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Corran450's Review Series Vol. 83: realMyst
A quick note before we begin: I usually post my game reviews on GameFAQs.com, but a recent (ultimately cordial and frankly trivial) difference of opinion with the moderator of that site has led me to reconsider my chosen venues. I will continue to post reviews on Backloggd under the username Corran450, but I think I will also post them here going forward. You may notice this is Vol. 83 of my reviews. I may go back and post my previous ones here, but I don't know when. If you're interested, I recommend checking out Backloggd for my earlier reviews. You can find them here: https://backloggd.com/u/Corran450/reviews/
Corran450's Review Series Vol. 83: realMyst
As someone with a known and admitted "skill issue", I actually really enjoy a good old point-and-click adventure. I've played many in my day, from classic hand drawn 2D adventures like Broken Sword to more modern 3D affairs like State of Mind. Their low-pressure nature combined with (generally) well-developed and environmental storytelling make for a potent concoction for me.
The best part is the absolute smorgasbord of classic adventures to experience. As these games were generally less demanding of higher computing power, there are just so many classic point-and-click adventures available to play, and usually available from Steam for a buck or two.
I have recently joined an online "Game of the Month" club, and for January 2026, the game selected was Myst, a classic point-and-click adventure from 1993. Developed by Cyan and published by Broderbund, Myst was one of the first adventure games to attempt a 3D style, and as such, became one of the most successful and influential PC titles of the early 90s, leading to an entire franchise of narratively related adventures in the Myst universe.
I was only 8 years old in 1993, so while my father did buy Myst for the family computer, it went way over my head. As I got older, it was one of those games that always hovered in the periphery of my gaming universe, flitting about like an irritating fly, never letting me forget it was there in my backlog, waiting. Watching. So, fine. I guess I'll finally play Myst, and give my thoughts on it 33 years later. But I'm gonna complain about it the whole time. (I am not actually gonna do that)
Some of you may have noticed this review is titled "realMyst". Well, I'll explain why in the next section. Let's get started.
Gameplay
As stated in the intro, Myst is a faux-3D point-and-click adventure title. You will survey various environments for clues, gather tools and resources, and solve puzzles to progress the story. It's a simple interface on PC, basically using the mouse to "point" at objects and "click" them to activate/manipulate them. There are really no fail states, and no timer. Take all the time you need to solve the puzzles and explore the maps. And you will need time.
Computing power in 1993 was incredibly limited by today's standards. What this means for Myst is that each screen is a pre-rendered still frame, with occasional full motion video elements. To progress down a path, for example, you click the screen in the direction you want to travel, and incrementally inch your way through successive frames to get where you want to go. As a result, the pacing of the game is cosmically slow. (Particularly in later ports, such as the Playstation port, which requires loading each individual frame!)
In 1993, this might have been manageable, but my brain absolutely cannot handle this geological pace. Call it a personal failing, if you wish, I'll own that.
Anyway, some wonderful individual at Cyan recognized the shortcomings of this approach, and in 2000 they developed realMyst as a result: a ground-up remake with full 3D environments that players could navigate freely. This is much more my speed, although it still has a rather slow pace. There's no "sprint" option, for example, so you are limited to the... shall we say, relaxed walking speed of the player avatar. Still, it's better than clicking twelve times in a single direction just to get to the next room.
This approach does have its own shortcomings, though. Unlike the original style, it can sometimes be difficult to parse puzzle elements from the scenery, or even recognize whether something is a puzzle at all. I guess this is probably an issue with many 3D point-and-clicks, a product of the genre. Be ready for it, I suppose.
Anyway, actually solving the puzzles is thinky and fun, but I strongly recommend you have a pad of paper and a pen handy to jot down notes. Being from 1993, Myst doesn't have anything like a quest log to save important information like codes or pictograms, so it behooves you to have a backup plan to prevent backtracking, thus saving you even more time spent traveling between locations.
Story
Your nameless protagonist arrives on the island of Myst with no preamble, no fanfare. Wandering about, you uncover a mystery involving advanced technology and strange magicks. Ultimately, you are tasked with determining who destroyed the arcane library on Myst, and how to free its imprisoned denizens.
