A Deeper Look at Myst

[@rittenremedy]

still surprised i actively searched for a video like this only three weeks after it was published. i watched a couple others since, and, yeah sure some more experienced channels may have better production value, but this one tells the story in a way that heightens the style of Myst, doesn't rush the puzzles, and showcases the creators' intentions.

[@wottle_]

Thanks a lot for the kind words. I'll continue to try to put that effort in my videos.

[@Squideey]

I always like hearing about other people's experience of a game that's so close to my heart. I enjoyed this kind of abridged playthrough format, pointing out little details and stuff.

[@leGUIGUI]

20:00 Basically, Sirrus is recording a message for Achenar, telling him to rip one page from Atrus's Myst linking book so that he remains stuck in D'ni. the very same page you later find out thanks to what you learn from the instruction on the sheet of paper that had been ripped in two and allow you to get the good ending.

[@BlackSun404]

Well, beat me to it. =D

[@Dingghis_Khaan]

This was a thoroughly enjoyable watch. I never put 2 and 2 together when it came to the Black Ships flag in Sirrus' room in Stoneship, or the fact that Channelwood and Stoneship are undergoing the same kind of slow death to rising water levels. It just never clicked that the different Ages could be connected like that. Interesting observations!

[@DruidButFast]

Myst is one of the few puzzle games that have actually caught my interest with the world, despite me not being a fan of puzzle games usually.

[@kalkstein2694]

honestly same

[@Divector8]

Great analysis of Myst! You explained well its brilliant design, its design mistakes, and the parts where the design was good but not quite perfect. I hope to see a video from you on Riven, a game iterative on Myst with many smart design decisions.

[@wottle_]

Thanks! I love Riven, I plan to do a video on it eventually for sure.

[@MystDragon3k]

Nicely done retrospective. Its always nice to see an honest look through the game, what makes it great, what holds it back, what makes it unique and special. In my experience, I did end up doing Selenetic first, and I really liked it. Interesting geological features and Jules Verne like machines, a fun maze that twists and turns like a roller coaster. I agree with your summary that its the weakest of the ages, but since it was my first, it felt more like a great introduction. I never put together the subplot of the Black ships before this video, that was all very refreshing to find new details after all these years! Regarding the weird holo-projector in Channelwood, here's my read on it: Achenar was clearly conquering the monkey-people, abusing their treatment of him as a god. We know from Atrus' journal that the two sons were learning their language. also, the device in Achenar's room seems to control the message that plays in the nearby torture room (if you play any of the other videos, including Sirrus' message, then the next time you go in, thats the video that will play above the table). To me, Achenar was demanding sacrifices or executions, and an angry floating head speaking the native language during the ceremony would play into the monkey's superstition of humans being gods. On a related note, we actually know what Sirrus' message was for: "He is preparing, take only one page". He's talking about their plan to trap Atrus in D'ni. We learn from other sources they lured Catherine to Riven, and then removed all exits from D'ni aside from the Riven book. Atrus would take an extra Myst book with him to return, but it had been sabotaged by having one page removed, trapping him, and leaving the brothers to plunder and destroy the Ages of Myst like the god-kings they fancied themselves as. Why they don't just...kill him is a different question, but I guess we needed a satisfying ending, and hey, it was the early 90's, patricide was way less cool back then (Star Wars had only come out a few years earlier, and that had some big "dont kill your dad" vibes). Well done with the video, you went over all the important points, a couple I wasn't aware of, and even gave your audience a chance to relive the choice of which brother to side with.

[@Mobius011]

Amazing video! Myst was the first game I ever played, and you explaining these little details I missed all those years ago really made my day

[@wottle_]

It's such a great game isn't it? Glad you enjoyed :)

[@JeffreyOchoa8]

The undisputed king of non arbitrary puzzles is Riven, the sequel to Myst! It perfected the format and I’d love to see a video like this about it

[@YourUdderBrudder]

This is by far the best video i have ever seen. Better than lord of the rings, better than Avatar, better than The Spongebob Movie. I'm going to watch this again and again and show my kids. I want to have more kids just so i can show them this film. Please translate this movie into Marathi, my native language because as it currently stands I can't understand english. thank you

[@vertron]

The first of many videos I hope

[@YouFightLikeACow]

I'll never stop watching hour long Myst lore videos. You should watch Necrovarius' lore dive as well. Good work!

