Myst in Retrospect

Exile

After Riven was released, Cyan went quiet for a few years in order to research and produce what would eventually become Uru. But there was clearly demand for another Myst title, and Cyan (with Mattel Interactive¹, which at around this time had acquired the publishing rights to the series) decided to outsource its production. The game was contracted out to Presto Studios, which was a solid choice: the company had already made a name for itself with an acclaimed Myst-like series called The Journeyman Project, a demo of which had been included with the original release of Riven. If Cyan was not to make the next game, Presto’s team was probably the most qualified to do so in their stead.

The game they created was Myst III: Exile. It’s a good game, though not a great game. It waffles between the profound and the silly, the realistic and the absurd. It can be outstanding one moment and laughably stupid the next. Despite its weaknesses, however, it is ultimately a worthy addition to the series.

Exile opens with a cutscene in which Atrus conveys a bit of backstory: he has decided that D’ni should not be rebuilt (alluding to the events of The Book of D’ni), and has instead written a new Age, Releeshahn, for the survivors of the Fall. His sons are gone, but he has a new daughter, Yeesha. He says that he’s reached a turning point at which he can put his past behind him, at which point the music swells and the title card appears.

The player is then dumped unceremoniously (and with no explanation whatsoever) into Tomanha, Atrus and Catherine’s new home. Catherine gets a brief cameo with baby Yeesha, and Atrus manages to get in a few lines before being interrupted by the dramatic entrance of Saavedro, the game’s antagonist. Saavedro immediately sets fire to Atrus’s study and steals the linking book to Releeshahn. Saavedro then links away again and the player is compelled to follow him quickly, the music and encroaching flames creating an illusion of urgency. It’s a well-paced introduction: a short video to establish character and backstory (particularly important for those who didn’t first read The Book of D’ni), followed by a small interactive section (which prevents the game from stagnating into a movie), culminating in a brief but effective cutscene which segues into the game’s primary storyline. I want to stress the brevity of these clips: this is not a game which forces you to sit still and watch a long drama play out before being allowed to act. Video is used sparingly and efficiently, never lingering long enough to make the player impatient.

Once Saavedro is introduced, he dominates the spotlight for the rest of the game, and with good reason. Unlike other villains in this series, Saavedro is written as a highly sympathetic character, one who performs evil acts not because he is a bad person but because he has been broken by tragedy. Saavedro was born in Narayan, a precarious Age whose inhabitants have to practice ritualistic environmental conservation in order to survive. When Atrus first visited the Age, Saavedro befriended him, teaching him the Narayani ways and presumably accompanying him on various adventures. Saavedro trusted Atrus, and thus was open to allowing Sirrus and Achenar free access to Narayan.

Sirrus and Achenar, being antagonists of a more traditional mold, bred discontent among the Narayani by implying that Atrus could improve Narayan’s stability by using the Art, but that he chose not to. In the conflict that followed, the Narayani traditions were neglected and Narayan began to physically collapse, driving Saavedro to confront the brothers personally. They laughed off his complaints and stranded him on J’nanin, a stark and otherwise uninhabited Age, to serve out his titular exile.

Twenty years passed before Atrus unknowingly provided Saavedro with a means of escape when he revisited J’nanin, leaving behind a Tomanha linking book. Saavedro followed him, and from Atrus’s journals learned of the “resurrection” of D’ni. At this point, Saavedro’s sanity, long teetering on the edge, finally toppled. Atrus, Saavedro believes, allowed Narayan to die. Atrus, he believes, has the ability to bring Narayan back to life. Atrus, he decides, must pay.

Insanity in fiction can be a tricky proposition; all too often it’s used as an excuse for shoddy character motivations rather than as a believable character trait. Saavedro’s insanity, though, is entirely consistent with his experiences: he behaves the way he does because he is a ruined man, no longer capable of rational thought. His “evil plan” is a convoluted mess of nonsense, a bizarre maze of puzzles and messages meant to make Atrus feel guilty and convince him to resurrect Narayan with his supposed godlike powers. Saavedro’s plan is absurd, yes, but it makes sense to him. Regardless of anything else in the game, Saavedro works. Veteran character actor Brad Dourif² portrays him with an appropriate blend of menace and humanity, and as a result his frequent appearances are engaging and realistic. From his conception to his depiction, Saavedro is a pitch-perfect character, arguably the strongest in the entire series.

