Myst in Retrospect

Revelation

Myst IV: Revelation is a frustrating game: too flawed to be great, but with too many good bits to be written off completely. It wildly exceeds one’s expectations with exceptional visuals, clever storytelling mechanics, and originality. But when it’s bad, it’s terrible. Laughable writing, largely amateurish acting, and some truly baffling design decisions arguably outweigh its successes. It’s the most uneven game in the series by a significant margin.

Revelation, like Exile, was contracted out to a new studio while Cyan continued work on Uru.¹ In this case, Ubisoft hand-picked a group of creators specially for the purpose, dubbing it “Team Revelation.” And Exile was clearly the model that the team followed in building their game. Revelation shares a lot of its immediate predecessor’s DNA, from the broad strokes of its structure down to its distinctive Linking sound.² This worked both to Revelation’s benefit and to its detriment. The game largely improves upon Exile’s mistakes, but it fails to emulate Exile’s successes.

In terms of visuals and immersive effects the studio did admirably. Using the aptly-named “ALIVE” game engine, Revelation seamlessly merges pre-rendered images with attractive real-time effects for insects, water, and so on, which creates a convincing and dynamic world. Another subtle but ingenious feature enables the player to lightly tap on things to hear the sound they make, adding a layer of interactivity to otherwise inert objects. This all works together to create an engaging and believable game environment, one which feels more lifelike than that of any other game in the series.

That said, Revelation’s control system leaves a lot to be desired. Like Exile, it uses a 360-degree panoramic view with movement restricted to teleportation between fixed “nodes.” The ability to smoothly turn the view in any direction does wonders for immersion, but it can also lead to problems, as it can cause the player to become disoriented. It’s hard to get lost in a “slideshow” game like Riven because each shot is carefully composed to make it clear where the paths are going. When you, the player, can look in any direction, the game developer loses control of shot composition, and it’s easy to lose track of which direction is which. This was a problem in Exile as well (particularly in Edanna) but it’s exacerbated in Revelation, where the nodes are fairly far apart: when one clicks to go forward, the next node often bears very little resemblance to the preceding one. It’s often impossible to distinguish between where one has been and where one is going.

Other control problems are caused by the sluggish mouse movements, which make the game’s timed puzzles particularly difficult to complete. The ALIVE engine allows for some beautiful graphics, but it also introduces technical limitations that often fly in the face of the immersion which it is intended to cultivate.

The game’s storyline picks up a long-dangling narrative thread, the fate of Sirrus and Achenar. In the game’s opening video, Atrus casually explains that Sirrus and Achenar did not die when he burned the Trap Books. Within the fan community it was well-known that the way the Trap Books worked in Myst and Riven was a simplification of the in-universe “reality.” As Cyan’s “D’ni historian” Richard A. “RAWA” Watson explained:

“[Sirrus and Achenar] were in complete Ages (and probably pretty nice ones, I would guess, if the panels were to show an Age that people like the boys would be so anxious to go to.) They just had no way out of them.”

He further joked that in the future, Cyan might make “ultimateMYST: the ‘See Sirrus and Achenar’s Prison Ages’ Edition.” Prior to Revelation, realMyst had toyed with this idea by adding sound effects to the brothers’ Ages in the bad endings³, but Team Revelation clearly saw the full potential of the idea, and they ran with it. We, the players, wanted to see where Sirrus and Achenar had been living, and that’s exactly what they gave us.

But showing the Prison Ages in a game directly contradicts the events of the first game, especially for those players who have not followed these convoluted canonicity issues. If there are no Trap Books, there can be no Red and Blue Pages, and no way that the brothers could have communicated with the player character. Revelation even bears this out: the brothers do not recognize the player character, as if the events of Myst never happened. The game does acknowledge that the player has had some sort of prior experience with the brothers, but it effectively erases from existence any of the things that the player did.

This is a phenomenon I call “canon fatigue:” a situation in which there are so many contradictory “facts” that the continuity of the storyline begins to crumble. This problem is hardly unique to the Myst series, of course. Examples can be found in most long-running serial fictions. All that being said, though, canon fatigue issues are not among this game’s foremost problems. Revelation’s treatment of the Trap Books is consistent with itself, and only in the context of the rest of the series does it seem problematic. In short, this isn’t really Revelation’s problem, but rather is symptomatic of a series that’s beginning to show its age.

