I find Myst really, really dull. The puzzles are okay but the story is uninspiring. I do like Riven though, and am generally a fan of similar FPP adventure games.

Myst is not to blame. Rather, it is because of the rogue's gallery of FMV-hell games that lines the SpoonyOne's bookshelf. Be it Terror TRAX, Johnny Menomic, or Star Trek: Borg, they had a hand in lowering the value of the genre by a bit.

However, I think the true culprit is an simple one: Greed, and the inability of most companies seeing value in filling a niche of the market. When potentially more lucrative markets opened up like the FPS and RTS genres, companies simply dropped what was working for them in order to appeal to a wider market. Problem is, popular markets quickly get saturated with strong competition, which meant that companies that previously specialized in adventure games sacrificed their strong points in order to get a weak foothold in a new, larger market.

Fortunately, episodic development, digital distribution, and the Internet has made it much easier to fill niche markets, as companies no longer have to compete for physical shelf space in order to move their software. I am really hoping that this would help my beloved Visual Novels to go mainstream, along with platformers like La-Mulana. :)

As Tim Schafer said in his first Kickstarters Video "Adventure games exists in our fantasies, memories... and in germany"

We have a lot of developers who create Point & Click Adventures. The Peak is Daedalic Entertainment, who kinda keep the clever/funny/smart vibe of the old Lucas Arts Classics. Check "Edna & Harvey", "Harveys New Eyes", "The Whispered World" and "Deponia". Their next game "The Dark Eye" will be published on Steam worldwide. There is also the secret files series, which has great logic puzzles but awfull english voice acting and embarrising endings.

And don't forget the french vibe. Heavy Rain was a world wide success and you should also check the unconventional "Experience 112" and The Red Johnson Chronicles. There is also the Runaway trilogy from Spain, which went from awesome to poorly designed.

There are and allways were Point & Click Adventures, they are just under the surface. Most of them didn't evolve and went with the times. Most Adventures still have poor animations, no Lip-sync. 3D was also a bad idea, most of these types suffered with poor tank style controls.

Nintendo and Capcom had some fresh ideas with Hotel Dusk, Another Code (Trace memory for americans), Phoenix Wright and Zack & Wiki. And also Professor Layton from level5, which is more a puzzle game than a P&C adventure.

You see there are plenty of adventures. But they are not from america.

I tottaly agree with your opinion!
Myst games are adventures for players with perception and logic.
Not for players who are overly fond of pointless pixel mouse clicking games...
In order to complete one of them, you have to realize an island or a different world. not just a screen...
I do NOT consider a game as adventure if i have to get through huge pointless dialogues for nothing, just to admire the script...

I also love Myst games and myst clones like schizm 1+2! There should be more games like these...

and if Myst games killed the genre -which i don't believe that- then... R.I.P. the genre had problems.

To those who blame Myst games: Just play them. And if you get stuck somewhere.. don't look the walktrhough. Keep trying.

@ntsmrtz

you said it buddy.

Plus,
Myst is what started the sub-genre to begin with
so to say it killed the genre just doesn't make any sense.

I remember that people actually started getting away from them when 3d acceleration came out. That's actually probably what killed it which is unfortunate because to this day Myst 2: Riven (with pre-rendered graphics) still looks better than any other game I've ever seen other than Myst 4 and Riven was made in 1997.
Way ahead of it's time.

Well I think he was saying it killed the main adventure game genre, not the Myst-clone sub-genre. But the important flaw in his argument is that the Myst-clones were just that... a sub-genre. Normal point and click adventures continued to be made for long after Myst.

As a longtime adventurefan, I have recently been renewing my interest in the mystgenre and was googling for mystclones when I stumbled upon this thread. The title sorta surprised me and I wanted to know what it was all about. The quoted remark below got me thinking, and three years after it was posted I still want to give it my thoughts.