Saavedro’s fixation on Atrus is a complex one, but of particular note is how Atrus’s own character flaws play into it. As we have seen time and again, Atrus has a tendency to visit Ages and engage their inhabitants with little regard for any negative consequences that may arise. Despite this, Atrus is usually depicted in a good light, and any detrimental effects of his explorations are glossed over. Saavedro, however, has had his life ruined by such an event, and he’s deeply aware of it.

While only Sirrus and Achenar are directly culpable in what happened to Narayan, Saavedro’s revenge targets Atrus, the man whom he had once called a friend. What bothers Saavedro more than anything is the fact that Atrus, after his initial visits, left Narayan and never returned. While his sons were trashing the place, he was somewhere far away, completely oblivious. Saavedro never really knew Sirrus and Achenar, but Atrus was someone he had trusted. In Saavedro’s mind, the brothers’ crimes are of less importance than Atrus’s negligence, broken promises, and neglect. Saavedro’s vendetta forces us to look at Atrus from a less forgiving point of view. His actions have serious repercussions, and in some ways he is responsible for the destruction of Narayan. Saavedro may be the antagonist, but he calls attention to a crucial weakness in Atrus’s character, one which other parts of the series rarely explore in this much depth.

If the game’s story is its greatest strength, its greatest weakness may be the absurdity of its visuals. Chuck Carter, an artist on the original Myst, said this of his design sense:

“I started off [looking] for the most interesting scene that I could come up with. But the problem I ran into was that … [y]ou don’t look at everything as a composition. When you’re walking through a room, you’re just walking through a room; you’re not stopping and staring at everything.”

To put it simply: not everything in the scene must be, or should be, visually interesting. Riven would go on to use this principle as well, and in fact took it even farther by making the distribution of opulence have symbolic meaning. Gehn’s personal spaces are decorated in a manner consistent with his personal style that combines luxury with functionalism. His temples, which are meant to impress his subjects, are fantastical and visually impressive. His industrial machinery, on the other hand, is completely utilitarian. The log-cart dock on Crater Island, for example, is made of simple unadorned iron: the activation lever doesn’t even have a handle. Gehn doesn’t use the log-cart personally, so what does he care what it looks like? In this way, even the most superficial visual details become significant to the story.

Exile, unfortunately, doesn’t learn this lesson, and instead just makes everything as pretty as possible. What is the player meant to infer from seeing gold-plated cogs in an elevator’s drive mechanism? Why would a bridge be made out of intricate sculpted brass yet lack handrails? Why would a tunnel be lit by little paper boats? The answer: someone thought it would look cool. These sorts of details, no matter how eye-catching they may look, have no narrative significance whatsoever. Priority to eye candy over contextual logic doesn’t do the game any favors, but rather adds a layer of unrealism that’s often hard to ignore.

The problem of excessive artsiness is not unique to the ornamentation of objects, however. Lead designer Phil Saunders directed his artists to make every scene a potential “back-of-the-box picture,” and they did. There’s hardly a moment in Exile that isn’t extravagantly beautiful. The problem with this is that it leaves no room to breathe, no contrast between the visually stunning and the mundane. One doesn’t find contrast here: no decadent bedrooms at the end of dark, musty tunnels; no vibrant forests beside clear-cut wastelands. Instead, everything is vivid sunsets and colorful jungles. A bird can’t just be a bird, it has to be a goofy Dr. Seuss bird with glowing eyes. Doors can’t just be doors, they need to be gigantic motorized monstrosities capable of severing limbs. In theory, a start-to-finish visual extravaganza is a good idea. In practice, when everything looks cool, everything starts to look the same after a while, and things that might have been interesting on their own begin to seem downright silly.