The game opens with a Crazy Ride: the player is on a speedy tram with Atrus’s daughter, Yeesha. In Exile Yeesha was only a baby; here she is depicted as being perhaps ten years old, which shows that a significant amount of time has elapsed since those events. Yeesha is depicted as a precocious child: observant, talkative, and well-aware of her parents’ foibles. She’s played by Juliette Gosselin, whose acting skills exceed those of most of the adult actors in this production. This intro is direct and effective: it introduces Yeesha, establishes a timeframe, and does so in an impressive environment.

At the end of the cutscene the player arrives at Tomanha, where Atrus explains the problem: Catherine thinks that Sirrus and Achenar should be set free. Atrus thinks otherwise and wants you to offer an objective opinion. In other words, the setup of the entire game is that Atrus wants you to settle a marital squabble for him. But before you can work on that, you need to help Atrus calibrate a doohickey, a puzzle so uniquely pointless that the game will actually skip it if you step away from it. Whether you solve the puzzle or not, Atrus’s equipment explodes, forcing him to run out for replacement parts. Thus you (as always) are left to stumble through the ensuing events without any help.

Atrus himself doesn’t appear very much in this game, but it’s worth noting that Rand Miller’s reprisal of the role is impressive. Atrus greets the player character with seemingly genuine familiarity, and he discusses his sons with a convincingly somber air. He’s the Atrus we’ve come to expect, friendly but with heavy issues on his mind, and Miller captures him perfectly. It’s easily the strongest performance in the game, which is pretty ironic considering that Miller is the only member of the cast who is not a professional actor.

Before the game really gets going, you have a chance to explore Tomanha a bit. It’s a pleasant and engaging environment, and lulls you into a false sense of security, a sort of “quiet before the storm.” Yeesha makes numerous appearances too, but each time the player encounters her she’s doing something different, which makes her seem slightly neurotic. This first Tomanha chapter continues until the player solves a puzzle involving a needlessly complicated fuse box (unfortunately not the only such puzzle), at which point you are knocked out by an explosion in a sudden cutscene.

When you come to, it’s nighttime. There’s no sign of Yeesha. This being Myst, the first order of business is to explore around to try to figure out what’s going on. Most of Tomanha appears unscathed, but eventually you discover Yeesha’s necklace, a magical object which was introduced earlier. Yeesha herself is not in the vicinity, but touching the necklace triggers a flashback cutscene in which she’s chased by an intruder.

The necklace introduces a new narrative device which allows the player to look back in time and witness past events. To add a new storytelling mechanic was a clever move, but unfortunately the necklace’s visions tend to be redundant. There are few puzzles which depend on it, and most of the “memories” it reveals are either pointless or are covered in greater depth elsewhere. While the necklace could have been an extremely versatile storytelling tool, it tends to abide by an understanding that it supplements rather than complements the other elements of the game. It is in fact so marginal that I suspect that it was conceived fairly late in the game’s design process. The necklace could have been truly groundbreaking, so it’s disappointing that it instead ends up little more than a transmission tool for bad acting.

After a few rudimentary puzzles, you make your way to the linking chamber where the two Prison Books are kept. At this juncture you are offered the choice to first explore either Haven (Achenar’s prison) or Spire (Sirrus’s prison). It doesn’t matter which Age one chooses, and in fact it’s possible to return to the linking chamber and visit the other at any time.

Haven is a lush jungle Age with a Treasure Island aesthetic. Environment design is one of Revelation’s great strengths, in part because it goes against the formula set in all the preceding games. All prior Ages (with a couple minor exceptions) were islands surrounded by vast seas, but none of Revelation’s Ages follow this convention. Only Haven feels island-like, but in many shots you can make out a huge land mass, out of reach but enticingly real. Haven’s explorable area has a number of distinct sectors: a damp and windswept beach (so beautifully realized that you can almost smell the rotting fish), a number of subtly different jungles, a swamp, and a meadow. Looking across the entire Age from the raised promontory near the beginning is a truly astonishing moment, a piece of living artwork that was unlike anything else I’d seen at the time I first played it.⁴

As you explore the Age you retrace the story of Achenar’s exile. Achenar began his stay on Haven by living in the massive shipwreck (a callback to the Stoneship Age of Myst), and his effects within the wreck speak to his motivations at the time: weapons, gruesome hunting trophies, and a journal filled with conspiratorial plots, vicious anger, and a blow-by-blow account of his conquest of the local wildlife.

