Uru: Complete Chronicles

There are seemingly endless places in different worlds to explore and puzzles to solve. Nice graphics, if a bit dark. You can always just go in to your favorite world and walk around if you don't feel like solving puzzles at the moment. Lots of fun!

I found Myst (the first one?) absolutely fascinating. I never played later productions because they fell foul of later versions of Windows and I couldn't use them. Many years later I bought RealMyst for my iPad. Again, it was stunning. So I bought Uru recently, but I'm finding it a bit dull, wandering around somewhat aimlessly. Myst presented the player with tricky puzzles from the start and in a strange, but beautiful, landscape, whereas Uru starts with a lot of walking/running in an extremely depressing environment. Steering the avatar is frustratingly difficult, and the inability to save the game is plain annoying. I am surprised that so many seem to find this a wonderful game. I shall obviously have to persevere until I see the value for myself, but so far it's not a game I look forward to restarting(!) yet again. It's become a chore to be tackled from time to time, rather than giving in.

I played Riven as a child and Myst later in life, and something in the story of creating worlds by writing books always spoke to me. Riven was of course far too difficult for me but I still enjoyed visiting those beautiful locations, solving some of the simpler pull lever-open door puzzles. Picking up Uru years later I was delighted to see how well they had brought together my favourite elements of the Myst universe. The game starts in visiting the Cleft where Atrus grew up, almost identical to how I'd imagined it. From there the player is taken to the vast underground city of D'ni, perfectly detailed, and to several other ages that tell the story of the darker side of the D'ni civilization, as well as the failed attempt by archaeologists to revive the city. If you're not familiar with the considerable lore of the series some of this will of course be lost on you but the overarching themes of the story are well clarified in journals and the ever expressive environments. Uru is a hard game, and like its predecessors before it this difficulty is characterized the obscure solutions it chooses for problems. They are much better than those in Riven, with much clearer clues and more obvious indicators of cause and effect. Platforming makes an unwelcome debut in this series, especially at Gahreseen but it doesn't detract enough from the rest of the game to be more than a mild nuisance. The reason I've always had a soft spot for the series and Uru especially is how much the game engages you in the story. It doesn't tell an especially emotive and certainly not present story- you'll feel more like an archaeologist uncovering the truth than actively taking part in it. It's the way the environments are so carefully detailed, and express so much of what the world was, with scattered journals and documents allowing you to piece together what happened. If Uru had better blended it's puzzles with this process it would be perfect. As it stands, it is merely excellent. The Myst series is interesting as I find it is simultaneously overrated and underrated, the graphics especially of the original being such a selling point and being so underwhelming today. As the series has evolved though the core that I have always loved, those detailed worlds and that unstated story that saturates everything you see. The player is narrator as much as he is narrated to, a rare and wonderful thing that shows us just what computer games are capable of. Nowhere are these qualities more refined, and better presented than in Uru.

Shorah! This game was intended to be the multiplayer experience that so man Myst fans dreamt of. However, the dream was never realized (in THIS version). The game became a shell of what it was intended to be. A beautiful open world (or worlds), yours to explore, by yourself. But, in its emptiness came something unexpected. In the story of D'ni, it speaks of a great cataclysm. One that effectively ended the D'ni race and civilization. When you first get to the city, and you are all alone in this beautiful, forgotten world, you can really experience the emptiness that is left in this place. This would not have happened if there had been a hundred other people with you. The problem comes in that there are several puzzles originally made for two or more people that have been modified and simplified for one person, sometimes adding a drudgery of walking across an age to flip a switch, only to have to walk back, open a door, then go and flip the switch again, to go to the door again to continue. Still, this remains my favorite game in the series. And the Music. Oh the Music. Tim Larkin, you are amazing. He made the perfect accompaniment for a near perfect game.

Cyan Worlds/Myst - Best single player games ever. You are placed into a particular world to solve mysteries to advance to the next level. Graphics, sounds and challenging environments propel you into unbelieveable scenery, simply the best real life games ever coded. I own the complete boxed series, but find the versions on GOG easier to play, because there are no discs to replace when you advance to thenext level. And you save a lot of $$$ .