The game’s puzzles are a bit hard to take seriously, too. Exile takes place in a series of “lesson Ages” which Atrus created for use in his sons’ educations. This is a clever idea, but unfortunately Presto used it to excuse what they referred to as “deliberate puzzles.” While Myst and Riven both at least made an effort to depict puzzles as things with some in-universe function, Exile’s puzzles exist for no other reason than to be solved. Creating contextualized puzzles is difficult, admittedly, but the decision to make all the game’s puzzles be “deliberate” effectively trades one design problem for another, because deliberate puzzles are by definition separate from the game’s universe. Compare, for example, the fire-marble dome puzzle in Riven to the electromagnet puzzle in Exile. The process of activating the fire-marble domes requires you to travel extensively, gather diverse information, and reach an understanding of how Gehn thinks. To activate the electromagnet requires you to align a series of bars, because that’s really all there is to it. Even within the Lesson Age conceit this doesn’t really make sense: what “lesson” were Sirrus and Achenar meant to learn from this device? Deliberate puzzles don’t do the game any favors, and its goofy environments need all the help they can get. In a series which has often been criticized for obstructing gameplay with arbitrary lateral-thinking roadblocks, Exile stands as the most egregious example.

The “lessons” of the Lesson Ages are a series of simple maxims which Atrus learned from his grandmother, Ti’ana. The player first encounters these in Atrus’s journal, in which he describes how the phrases influenced his work on Releeshahn. The point of the Lesson Ages was for Sirrus and Achenar to learn specific concepts as they explored them: From Voltaic, “energy powers future motion.” From Edanna, “nature encourages mutual dependence.” From Amateria, “dynamic forces spur change.” Finally, from Narayan, “balanced systems stimulate civilizations.” In execution, however, the Ages do a terrible job of conveying these ideas. The phrases, as written, never appear anywhere besides Atrus’s journals, and in many cases the Ages flat-out contradict them. Edanna, for example, is hardly an ecosystem of mutual dependence; in fact, the Age’s entire ecosystem is based on a giant tree which is essentially parasitized by other organisms. The fact that Saavedro never managed to learn the phrases over the course of his 20-year exile demonstrates how ineffective the Ages are at their stated goal.

And do these phrases even mean anything? “Energy powers future motion” is true, but not any more insightful than “harnessed motion transmits energy” or any number of other things. “Nature encourages mutual dependence” on a worldwide scale perhaps, although on a more individual level most organisms are self-serving, so this one is hardly a universal truth. “Dynamic forces spur change” is so vague that it means almost nothing, and it’s unclear how Amateria represents this idea regardless. And if “balanced systems stimulate civilizations,” what does that mean for Narayan, an Age that was conceived to be as unbalanced as possible? These “truths” are vague at best, and misleading at worst. One would think that Atrus, a man of science, could have come up with something better than these by now.³

Exile has six Ages in all. The first of them is Tomanha⁴, a lush greenhouse in the middle of a vast red desert. It’s a typical “paradisiacal first level” which gives you a chance to get situated before you are plunged into the story proper. Tomanha will be explored in greater depth in Revelation; here its expansiveness is only hinted at. Small as it is, there’s not a whole lot to be said about it, although it does have a handful of nice details, such as the no-longer-functional Riven book. It’s not a bad place to begin, and it’s certainly preferable to a lengthy non-interactive cutscene.

J’nanin is the central hub of the player’s explorations, and was Saavedro’s home for the last twenty years. Despite the fact that the young Sirrus and Achenar were meant to explore this place without supervision, it’s possibly the most dangerous Age in the entire series. This is a world of hundred-foot drops crisscrossed by narrow rocky paths, slippery metal bridges, and steep staircases, handrails not necessarily included. The effect is unsettling to say the least, and there’s not any good reason for it to be this way. Beyond its vertiginous elements, J’nanin is a fairly unremarkable place, and its resemblance to Riven makes it seem vaguely derivative. Given that Saavedro lived in J’nanin for two decades, one might expect to see more of his influence here, but beyond a small personal area in the basement of one of the buildings, he seems to have left the place largely untouched, which is disappointing from a story perspective. Ultimately J’nanin is without any real substance of its own: it’s larger than Myst Island, but that’s about all it has going for it.

