Myst V: End of Ages Limited Edition

Great end to the Myst saga. The puzzles were challenging enough and the worlds are stunning. I look forward to playing again down the road.

Ok, so I'm breaching protocol here a bit. You'll see I'm not a "verified owner" of a digital copy from GOG... and there's a good reason for that. Frankly, after playing through my hard copy of the game I purchased a long time ago, I struggle to justify wasting any money on it here. I may upgrade in the future, but we'll see. Anyhow... This game is the end of the series. (big build up... over a decade of waiting for the end to be written...) And I must say, though the game is delightful and challenging and looks great and all that jazz... It's not the "grande finally" that I would have liked to see. Why? I'm glad you asked. First, the attention to detail was absolutely absurd. If you're going to have a game that immerses you in an atmosphere, and you dare to add the free roaming aspect to the game, then you MUST HAVE FOOT STEP SOUNDS! They're not there! Walking through water? No ripples... or any sound evidence to show that you are doing so. I cannot express how strange this is considering the detail that went into Myst IV. (In that game you could touch just about anything and it made a sound. I watched a documentary about them explaining they wanted total immersion and so they paid extreme attention to detail... on that game.) Also, this game feels rushed. You can't leisurely explore... I mean, you can, but there's no reward for it. In the other games you felt compelled to explore because sometimes you found things that pieced the story together for you. But not here. Just beautiful scenery for beauty's sake. Ultimately unimpressive, and highly disappointing. You find journal notes... not even hidden, but on your main paths, that fill you in on story. Not much mystery. If I ever do buy a digital copy here it will be so that I have the complete set in my library, because I like stuff like that. But at the time of writing this review I only own the physical copy.

Achtung: In der Planeten- (Teleskop-) welt Todelmer sollte man auf der Steinplatte keine Dreivierteltorte oder ein vergleichbares Motiv zeichnen. Das führt dazu, dass man zu früh zum Ende gelangt und die Platte für diese Welt deaktiviert wird. Man kann zwar die drei anderen Welten noch besuchen, das Spiel lässt sich aber nicht mehr beenden. Caution: In the planetary (telescopic) world Todelmer, you should not draw a three-quarter cake or a comparable motif on the stone plate. This will cause you to reach the end too soon and the plate for this world will be deactivated. You can still visit the other three worlds, but you can no longer finish the game.

I have to agree with a lot of the reviews on here, and say that the emphasis on story-telling took this one a little too far in a direction to make things fun for a Myst game. The closest comparison in the series would be Uru, but the reward there really felt like exploration itself, and finding that the connections between different areas were surprisingly non-linear. In Myst V it feels a little too much like the game is guiding you through one giant journal, pausing constantly for the characters to read things out to you. Once you're done with an area, you're done; you don't learn as much from the settings, or get to linger and enjoy the ride. On the plus side - the puzzle dynamics, aside from one maddeningly random time-based one, are cool and different. I liked the weird addition of creatures you can interact with, and if you read about how the game was developed, they're a smart way to include puzzles that may have originally been multi-player in a single-player game. In addition, the graphics and sound feel like they really nailed what Uru was going for and it's cool to finally explore some areas that were hinted there. The music by Tim Larkin in both games is probably my favorite of the series, though that's up to taste. It's overall a pretty gorgeous game and a fairly similar gameplay to the original Myst, but after what the series started to hint at, it just feels frustratingly linear and occasionally incomplete.

I am a huge Myst fan, but when this 5th game came out I was very disappointed with it. First of all, the graphics suck. It's not prerendered, but "real" 3d, what totally breaks with why Myst was so awesome: it looked always very real and convincing. Second: there are strange creatures running around in this game. It felt like a quake game or so to me, so completely non-myst. I did finish the game, but the bad taste never left. I guess if you played the other myst games you'll have to play this one too, but be warned, it sucks. This game should never have been made.