The actual plot is rather understated, as point-and-clicks go, but that doesn't make it bad. On the contrary, it allows the absolutely stellar world-building to take center stage. The setting is the real hero here, and it delivers a dynamite setup to what would become a sprawling narrative spanning at least five games. The enigmatic island with its strange 'infernal machines'... it's all very Steampunk, before that became mainstream. I'm not gonna get all hipstery about it, but this really was a pretty unique setting at the time, and it still has power today.
That's to say nothing about the various "ages" you will explore in your travels. The central fulcrum of the story is the Library of Myst, which contains the books the creators (and you!) use to travel the divergent "ages", different worlds to be explored (and to some, exploited). I haven't played any other games in the series yet, but the use of the term "age" to describe these worlds suggests they are all, in fact, the island of Myst at different points along a massive timeline. (Nobody correct me if I'm wrong, haha. Someday, I'll play Riven and maybe find out for myself.)
Anyway, the central mystery involves a family squabble that leads to dark designs, and it's fine. The real magic of Myst is in its world, and even today, it is excellent. No notes.
Graphics
As I mentioned before, the original Myst used pre-rendered frames to represent its world, and they are exquisite. Fantastically detailed and expressive. The steampunk style is unique and exciting, and the various ages all have their own atmosphere and feel, whether it's the oppressive brutalist nature of the Mechanical Age, or the serene beauty of the Channelwood Age.
realMyst renders all of these in full 3D, and I don't think it loses anything in the translation, as far as beauty is concerned. Maybe the 3D renderings are a little simple, owing to the antiquity of the original designs, but they function absolutely flawlessly. I played on a Steam Deck, not the most powerful machine by any means, but it ran smoothly and looked amazing on the OLED display. In particular, I was impressed with the water effects in the Channelwood Age. Most of the other ages are dark and stormy, so the water surrounding them had little character to recommend it. In Channelwood, though, the sky is bright and clear, giving the water an opportunity to shine, so to speak.
I guess the only remotely negative aspect of the presentation is that Myst is a profoundly lonely game. Only once in its runtime do you come face to face with another living soul, and it is at the very end. You will have interactions with various characters via FMV, but it's just not the same. To be fair, I hesitate to call this a true negative, as Myst would absolutely not be the same game without that sense of solitude.
The FMVs are hella fun, btw... vintage 90s cheese delivered with absolute commitment by the performers. They are surprisingly authentic, and I love them.
Sound
I must commend Cyan for their dynamite sound design. It holds up surprisingly well, even 33 years later. The ambient sounds of a given environment are very atmospheric and immersive. The gentle sound of waves, the hustling of machinery, the otherworldly hums of magick, all serve to transport you to another place. The synergy between the visuals and the sound, combined with the world-building, make Myst feel absolutely real.
Well, mostly... In the grandest tradition of early 90s PC gaming, some of the samples are pretty short and repeat endlessly. It can lend a bit of distracting artificiality to a given scene, but I have to grant Myst a little grace. Sound and video took up a huge amount of allotted space back in the day, when hard disks could be measured in megabytes, not terabytes. So short samples were the order of the day. I forgive it.
The soundtrack is sparse, but effective. One of my favorite things about modern game design is that open world games aren't afraid to use space... As in, let the world breathe without a soundtrack in the way. Myst does this pretty well... probably out of necessity, but that doesn't detract from the overall effect. What's here is good, supporting a foreboding atmosphere where necessary, and complimenting the subtly ethereal nature of the Island of Myst in other places.
Lastly, the voice acting: it's excellent. I know! I'm as surprised as you are! A game from 1993 having decent voice acting is a unicorn indeed. Amazingly, all three characters that appear in the game, Atrus and his sons Sirrus and Achenar, are portrayed not by professional actors, but the founders of Cyan, Rand and Robyn Miller. They do an excellent job, Robyn in particular, for his authentic, unsettling portrayals of the cruel, unhinged Achenar and the cool, smarmy Sirrus.
Play Time/ Replayability
Ultimately, your play time of Myst will depend on your ability to solve the puzzles contained therein. Use of a walkthrough can be warranted, if (like me) you're pretty bad at problem solving or pattern recognition. However, most guides you can find online stress that you should make every attempt to solve the puzzles on your own first, before resorting to a guide, and I can endorse that statement. There's really nothing quite like that epiphany moment when you realize what you must do, nor is there any satisfaction like solving a tough one on your own.