[@HorizonOfHope]

I write this 11 months after you published it, so hopefully you read it to see four things: 1) This is an excellent video. I love you how critique the game, giving praise for such a labour of love and fair criticisms. Your delivery and structure of the narrative with the puzzles is sublime. 2) It's not necessarily a stretch that Atrus made such elaborate devices in the worlds. It's heavily implied, especially by Atrus saying that he learned writing as an "art" from his father, that he doesn't literally make the inventions of the worlds. Rather, he writes them in the books and they manifest in the ages. Indeed, this is how he made the ship in the Stoneship Age, which he didn't realise would appear in the rocks themselves. So when he made the little bubble railcart thingy, he didn't build it, he wrote it. It seems that writing is, though, a very precise art and it's really easy to get it wrong. It also establishes Atrus as someone who is kind of playing God and ignoring the consequences that adding new technologies to worlds can create. As you state yourself: making the lighthouse damned the people of Stoneship to the Black Ships. Similarly, arriving and interfering in Channelwood destroyed a magic that Atrus didn't understand, ultimately allowing his sons to overpower the people and hang their heads as trophies. 3) I had no idea that people didn't like the maze puzzle. When I played the game as a kid, that was probably the easiest puzzle for me to work out. It was super obvious that the sounds tell you where to go. But it took me ages to find the third floor of Channelwood. 4) Piecing together the fact that Atrus seems to "link" to worlds rather than overtly create them, I always assumed that his sons suffered a fate worse than death. Rather, he wrote linking books to worlds that didn't exist. Therefore, they are in a timeless void. It has been years, at the minimum, since they were in the Ages of Myst, and have spent years in those books without apparently needing food or water. If the player enters the book all they see is a complete darkness, other than the window to the library which is quickly static as the pages are torn out. The brothers probably aren't killed, just the links to the void they are trapped in are gone. They remain, literally forever, trapped without ageing, eating, or even a tiny bit of company. No wonder Achenar went mad (moreso than he was).

[@IgorUsePro1347]

I got to Selentic first. And I have to say, I really loved the train puzzle. It was frustrating at first, but I had the right mindset for it, that being [If a switch exist, it must serve a purpose] So I caught on to the importance of the sounds directly. Though I was playing the VR remake, so charting out a map and noting down stuff was rather difficult, I had to switch to flatscreen. From there I noted down the sounds and which directions were available on the tracks, noted down the common denominators, and thus got the sounds sorted for their corresponding directions. I then simply followed the sounds and made my way to the linking book. Felt like a genius at that point. It was also really fun hearing the sounds again in the mechanical age and directly knowing what to do😊

[@SaiyaSounds]

This has been a really great watch; thank you for making this! Though I've typically been a console gamer, even as a kid, Myst was the first computer game I wanted after my older cousin showed me a demo disk which let you explore Myst island (and would end as soon as you tried to link to another age). After getting ahold of and playing the full version, I was hooked. I read the books of Atrus, Ti'ana, and D'ni, I eagerly awaited Riven (and despaired at not having a powerful enough computer at the time, so it would be a couple more years before I'd play it), and even though I fell off after Exile, I still hold the series near and dear to my heart.

[@BlusViews]

Myst blew my 8 year old mind in 1993. It truly was innovative for its time.

[@s-8488]

Your thoughts on the black ships makes a lot of sense. It may very well be what they had in mind early in development, around the time they'd planned on the spaceship actually flying you to Selenitic. The placement of the red/blue pages on Selenitic does seem pretty random. I think they added significance to it retroactively: Sirrus' page is found amidst a bunch of crystalline/rocky structures (like Spire), while Achenar's page is amidst trees and plant life (like Haven). Back in 1996, a Myst Calendar was released, which had excerpts from the journals of other Ages that Atrus has written. The books for those Ages were probably destroyed by his sons, but those journal snippets can still be found online if you're interested. It's been nice hearing your perspective on things; If you did something similar with Riven, I'd watch that too.

[@AngryJulien]

Great video! I loved your personal take on this gaming classic. Also, thanks for the trip down nostalgia lane!

[@lolicores]

this might be one of the first videos where it went on for a long time and i understood and retained most/all of it. good work. i know nothing about this game but now i am very interested in it, it reminds me a lot of creatures 3 graphically and with the audio quality

[@tck3809]

comfy vid to settle down to!

[@randylplampin1326]

42:36 The picture of Napoleon can be seen at the Louvre where you can also see the Mona Lisa.

[@enilenis]

I didn't get a soundcard until 1997. I'd be screwed playing Myst before that.

[@chennessycomposer]

Awesome video on one of my fav games, great channel too! Subbed up

[@Finnateanapricot]

You are INSANELY underrated!

[@slightlyevolved]

I find it interesting that if you follow all the canon lore of the series through, you find that right before Myst IV; Achenar redeems himself. He ends up mellowing out spending years exploring the age he's trapped in, then years spending time with Cathrine and his sister through the age's book portal, while Sirrus stews, becoming bitter and vengeful, but hiding it, pretending to also care for his sister. Achenar ends up really protective of his younger sister, Yeesha. Sirius on the other hand uses her to escape and kidnaps her. Resulting in Achenar sacrificing himself to allow you to save his sister.