As Achenar moved into the jungle, though, he began to develop a more intimate understanding of the Age’s ecosystem. Of particular importance are the “mangrees,” intelligent primates with which Achenar eventually formed a close bond. In Achenar’s “lakehouse,” the player learns that his time spent observing and interacting with the mangrees has brought about a change in his character: he has repented of his past evils and taken on a calling as the mangrees’ caretaker. Various necklace memories imply that he isn’t even particularly eager to leave Haven, should doing so become an option. It has become his home, and he’s not prepared to abandon it thoughtlessly.

The player witnesses Achenar’s story chronologically, first coming across his early years in the ship and ending the Age with his most recent experiences in the mangrees’ “village.” Using the geography of the Age to convey a linear story progression was a brilliant bit of narrative design, and makes Haven one of the most memorable experiences of the series.

Sirrus’s prison, Spire, is an Age like no other: the endless sea is replaced with an infinite starfield, and the eponymous spires are in fact asteroids floating through a vast cloudbank. It’s a hostile environment, one barely capable of supporting human life. Its puzzles primarily involve power redirection and the resonant frequencies of crystals: highly abstract fare that’s considerably less engaging than Haven’s whimsical ecology. (Though to their credit, they do correspond to Spire’s overall thematic elements.)

But while Spire is a rich and expansive Age, Sirrus’s character is more shallow than Achenar’s, so it is unable to exemplify the same sort of character development. Just as you did with Achenar, you follow Sirrus’s path through the Age, learning that the inhospitality of the Age, along with his fury at being tricked by Atrus, gradually caused Sirrus to develop a psychopathic vendetta. Sirrus spent the first years of his exile fruitlessly searching for a Linking Book in order to escape from Spire, as the player learns from his older journals. Eventually Sirrus realized that no such book existed, which only strengthened his desire for revenge.

Despite the relative simplicity of his character, Sirrus’s reaction to his reunion with Atrus is fairly nuanced, as described in his most-recent journal. In one interesting moment, he quietly suggests repentance and a wish to be allowed to return to Tomanha with past evils forgiven, but Atrus’s resistance rekindles his anger and his journals leave off with a subtle suggestion of his upcoming evil plan. The exact nature of his plan isn’t clear at this juncture, but we’ll get back to it, and its implications for Sirrus’s character, later on.

Neither of the Prison Ages have a clear goal for the player. In Myst, the objective in each Age was simple: find a red or blue Page, then find the Myst book so that you can return to the library. Exile likewise kept the objective straightforward: at the end of each Age you find a key that brings you a step closer to unlocking Narayan. In both cases, there’s a clear indication that the player has gained something and thereby “completed” the Age.

Revelation’s Prison Ages, on the other hand, have no objective. You explore them because that’s what one does in a Myst game. After making your way from one end of an Age to the other, the game indicates completion by treating the player to short and largely uninteresting Crazy Rides. At the end of each Age are clues which the player will need later on, but they’re not apparently meaningful at the moment they’re found, and the player doesn’t know from the outset that finding these clues is the only functional reason to play through the entire Age. The Crazy Rides aren’t even strictly necessary; the player could walk back to the linking chamber and ultimately accomplish the same thing. The game uses the rides to imply that the Age is complete, rather than to provide any sort of contextual meaning that would confer actual closure. The rides with which Exile’s Ages ended were directly related to all the puzzles that the player had solved, and were the only way to reach the places where Saavedro’s symbols were hidden. Here the rides are treated as if they themselves are the motivating factor in finishing an Age, as if Revelation’s creators were imitating the format of Exile without actually understanding it.

Up until the end of the Prison Ages, Revelation is fairly strong. There’s some poor dialogue and lots of bad acting, but nothing terrible enough to ruin the experience. The Ages are rich and engaging, the music impeccable, and the air of mystery perfected beautifully. The first time I played the game, I thought there was no way it could go wrong, and was prepared to declare it one of the strongest entries in the series. Then I linked to Serenia.