That said, one of the guides I read noted that it was possible to complete the game in less than two minutes, if you know what you're doing. But where's the fun in that?
Your play time will also depend heavily on which version you play. Load times on Playstation are atrocious and pervasive. I cannot recommend that version except as an absolute last resort. The original PC version uses the "click to advance" engine I described earlier. This is better, but I still think the full 3D version realMyst has the advantage, at least for the impatient, like me.
In 2020, Cyan released a new fully remade version for PC and Xbox platforms, made in Unreal Engine 4 with full free-roam 3D environments. An update to this version included VR support, so that's an option too, and a compelling one. But I don't have a VR capable device, so I can't speak to its quality.
Replayability is a bit of an odd topic for Myst. The actual number of puzzles in the game means if you already know the solutions, the game is pretty short. Maybe you're into that, and the world of Myst absolutely invites further examination in terms of world-building detail, but generally I would rate replayability as low, as with all point-and-click adventures. The puzzles are where the fun is, and it's less fun if you already know the answers. There are, however, a number of sequels and spin offs to Myst, so I would perhaps recommend those instead of a replay of this game.
Conclusion
Myst frustrated and confounded me, at first. It is a slow, lonely game, with not much actual plot to dig up, and not much to recommend itself.
At first.
After discovering the realMyst remake, and after advancing through its glacial initial setup, I found myself engrossed in this world in a way I couldn't expect. There's just so many unexpected details, and strictly speaking unnecessary details that don't really add anything functional to the game except to flesh out your understanding of the world and its characters. Why does Achenar seem obsessed with maps? Why does Sirrus assemble little gadgets like a wind-up mechanical bird? Why am I allowed to break it? That serves literally no functional purpose, it doesn't help me solve a puzzle or give me any clues about the overarching mystery.
But I can do it. The developers thought it was important enough to design it and code it in, purely to help make Myst seem more real. And this effort, this care and commitment, shines through in the final product in a way that many more modern games lack.
I salute you, Cyan. This game is a stone-cold classic, and for a good reason.
To you, the reader, I implore you: give Myst a little rope, and it will impress you. Endure the slow start and it will eventually grab you. It is worth the investment.
Just don't forget to close the elevator door before you operate it. You wouldn't want to fall out, would you?
Corran450's Review Series Vol. 83: realMyst
As someone with a known and admitted "skill issue", I actually really enjoy a good old point-and-click adventure. I've played many in my day, from classic hand drawn 2D adventures like Broken Sword to more modern 3D affairs like State of Mind. Their low-pressure nature combined with (generally) well-developed and environmental storytelling make for a potent concoction for me.
The best part is the absolute smorgasbord of classic adventures to experience. As these games were generally less demanding of higher computing power, there are just so many classic point-and-click adventures available to play, and usually available from Steam for a buck or two.
I have recently joined an online "Game of the Month" club, and for January 2026, the game selected was Myst, a classic point-and-click adventure from 1993. Developed by Cyan and published by Broderbund, Myst was one of the first adventure games to attempt a 3D style, and as such, became one of the most successful and influential PC titles of the early 90s, leading to an entire franchise of narratively related adventures in the Myst universe.
I was only 8 years old in 1993, so while my father did buy Myst for the family computer, it went way over my head. As I got older, it was one of those games that always hovered in the periphery of my gaming universe, flitting about like an irritating fly, never letting me forget it was there in my backlog, waiting. Watching. So, fine. I guess I'll finally play Myst, and give my thoughts on it 33 years later. But I'm gonna complain about it the whole time. (I am not actually gonna do that)
Some of you may have noticed this review is titled "realMyst". Well, I'll explain why in the next section. Let's get started.
Gameplay
As stated in the intro, Myst is a faux-3D point-and-click adventure title. You will survey various environments for clues, gather tools and resources, and solve puzzles to progress the story. It's a simple interface on PC, basically using the mouse to "point" at objects and "click" them to activate/manipulate them. There are really no fail states, and no timer. Take all the time you need to solve the puzzles and explore the maps. And you will need time.