[@VikingBoyBilly]

20:00 I think sirrus is warning achenar that their father is planning to trap them, and instructing him to take one page from the green book to trap their father first

[@tamagothchic]

The defense of the sound puzzle sounds a lot like the Dunning-Kruger effect to me. Of course a puzzle makes sense if you already know the answer; of course it sounds easy to listen for clues if you know that it's a sound based puzzle and the clues are audible. But in a game with constant audio, very little of which is actually relevant to puzzles (even the piano and other sound puzzles had visuals and didn't only rely on audio), a very grainy sound quality and lot of other elements throwing distractions in the mix (not to mention loading times and a new series of button presses), if most people have trouble and don't find the puzzle very intuitive it's probably not the most intuitive format. The puzzle itself would have worked a lot better if it was presented differently, hence the admission that they failed. The idea itself isn't bad, but the way it's delivered and conveyed to the player has as much or more effect on one's ability to solve the puzzle as the difficulty of the solution, which is a very basic core idea behind modern QA. I still think Myst is a huge piece of gaming history, but I think it's important to acknowledge why these things fail instead of just writing it off as "oh well, it's subjective, guess we'll never know".

[@SleepyBear_SB]

This is criminally underrated

[@thomasahearn4142]

Good video. One slight nitpick: Ages are basically separate universes. So the black ships of Mechanical had no effect on Stoneship because they don't exist in the same reality. Otherwise, well done.

[@TeaManDev]

Really nice and detailed video 🙂 What do you think about the sequel btw, the Riven? For me personally it is one of my most favorite games/worlds of all time. And it's the Riven what I consider to be the best Myst game. (With acknowledging the value of first Myst at its time of course, and what it brings to us).

[@SleepyBear_SB]

Great vid!

[@casanovafunkenstein5090]

The problem with the maze is the same problem with a lot of the game's design in that it doesn't do anything to provide positive reinforcement when you perform the correct actions. The puzzle is too reliant on the player's intuition in linking the four samples to the cardinal directions without any ability to check which sounds are which and the maze itself has no visual information to confirm whether you're going in the right direction. For people who have hearing issues, or who struggle to maintain a good reference in their mind for what the sounds represent, the puzzle is unnecessarily difficult and for the people who do understand it it's still incredibly tedious to watch the same animations repeat endlessly with little indication of when it will end or if you're even doing it correctly. I feel like the biggest problem with Myst's design is that none of the information about what's happening is conveyed through visuals for the vast majority of the game, which is partly down to the limitations of the format. It's really apparent that so many of the devices that are supposedly meant to be used every day are built in the least convenient way possible, as most of the time they are a significant distance away from the things they influence and are very frequently built facing directly away from them in order to hide the lack of animation. I feel like this creates a lot of situations where the player is taken out of the experience by virtue of wondering how exactly the people who lived here were ever going to get anything done. I know that a lot of the ages are completely wrecked, but imagine trying to walk around these places back when they were still populated and the main route from one side of the settlement is only traversible when a person in a tower with no visibility of the street pushes a button to lower the water level in the region, in turn stranding half the village or potentially drowning anyone who happens to be downstairs because they forgot the code that's only written down there on a single plaque that opens up a storage box hidden inside a bookcase, where they can finally obtain a mop. Also, I don't really agree with the idea that obscuring the routes from screen to screen is a good design feature as I think it just serves to make the game feel more arbitrary and obtuse.

[@seargantmagor]

The maze sucks because you can't write down what a sound makes. Half the puzzles were intended that you have a pen and paper but the maze was based off memory. This makes it very challenging as you are also trying to solve the puzzle itself. That whole island was the only time I used a cheat sheet.

[@MotiviqueStudio]

Anything can be understated. It can’t be *overstated*.

[@TrailBlazer5280]

idk, i havent played the game so i cant say how I would have handled the maze portion, but it doesn't seem to hard. Follow the sound... Lots of games use sounds to indicate sameness, i dont think it should get so much hate.

[@trinesrensen560]

Today this is a known way to do things. It wasn't back then. So many things they did were entirely new. And also they got people playing that weren't gamers. Playing computer games was a niche interest compared to today.

[@joejoemyo]

This video is deeply underviewed

[@chasepalumbo2929]

I just beat myst, this was an amazing video.

[@forsenalright]

veryFors

[@casanovafunkenstein5090]

Having reached the end of the video I'm struck by how my takeaway is the exact opposite of yours. I feel like the design of the game is really unintuitive and breaks the immersion constantly by introducing obtuse contraptions that are far too complicated to exist as anything other than puzzles, despite supposedly having a real life function. The story and setting were the things that really hold up to me. It's a really well executed mystery with a lot of mature subject matter that tells the story of a series of colonisations and subsequent genocides by way of showing these places stuck in time, preserved as they were the day that the two antagonists were trapped in their respective books. The story and ideas behind Myst are the aspects that make me interested in the series, but the design of the game just kills any sense of realism for me and made the whole game far more frustrating than it needed to be. It's all the worst excesses of adventure games, just with no inventory puzzles to provide variety and direction. If Myst were to have been less focused on puzzles and more about letting the narrative carry the experience I think that it would be a much better experience, because I imagine that the majority of people who played it probably never managed to get that far enough for the story's themes to really make sense.

[@trapez77]

You should have played the original Mac version

[@jebwu8648]

Do one video about Riven.