Serenia: even its name is stupid. It’s an Age where certain kinds of magic work, and hypothetically there’s nothing wrong with that. The Art is magic in any practical sense, of course. But there is an understanding that in-universe it is simply a technology like any other: something of incredible power which might someday be explained by science, even if it is not currently understood. The problem with Serenia is the way that its magic is depicted. Atrus, in his journal, attempts to find rational explanations for the Serenian weirdness, but where in the past his rationality was depicted as a positive trait, here it’s cast as naive. For example, one of the fanciful creatures you encounter in Serenia is a water spirit, but Yeesha’s journal records an incident in which Atrus wrote it off as “a fish jumping.” Atrus, in his own journal, documents his attempts to explain the Serenians’ ability to restore forgotten memories as a biological process, and is clearly flummoxed by evidence that flies contrary to his hypothesis. The game preempts any attempt to explain Serenian phenomena as anything other than literal magic. In many contexts this would not matter. Magic is a common fixture of video games, after all. But in this series, which has generally been very grounded except where the Art is concerned, the Serenian magic is off-putting, not just for its incongruity but for the way it is used to reframe Atrus’s intellectual curiosity as dogmatic blindness.

Furthermore, Serenian magic is wildly inconsistent. The only Serenians you meet are some sort of religious leaders, whose duties involve taking trips into “Dream,” a psychedelic mental dimension from which they learn things which are not apparent in the material world. From Dream they learn that the player character will be visiting, approximately when you will arrive, and what you look like. They mention Dream and its supposed usefulness at every opportunity, but it’s apparently highly unreliable, failing to inform the Serenians of far more pressing concerns. Of what use is a system which spends a huge amount of time presaging a single harmless newcomer but fails to provide any clues pertaining to the evils currently being perpetrated by Sirrus and Achenar? If Serenian mysticism is unable to alert even its top priestesses to the existence of a dangerous plot going on within easy walking distance, then their entire culture is built around a system that is completely worthless.⁵ It’s impossible to take Serenia seriously for this reason: its mystical elements are out-of-place in the series, and while you’re constantly informed that they’re powerful and exciting, in practice they appear to be only marginally more useful than psychoactive drugs.

Even aside from Dream, the Serenian culture is at best ridiculous, and at worst downright insulting. Serenian society is depicted as some sort of matriarchy in which women are revered, but somehow this reversal ends up reinforcing sexist stereotypes anyway. What the game’s creators have done here is to reverse expected gender roles, but not only does this maintain a sexist power structure, it gives rise to some unfortunate and regressive subtexts by accident. As Yeesha explains it in her diary, “Only women can be Protectors [priests]. Men stay in the village + do other hard stuff, like fixing roofs.” So Serenian society adheres to very strict gender roles and expectations, in which the best career that women can aspire to is one in which no physical prowess is required, and the most prestigious positions are closed to men. Yet the game seems uninterested in exploring this, and its opinion of Serenian society is at worst neutral, at times almost celebratory.

Gender issues aside, the Serenians also demonstrate a marked inability to protect their own interests. Achenar steals a small stone sculpture which you later learn is actually some sort of magic thing that their culture is dependent upon. So, is it irreplaceable? No, they have teams out looking for a new one. Despite the fact that there are more than one of these things, no one ever thought to keep a spare on hand. And what of Serenian law enforcement? Sirrus and Achenar aren’t hard to find; is there no one who can confront them, slap them in chains, and take the magic thing back? For that matter, shouldn’t the magic thing have been under guard in the first place? Whenever the Serenians walk around wringing their hands and bemoaning their fates, one can’t help but think that the whole situation could have been prevented with a modicum of forethought.

All this being said, Serenia is not universally hated, and is in fact quite popular with some people. Serenia was not an inherently bad idea, it’s just that the Age seems to have been designed to be as unlike previous Myst installments as possible, which is virtually guaranteed to be polarizing. It often feels like you’ve been dumped into another game entirely, so your enjoyment of it depends on whether this new game is something you find appealing.