Computing power in 1993 was incredibly limited by today's standards. What this means for Myst is that each screen is a pre-rendered still frame, with occasional full motion video elements. To progress down a path, for example, you click the screen in the direction you want to travel, and incrementally inch your way through successive frames to get where you want to go. As a result, the pacing of the game is cosmically slow. (Particularly in later ports, such as the Playstation port, which requires loading each individual frame!)
In 1993, this might have been manageable, but my brain absolutely cannot handle this geological pace. Call it a personal failing, if you wish, I'll own that.
Anyway, some wonderful individual at Cyan recognized the shortcomings of this approach, and in 2000 they developed realMyst as a result: a ground-up remake with full 3D environments that players could navigate freely. This is much more my speed, although it still has a rather slow pace. There's no "sprint" option, for example, so you are limited to the... shall we say, relaxed walking speed of the player avatar. Still, it's better than clicking twelve times in a single direction just to get to the next room.
This approach does have its own shortcomings, though. Unlike the original style, it can sometimes be difficult to parse puzzle elements from the scenery, or even recognize whether something is a puzzle at all. I guess this is probably an issue with many 3D point-and-clicks, a product of the genre. Be ready for it, I suppose.
Anyway, actually solving the puzzles is thinky and fun, but I strongly recommend you have a pad of paper and a pen handy to jot down notes. Being from 1993, Myst doesn't have anything like a quest log to save important information like codes or pictograms, so it behooves you to have a backup plan to prevent backtracking, thus saving you even more time spent traveling between locations.
Story
Your nameless protagonist arrives on the island of Myst with no preamble, no fanfare. Wandering about, you uncover a mystery involving advanced technology and strange magicks. Ultimately, you are tasked with determining who destroyed the arcane library on Myst, and how to free its imprisoned denizens.
The actual plot is rather understated, as point-and-clicks go, but that doesn't make it bad. On the contrary, it allows the absolutely stellar world-building to take center stage. The setting is the real hero here, and it delivers a dynamite setup to what would become a sprawling narrative spanning at least five games. The enigmatic island with its strange 'infernal machines'... it's all very Steampunk, before that became mainstream. I'm not gonna get all hipstery about it, but this really was a pretty unique setting at the time, and it still has power today.
That's to say nothing about the various "ages" you will explore in your travels. The central fulcrum of the story is the Library of Myst, which contains the books the creators (and you!) use to travel the divergent "ages", different worlds to be explored (and to some, exploited). I haven't played any other games in the series yet, but the use of the term "age" to describe these worlds suggests they are all, in fact, the island of Myst at different points along a massive timeline. (Nobody correct me if I'm wrong, haha. Someday, I'll play Riven and maybe find out for myself.)
Anyway, the central mystery involves a family squabble that leads to dark designs, and it's fine. The real magic of Myst is in its world, and even today, it is excellent. No notes.
Graphics
As I mentioned before, the original Myst used pre-rendered frames to represent its world, and they are exquisite. Fantastically detailed and expressive. The steampunk style is unique and exciting, and the various ages all have their own atmosphere and feel, whether it's the oppressive brutalist nature of the Mechanical Age, or the serene beauty of the Channelwood Age.
realMyst renders all of these in full 3D, and I don't think it loses anything in the translation, as far as beauty is concerned. Maybe the 3D renderings are a little simple, owing to the antiquity of the original designs, but they function absolutely flawlessly. I played on a Steam Deck, not the most powerful machine by any means, but it ran smoothly and looked amazing on the OLED display. In particular, I was impressed with the water effects in the Channelwood Age. Most of the other ages are dark and stormy, so the water surrounding them had little character to recommend it. In Channelwood, though, the sky is bright and clear, giving the water an opportunity to shine, so to speak.
I guess the only remotely negative aspect of the presentation is that Myst is a profoundly lonely game. Only once in its runtime do you come face to face with another living soul, and it is at the very end. You will have interactions with various characters via FMV, but it's just not the same. To be fair, I hesitate to call this a true negative, as Myst would absolutely not be the same game without that sense of solitude.
The FMVs are hella fun, btw... vintage 90s cheese delivered with absolute commitment by the performers. They are surprisingly authentic, and I love them.
