Hello,

I was wondering whether I'm just looking at another bug or if I'm doing something wrong.

So to start off, my assumption with modern puzzle/adventure games is:

- There are no dead ends — you can always finish the game from where you are.

Secondly, things I simply don't get and that I think I should mention since they don't seem to be part of any puzzle:

- The metal "flaps" above each book in my bookshelf. They seem to have no purpose, but I can still interact with them. If I'm supposed to immediately understand what their purpose is then, no, I don't. If on the other hand they're part of a puzzle then fine, I'll figure it out eventually.
- The reset button below each book. Why would I ever want to reset my progress in an age? I don't get it. Also, when I try, it doesn't actually reset my progress! I can simply link directly to the last hand symbol that I activated, and I don't have to reactivate any of them it seems. That's hardly a reset of my progress, I think.


My question:

In the forest age I solved the scope puzzle, and saw the door open through the lowest scope. I entered it, pressed the button inside, saw the door close and a hand symbol reveal itself. Later I linked to the outside of the door and activated another hand symbol, and thought I'd just trigger the scope puzzle again to open the door again, but nothing happens. Am I not supposed to be able to enter the door again? Did the devs just not bother to make it possible to trigger it again, or am I missing something?

I'd say that the "reset button" is a vague, lazy dev implementation of getting around this sort of thing, but it goes against my assumption for adventure games in general so I thought I'd better ask. After falling through the geometry at multiple places in the game I simply have no more patience with sloppy programming.

It's been quite a while since I last played the game, but I think I remember this one. It's a remnant from the game's initial design as an online game where people could explore the Ages with friends (or people who were online and could help out). The metal thingie when released would allow a visitor to your Relto Age, to use that particular book and they'd be able to come with you to your version of that Age. In the single player offline game that URU Chronicles was reworked to be, I don't think it has any purpose any more.

There's still an online version of the game maintained by fans (and I think Cyan is also involved with the servers and some maintenance?) which is called "MYST ONLINE: URU LIVE AGAIN" (MOULa) which you could check out for the online experience as is now (https://mystonline.com/en/).

I don't remember, as of yet, the Kadish Tolesa issue you mention. I did have some hard time in that Age figuring out some of the puzzles but I don't remember getting stuck.

I also don't recall ever making use of the book reset function. But I admit that if the game seemed completely bugged in an Age, I probably would have, so maybe I did and just don't remembet it.

Hey, thanks for the explanation of that mechanism. And the online info.

I did have a suspicion along those lines but the whole online facet of the game looks very weird and awkward in my eyes. What exactly do you gain by multiplaying a puzzle game? The puzzles are your main entertainment and challenge, so letting someone else solve them for you takes away the fun, and surely there's infinitesimal replayability once you've solved them? Eventual additional DLC in form of new ages, sure, but were you really going to hang around online waiting for those to release, as opposed to just play another game until they're done?

So maybe from the multiplayer perspective the reset button makes some kind of sense; if someone else has entered your age and messed around and you want to undo it all.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy getting stuck (as in "how do I progress?") in adventure games, as long as I can trust the developers enough that I'm confident that it's my own fault. I also enjoy analyzing design, so that's part of the reason I want to know what the devs were thinking. Am I really expected to reset the age just in order to progress here? It's weird.

If an online video by someone who is very familiar with the Myst games is to go by, then you don't have to reset the Age. But according to him, you do have to re-do all the viewers to re-open the door since you don't have another way to teleport inside (because you touched another hand cloth outside in the meantime).

Re: the multiplayer game. The game was originally designed (ambitiously enough) as an MMO adventure game. There were mini games for multiple players, and some of the puzzles would require more than one person to be solved. Other than that I think the goal was to be able to play with a friend or your s.o. and work out the puzzles and explore the game's worlds together.

I think that, for some at least, it can be fun to solve puzzles collaboratively--to brainstorm potential solutions, to have multiple pairs of eyes to spot things that one pair might miss, to simply share in the challenge of completing and joy of solving them.

(For a recent example, see "Escape Sim", which is basically a room-escape puzzle game in multiplayer, I believe.)

Thanks! I can see the appeal of playing with someone I know, but maybe not with a massive amount of online strangers. Interesting.

Regarding that forest age, perhaps I didn't restore the puzzle perfectly (my solution had been thrown away) but I reset the age and progressed.

Yes, the puzzles in this age were some of the worst I've ever come across in terms of actual boringness, ambiguity, tediousness, difficulty...

[spoiler]
Scopes: kindergarten level, square block in square hole

Lights/path: utterly bored by the time I had waded through all the possible permutations and ended up tracing an unlit path from the highlighted tile to the arbitrary center with non-inverted button input. Not to mention zero feedback most of the time.

Hexagons: awful in every respect; an explosion of possibilities forcing me to decide between being bored for hours trying them all out *with zero feedback* or using a hint system. I chose both, and seriously, even after reading every hint I still don't get it. There's no logic to the solution — it's completely arbitrary. Waste of time.

Pillars: regression to kindergarten level difficulty for some reason. At least it wasn't a tedious waste of time.

Vault: soon decided that it'd probably be a waste of time like the hexagons and decided that it'd be quicker to just try a few combinations that would be reasonably attractive to the developers. Took about 20 tries, which was at least statistically better than random tries. Maybe I should look up the "logic" behind it come to think of it...
[/spoiler]