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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2443 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 26, 2024

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I bought the Myst remaster. I played it back when it was an interactive slide deck 30 years ago, but it would take tens of seconds for each new slide to load on our PC and I was a kid, so I basically have no recollection of it beyond the basic layout of the starting island.

Man, does the gameplay feel dated. The Witness is a modern game set on a puzzle island, and it doesn't need to pad its puzzles out with cryptic rules and legwork, like Myst does. Well, maybe with the exception of the sun temple.

The original Myst relied heavily on the wow factor of the high res video and imagery. The game was doing things people had never seen their computer do, and the puzzles were there to space things out.

The legwork gave you a chance to look at the cool images and the cryptic puzzles made you focus on the cool details.

Without the wow factor it just turns into a slog.

It’s not fair, I want to go back.

Exactly, and it's why the remasters pretty much always fall flat. Myst was a technological showcase, and what people are nostalgic for is not good gameplay design, or a particularly good story. It's for seeing a game where things didn't look so much like abstract pixels anymore but like the actual thing they are. For seeing full motion video in game, making them mentally project to the future where games look like movies (and gaming did take a dead end detour through FMV games to try to rush to that point in the aftermath of Myst). The production values were impressive for a video game of that time, but outside of that context they are awful. The acting was cringe, the FMVs were really really small and low res (which they cleverly hid through the "book" framing). The visuals, not as pretty and always look a lot more plasticky and cheap than they seem to be in my memories.

Remove the technological achievement and Myst is a step back from the puzzle and gameplay design from Sierra/LucasArts graphical adventure games and even the older interactive fiction games that preceded them, but with 3D pictures and movies. I guess story is debatable.

Which Myst remaster?

The latest one, from 2021.

The Witness did suffer from puzzle reuse though. Not that that’s a bad thing, there are obviously famous puzzle games (sudoku, tetris etc) that consist of scaling levels of the same core mechanic. But I think that’s different to the traditional adventure game format where there are many different types of puzzle.

I didn't feel like it did. The shrine and the forest both used "use the environment to find the shape of the answer", but I think that's the only case when two groups of puzzles were similar.

The shrine and bamboo forest use the environmental clues most heavily, but they're present in the Red Ship's door puzzle, a couple Town puzzles, and a decent number of the coastline ones.

But I think 2rafa is more commenting on the emphasis on 'maze'-style line-tracing puzzles, which aren't the only puzzle in The Witness, but they do make up an overwhelming majority of the content. There are a bunch of modifiers that get thrown in such that they mostly feel 'fresh' -- I'd argue that a few, like the hollow tetronimos and gamma symbols, are kinda underutilized -- but both panel-staring and even the most clever bit about panel-less point of view puzzles gets a little rough after the first few-dozen even if each has a gimmick. Completely discrete puzzles, or where the line-tracing is just a completion mechanic after you've done the heavily lifting, are a small minority of the puzzles, and most of them aren't great (most infamously, the Jungle sound puzzle).

Contrast Myst, where the only real underlying overlap in game mechanics was button pressing, lock-combination-solving, or use-x-on-y. That wasn't always a good thing, and I don't think there's a single Myst player that likes the sound tunnels section! Even the good puzzle mechanics seldom got time to breathe or develop. It does feel more varied, though, and you can tell Myst's background as an adventure game, in contrast to The Witness as a puzzle game.

On the gripping handle, while the line-tracing is never sudoko-level, I could see it as tetris-level; it is engaging for most of the play. And it is critical for the whole meta-plot's core concept that it be everywhere in the Island.

I will make a separate complaint that The Witness's story also just not that compelling. No matter how bad the Myst series got, the basic concept of linking books and creating ages and rifts in unstable ages is cool, and leaves a lot to be said both within the Myst narrative and without it. There's a reason things like MystCraft exist.

The Witness tries to do some interesting stuff with Themes, and there's a lot of interesting questions raised in universe, but they're ultimately not anything relevant to the setting or its story. Indeed, the 'true' ending does little but (falsely!) present the skills and pattern recognition that the player has gained as pointless. It may just be that's not what Blow set out to do, but it still feels disappointing for how atmospheric the game is.

and I don't think there's a single Myst player that likes the sound tunnels section!

I guess that's the puzzle that made me rage quit yesterday. Were the tunnel animations skippable in the original game?

I don't think so. The animations were a little shorter, but not enough to make it less annoying. I don't know whether it's the worst puzzle in the series -- some of the solo version of Uru was outright broken as a result of its weird development history -- but it's easily the least fun part of Myst proper.

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