exile, or vivid, dynamic Ages like Revelation. Even Uru generally outperforms it in terms of the expansiveness of environments. The game’s greatest problem, sadly, is not an innate one but one of comparison. Like a child who can’t live up to the standard set by talented siblings, End of Ages feels neglected. Cyan Worlds filed for bankruptcy at about the same time the game was released, and there’s definitely a sense that creating the game was a rush against time, trying to get something out the door before all the money was gone. As such, its cobbled-together quality is perhaps to be expected. Is End of Ages a bad game? No. It’s troubled, but not bad, when all is said and done. It’s just that in a perfect world, it would have been something much different.

Footnotes

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