I honestly think that someone who thinks of the puzzles in the myst games as irrelevant and a hinderance in advancing the story completely fails to appreciate (perhaps even understand) what the developers have been doing with the games. That is ok though. Let's focus on Riven for now, since that was the best game in the genre for me, because it has some of the best storytelling I have ever seen ... yes, storytelling. Take the rotating room puzzle right at the start of the game. You can solve it, or you can move on and leave it for later. In both cases you can think it is just a dumb little game and curse the developer for putting you through that instead of giving you normal doors. You can instead appreciate the challenge and congratualate yourself on your cleverness when you solved the puzzle. In both cases I think a player is missing something. I think players should ask themselves the question "who build this place, why is it the way that it is, what is it's purpose?" For that was (very roughly described) the overarching set of questions for me that slowly got answered throughout the game. It is not that solving puzzles give you access to the next piece of story, no ... the solving itself IS a piece of the story, your cleverness IS a piece of the story. Especially in Riven you don't just direct the unnamed protagonist, you ARE the unnamed protagonist. It is you that asks the questions, it is you that answers them (well, you and nice bit of monologue you find along the way). You answer those questions and actually perform the storytelling by submerging yourself in these puzzles. The myst games aren't games about an island with puzzles on them where a story happened. They are stories, given shape by the developer as puzzles on an island. And in Riven more like a single whole of puzzles to be more precies, which is what sets it apart from the other games in the series in my opinion. Most puzzles don't fully reveal themselves untill the end of the game, even though you long since them solved them. You can choose not be enthralled by that. Like I said that is perfectly fine (with me), no game is for everyone. For somone who likes both puzzles and stories though, these games are a godsent, and I very much disagree with almost everything the OP said ... both for what I expressed in this post and what others allready said throughout this thread.

What I do agree with is that many of the mystclonedevelopers failed to realise why the mystgames are so enthraling. Often the puzzles have no real purpose to the story, sometimes not even to the environment. Even Ubisoft does not evade this pitfall completely when making some of the mystgames after Riven. The less environment, puzzle and story are intertwined, the worse the game becomes as an adventuregame (not as a pure puzzlegame though). We have had these games. This, as has been pointed out, is not Cyan Worlds fault though. The fault lies with all those developers that failed to understand how to do those games well.

I say, bravo. +1

Wait, what? The story is uninspiring? Did you get into the series and the whole story behind it? Myst is like a prologue to the greatest adventure/puzzle game series known to mankind! I believe there are even a trilogy of books based on this series, written by the writers of the series too I believe. I do have to say that the puzzles in Myst are quite simplistic and easy, but Riven is amazing.

I just replayed through Myst, Riven and Exile. Still great games. Installing Revelations, which i never completed.
As has been stated previously; puzzles are part of the story, the journals are part of the story. The game gives you the story, whether you want to see it or not is not the games mistake.
The Myst library for example, you could just browse the journals and take notes of what could be hints or you can read it all and learn the story. Same goes for Gehns journal on Riven. It has clues but it also holds a great deal of the story.
(i partly skipped Catherine's journal because the awful handwriting....)

I much prefer puzzles that make sense as a puzzle. The riven gate analogy is a good example of puzzles that don't make sense as a puzzle.
The puzzle on Amateria in Exile where you have to experiment with the weight of the sphere is the most "unmyst" puzzle i have encountered so far; little to no clues(or i completely missed them after reading to the journals countless times) just countless of combinations that do not work except for one. No nitfy mechanics, no logical answer.
Voltaic, for example, was a joy however, an age filled with separate puzzles that work as a whole when completed

Actually there is a hint for the weight puzzle.

*SPOILERS*

In Saavedro's house on J'nanin you can find clues for several puzzles, including a scale and some weights, and a scale with two dolls dangling from it. This second scale indicates that Newtons laws of physics don't apply in the Myst universe (or at least not in that puzzle, either way it's not a very big surprise). Normally, in real life, Momentum left = Momentum right, when balance is achieved. Not in this game. The scale in Saavedro's house indicates that Weight * 3 arm = 2 * Weight * arm. When I realized this I could make a working calculation for this puzzle.

lol I still just find it funny that people have been blaming myst for killing off adventure games since the 90's when they've never actually died out except for a short little time right when 3d games first came out and while myst itself is still the 11th best selling pc game of all time in any genre.
6 million copies sold... and it killed a genre? i think not

anyone hear of any new ones that will play on a shader 3.0 computer?

sadly lately I've only been seeing new ones that only play on really good graphics cards like the 5 cores or talos principles...

although when Xing and Prominence come out.. that'll scratch the itch :)
s

Well this is an odd surprise. I wasn't expecting to find an alternate universe version of the "Final Fantasy 7 killed RPG's" argument here on GOG. Did I just slide through some 90's themed wormhole?

Of course, isn't that what GOG is all about :)