Myst Masterpiece Edition

An excellent game, which can be powered by wine on ubuntu 8.04 ( 32 bits ) !!

I love Myst Masterpiece but the GOG.com version is very, very glitchy. I've spent the last month on the forums trying to get everything figured out. After many different "fixes" there are still issues with loading saved games. I've not had any other issues with GOG games but this particular game just does not work right.

As far as mechanics goes, this is the gold standard for how a puzzle game should be. While the puzzles might sometimes be hard in their execution (I'm looking at you, spaceship) they are not obtuse, you never really feel like you are executing some sort of logic that only the developer could possibly understand, which was a huge problem as the genre went forward. With enough time and exploration every piece of confusion will have a eureka moment where you fit everything into place in your head. Like a good mystery novel you could work backwards and see all the pieces were there all along, waiting to be put together in your head. That being said, it was never the puzzles that really drew me to this game, it was the world itself. Once I was done with the main plotline, which was threadbare but still intriguing, I would stick around and explore the ages, creating stories and adventure in my mind, making each age feel like a sort of home. The attention to detail and the obvious love of crafting the world made this an easy feat, and I still find myself loading my final save to explore the world I had unlocked. Few games can claim to accomplish this, making a world you want to stay and wrap yourself up in. That being said, starting a new game from scratch can be tedious, as you already have all the answers you just need to execute them, and the game will most likely only take you a few days to complete. But overall this is the sort of game that shows you the raw potential of what a game can be, and most importantly how it can spark the imagination instead of leading it around by the nose.

I'll start by saying that I recently played Myst and then Riven, both of which I had played back when they originally came out. I absolutely loved playing Riven--it affirmed all my positive memories. Not so much with Myst. A couple reasons: 1. The graphics: I'm not a graphics snob, and enjoy plenty of old games--the problem is that the graphics make some of the puzzles frustrating--more than once I had to look up hints only to realize I was stuck because I didn't realize a brown line was actually a lever or something like that. 2. The puzzles: again, I loved Riven and was able to complete that entire game without any help, so it's not that I'm bad at puzzle games. But I found that Myst puzzles too often required you to make assumptions or know just where/how to click an object--in other words, not all the puzzles could be solved by logic alone. 3. Navigation: Related to the graphics, is that I often found it hard to know if I had successfully traversed all of a given area--not sure how to quite describe it, but I at times found myself unintentionally going in circles. Despite those three points, I enjoyed it enough to finish it, and I got some nostalgia value from it. In brief, while I don't regret buying it on sale, it doesn't hold up compared to Riven.

This is one of the games that started me playing on a PC way back in the early to mid 90's and I loved every minute of it all the way to the 3rd part where I kind of quit the franchise until I pick it up when it goes on sale.