Sound
I must commend Cyan for their dynamite sound design. It holds up surprisingly well, even 33 years later. The ambient sounds of a given environment are very atmospheric and immersive. The gentle sound of waves, the hustling of machinery, the otherworldly hums of magick, all serve to transport you to another place. The synergy between the visuals and the sound, combined with the world-building, make Myst feel absolutely real.
Well, mostly... In the grandest tradition of early 90s PC gaming, some of the samples are pretty short and repeat endlessly. It can lend a bit of distracting artificiality to a given scene, but I have to grant Myst a little grace. Sound and video took up a huge amount of allotted space back in the day, when hard disks could be measured in megabytes, not terabytes. So short samples were the order of the day. I forgive it.
The soundtrack is sparse, but effective. One of my favorite things about modern game design is that open world games aren't afraid to use space... As in, let the world breathe without a soundtrack in the way. Myst does this pretty well... probably out of necessity, but that doesn't detract from the overall effect. What's here is good, supporting a foreboding atmosphere where necessary, and complimenting the subtly ethereal nature of the Island of Myst in other places.
Lastly, the voice acting: it's excellent. I know! I'm as surprised as you are! A game from 1993 having decent voice acting is a unicorn indeed. Amazingly, all three characters that appear in the game, Atrus and his sons Sirrus and Achenar, are portrayed not by professional actors, but the founders of Cyan, Rand and Robyn Miller. They do an excellent job, Robyn in particular, for his authentic, unsettling portrayals of the cruel, unhinged Achenar and the cool, smarmy Sirrus.
Play Time/ Replayability
Ultimately, your play time of Myst will depend on your ability to solve the puzzles contained therein. Use of a walkthrough can be warranted, if (like me) you're pretty bad at problem solving or pattern recognition. However, most guides you can find online stress that you should make every attempt to solve the puzzles on your own first, before resorting to a guide, and I can endorse that statement. There's really nothing quite like that epiphany moment when you realize what you must do, nor is there any satisfaction like solving a tough one on your own.
That said, one of the guides I read noted that it was possible to complete the game in less than two minutes, if you know what you're doing. But where's the fun in that?
Your play time will also depend heavily on which version you play. Load times on Playstation are atrocious and pervasive. I cannot recommend that version except as an absolute last resort. The original PC version uses the "click to advance" engine I described earlier. This is better, but I still think the full 3D version realMyst has the advantage, at least for the impatient, like me.
In 2020, Cyan released a new fully remade version for PC and Xbox platforms, made in Unreal Engine 4 with full free-roam 3D environments. An update to this version included VR support, so that's an option too, and a compelling one. But I don't have a VR capable device, so I can't speak to its quality.
Replayability is a bit of an odd topic for Myst. The actual number of puzzles in the game means if you already know the solutions, the game is pretty short. Maybe you're into that, and the world of Myst absolutely invites further examination in terms of world-building detail, but generally I would rate replayability as low, as with all point-and-click adventures. The puzzles are where the fun is, and it's less fun if you already know the answers. There are, however, a number of sequels and spin offs to Myst, so I would perhaps recommend those instead of a replay of this game.
Conclusion
Myst frustrated and confounded me, at first. It is a slow, lonely game, with not much actual plot to dig up, and not much to recommend itself.
At first.
After discovering the realMyst remake, and after advancing through its glacial initial setup, I found myself engrossed in this world in a way I couldn't expect. There's just so many unexpected details, and strictly speaking unnecessary details that don't really add anything functional to the game except to flesh out your understanding of the world and its characters. Why does Achenar seem obsessed with maps? Why does Sirrus assemble little gadgets like a wind-up mechanical bird? Why am I allowed to break it? That serves literally no functional purpose, it doesn't help me solve a puzzle or give me any clues about the overarching mystery.
But I can do it. The developers thought it was important enough to design it and code it in, purely to help make Myst seem more real. And this effort, this care and commitment, shines through in the final product in a way that many more modern games lack.
I salute you, Cyan. This game is a stone-cold classic, and for a good reason.
To you, the reader, I implore you: give Myst a little rope, and it will impress you. Endure the slow start and it will eventually grab you. It is worth the investment.
Just don't forget to close the elevator door before you operate it. You wouldn't want to fall out, would you?