Each of the Lesson Ages follows the same basic structure: you solve various puzzles to progress through the Age, occasionally finding scraps of story that Saavedro left behind to plead his case to Atrus. These take several forms: videos played by distinctive TV-like devices, elaborate murals, and pages torn from his diary. The diary pages are not found in consecutive order, so Saavedro’s own retelling of his life comes together in bits and pieces as you go along.

At the end of each Age, the player is treated to what I call a “Crazy Ride”, a full-screen video in which the player zips across the Age in some sort of fanciful vehicle. In the case of Exile, the rides take you on a course that revisits all the most prominent areas of an Age before dropping you off at the Age’s terminus, where you will gain access to a clue that brings you incrementally closer to unlocking the final Age, Narayan. Some variation of the Crazy Ride has been part of the series since the beginning, with Myst’s Mazerunner being arguably the first example, followed by the mag-lev that conveys you between islands in Riven. But it was Exile’s embrace of the Crazy Ride as a “reward” that cemented it as a prominent trope of the games.

Voltaic is the game’s energy-themed Age, its puzzles based around various principles of electricity and heat. Voltaic utilizes both geothermal and hydroelectric processes, both of which are legitimate real-world technologies, but the ways in which they’re depicted here are nonsensical. The hydroelectric turbine is turned by the ocean itself, which for some reason feels compelled to flow upstream if not blocked by a floodgate.⁵ Heat energy is produced by a room full of very cooperative lava. For an Age meant to teach about energy, Voltaic displays a poor understanding of how energy actually works. But to give the Age some credit, its visual realization is very nice. The rock formations are more detailed than the rendering technology was able to support in the past, and it does a lot with its limited palette of red stone and rusty metal. It’s somewhat smaller than its counterparts, but it has a sort of visceral earthiness that isn’t seen anywhere else.

The most whimsical of the Ages is Edanna, where all the plants and animals have conspired to form a giant puzzle. While the gameplay of Edanna feels fairly natural, it’s hard not to be distracted by many of the obvious contrivances on display. If you can interact with a plant, it’s part of a puzzle, which only serves to call attention to the fact that much of the “jungle” is in fact a carefully-arranged logic problem, not an organic growth. Another problem is that the actual reason to solve a given puzzle is often unclear. You can infer that you need to rescue a bird that’s trapped in a pitcher plant, but you don’t know why it’s important. You can infer that you’re supposed to get bugs to pollinate a specific flower, but you don’t know why it’s important. These types of puzzles don’t make sense until after they’re solved, which calls attention to how arbitrary they are. All that being said, Edanna is probably the most memorable Age in the game. Its overall aesthetic is very unique, and even its sillier lifeforms have a certain charm to them. Much as it can be hard to take Edanna seriously, it is fun to explore, and that is (after all) what these games are about.

Amateria takes Exile’s Age-as-giant-puzzle philosophy to its logical conclusion. Its landscape is covered by an elaborate series of rails, along which you will find various puzzles. All of these puzzles involve manipulating a series of controls until a large glass ball can roll along the track without shattering. Once all the puzzles are completed, the Age’s Crazy Ride sees you sealed inside a glass ball yourself and sent on a whirlwind tour of the entire track, which is a nice touch.

The unfortunate thing about Amateria is that its obstacles are by far the most obvious “deliberate puzzles” in the game. You find a puzzle, experiment with it until it’s solved, repeat. It’s hard to take the Age seriously because there seems to be so little point to it; it has no story of its own, has no apparent relevance to its supposed lesson, and the entire thing looks like a ninja-themed pinball game. In truth, Voltaic is just as contrived (as none of its machinery serves any function other than its own existence), but Amateria doesn’t even try to disguise its puzzles, which makes it seem highly artificial. The Crazy Ride is fun at least, and popular with many people, but I think everyone would have appreciated a more engaging environment for it.