But regardless of your opinion of Serenia itself, the game’s climax hinges on the stupidest thing yet, namely The Plan… Sirrus’s plan! His diabolical scheme, you eventually learn, is this: using Serenian memory magic, Sirrus will swap bodies with Yeesha, use this “disguise” to learn the Art from Atrus, then kill everyone and conquer the universe. In the previous chapter I wrote about how Saavedro’s evil plan is nonsensical, but still makes sense from a story perspective because Saavedro is irrational. Sirrus, however, is generally depicted as insane only insofar as he disregards human life, and is still very much a rational person otherwise. (Essentially, the popular understanding of psychopathy.) Yet Sirrus’s plan is far more ridiculous than Saavedro’s. There are many ways he could accomplish the same ends that are less complicated, and by extension less likely to fail. This plan, even disregarding the tiredness of body-snatching tropes, has very little chance of succeeding, and as such isn’t very credible as a scheme dreamt up by a supposed criminal mastermind. It’s decidedly one of the low points of the entire series.

From a gameplay perspective, the final act is somewhat weak as well. Once you gain access to the room where The Plan is being carried out, you find Yeesha tied to the memory-transference chair. She says that Achenar is going to kill everyone and that the player needs to set her free immediately. Right on cue, Achenar shows up and says that Sirrus is already possessing Yeesha’s body, and orders you not to release her. Yes, that’s right: it’s time for our usual Final Big Choice: Who to trust, Achenar or Yeesha? Well, here’s what we know:

1. Sirrus’s plan is to take over Yeesha’s body.
2. Sirrus’s plan has been going fairly well so far (incredibly enough).
3. You have already heard Sirrus claim that Achenar is planning to kill everyone.
4. Achenar has up to this point been both trustworthy and helpful.
5. You have already seen Sirrus’s apparently-comatose body at this point.

In short, the game does everything short of putting up a big sign saying TRUST ACHENAR at this juncture, making the Final Big Choice so phoned-in that it ends up calling attention to itself. There’s not really much sense of accomplishment in being made to do something so transparently obvious. The worst part is that this is the last moment of the game where anything remotely Myst-like takes place. From here onward it’s just two more unbearably tedious Dream puzzles before you finally get to the ending cutscene.

The game ends like this: Sirrus’s memories⁶ are somehow preventing Yeesha’s memories from returning to her body, and the Memory Chamber (which powers the memory-transference chair) is dying, so there’s not a moment to lose. Achenar buys some time by exposing himself to the Memory Chamber’s lethal innards while the player solves some abstract Dream puzzles. The puzzles kill Sirrus’s soul (although his body presumably continues to live… a fact which will never, ever be mentioned) and release Yeesha’s memories back into her body. When you finally emerge from the trippy dreamworld sequence, you’re just in time to see Achenar die in Yeesha’s lap. It’s pretty depressing that the already-redeemed Achenar has to redeem himself again, this time by self-sacrifice, just because Sirrus manipulated him. This is made even worse by the fact that the brothers actually have breathing kits designed to protect against the Chamber’s poison gases, but Achenar just didn’t use one for some unstated reason.⁷ The whole scenario is reminiscent of Exile’s good-ending/better-ending system, but alas: no matter what, Achenar dies, Sirrus survives as a vegetable, and Yeesha is traumatized for life. Is it any wonder this is the only game in the series that got a T rating?

The game closes out with yet another gentle Atrus monologue, and the more of these we see, the less sense they make: at this point three members of his immediate family have tried to kill him, as has one former friend. His sons have been instrumental in mass murder and are now both dead after traumatizing his only daughter. Yet despite all this, Atrus just stands around musing as if nothing is wrong. How much chaos needs to erupt in this man’s life in order to get a rise out of him? That Atrus seems to be able to take any amount of trauma and be unfazed doesn’t make him a stronger character. It makes him a robot.

Perhaps the greatest flaw of Revelation, the one that most contributed to its downfall, is its ambitions. At its heart, the game’s story is small and intimate, a tale of a family locked in a cycle of mutual distrust and cruelty. But it’s presented like a summer blockbuster, complete with explosions, overacting, and an incredibly melodramatic conclusion. The game is at its best when tracing the subtleties of its characters and how they relate to each other, exploring its central themes of forgiveness and redemption. But those moments are overshadowed by its cinematic aspirations, its need to be big. There’s a great game in Revelation, but there’s a bad game wrapped around it.

Footnotes

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