The final Age we reach is Saavedro’s homeland, Narayan. Given how much the player knows about this place before visiting it, its eventual reveal is something of a letdown. The depiction of the vaunted Narayani weaving is uninspired at best, and in general it feels less detailed and creative than the other Ages. There’s very little to see; the player only has access to two small chambers and an empty rooftop. Its most visually interesting features are the unexplorable islands in the distance, which aren’t even visible most of the time. By comparison, Riven’s Rebel Age feels much more well-realized than Narayan, despite the fact that it’s actually smaller. The puzzles are lackluster as well: the player must transcribe Atrus’s “lessons” into Narayani script, a process involving little more than tedious clicking.

Aside from the shortcomings of its setting, the game’s conclusion is decent. Shortly after arriving in Narayan the player meets Saavedro face-to-face, and shortly later succeeds in lowering the opaque force field that surrounds the explorable area. Saavedro then realizes for the first time that Narayan isn’t dead, and initiates the Final Big Choice: he says he’ll return the Releeshahn book if you will help him return to his people. As in the original Myst, the game is testing whether you will trust a distinctly untrustworthy character, and choosing to trust him will result in an instant bad ending. In this case, however, the alternative option isn’t spelled out. Where Sirrus and Achenar call attention to the alternative by telling you not to touch the green book, the only options Saavedro gives you are to help him or not to. It’s up to the player to infer that there’s a third option: re-enabling the force field in order to trap Saavedro and gain the upper hand. Exile’s interpretation of the Final Big Choice is a solid one, trusting the player to make the right decision without any hand-holding.

Exile follows its Final Big Choice with a smaller, quieter choice. Saavedro, effectively caged by the illustrious player, returns Releeshahn and begs to be set free. The player can at this juncture do two things: link back to Tomanha and leave Saavedro trapped, or set him free first. Technically either of these are “winning” endings, but choosing the former would be cruel and callous. Saavedro being as sympathetic as he is, you instinctively want him to get back to Narayan, so this second choice, essentially between forgiveness and punishment, is a clever touch. Set free, Saavedro turns and gives you a somber wave, acknowledging your kindness, then boards a tram and rides off to be reunited with his people. As he disappears into the distance, you hear the musical theme representing his stolen innocence. It’s a beautiful ending, providing a ray of hope for a character who you’ve come to care about and a satisfying conclusion to the story you’ve played through.

But the game isn’t quite over. Once Saavedro is set free, you link back to Tomanha with the Releeshahn book, which leads into the final cutscene, another Atrus monologue. He’s been thinking over the fact that his negligence indirectly caused an old friend of his to go insane and plot to kill his family. From this, he concludes that you can’t turn your back on the past, but you should take from it only the good. This mirrors his comment at the beginning about wanting to put his past behind him, but that Atrus seems largely unbothered by this new horror story is bizarre, and his takeaway is a complete non-sequitur. It’s a nice enough speech on its own, but it doesn’t make much sense in context. After the brilliant denouement of Saavedro’s storyline, it’s disappointing that the game’s actual ending is so much weaker.

Exile is effectively the sequel to Riven, which by any reckoning would be a tough act to follow. Michel Kripalani, its executive producer, compared it to “being in the film industry and having George Lucas say ‘I want you to make the next Star Wars for me.’” In the context of the then-recent Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, this metaphor takes on a peculiar kind of irony. Like Exile, The Phantom Menace was a sequel produced by (mostly) different people using different methods, was hyped to absurdity⁶, and ultimately fell short of the expectations of its audience. It’s not easy to make a follow-up to something as successful as Riven or Star Wars. Yet Exile came remarkably close to succeeding. Its flaws, while serious, do not ruin the experience, and its story is excellent. Its biggest problem is its failure to break the mold: the gameplay is formulaic, the puzzles arbitrary, the structure nonsensical. Where Myst and Riven had both been groundbreaking in their own ways, Exile played it safe, doing little that had not already been proven by its predecessors. It has plenty to recommend it, but it will always be first and foremost a sequel, not a noteworthy game in its own right.

Footnotes

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