Myst Masterpiece Edition

The images are so bad that I am unable to play the MYST game.

In 1993, Myst was a compelling mystery game. It reached a wide audience and sold well, and was one of the easiest titles to find for Windows95 on store shelves. The game itself had (for the time) beautiful prerendered images and what seemed like futuristic animations. But once realtime 3D rendering caught on (beyond clever hacks like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Duke3D which still relied on sprites)... Myst was no longer a big deal. Its static screens, cheesy/slow transitions, and clickable inset animation blocks started to seem lifeless. The story is sparse; you're alone on a series of small islands and must assemble clues in the right order to figure out the mystery. Most of the puzzles are interesting, but at least one will make you get a pencil and paper and another was (for me as a teenager) a total stumper that unfortunately made me turn to the internet for a solution. Unfortunately there's almost zero replay value, because if you know the solution to a few key puzzles, you can go from beginning to end in about 5 minutes. But if you're interested in this enigmatic universe, Myst is good to play as a lead-up to its far bigger and more varied sequel, Riven. Can't decide? Flip through the screenshots -- except for the animations, it's almost the same thing as playing. If that's not enough action for you, then you won't like Myst.

too much time trying to figure out benign clues and no way to store them. Have to revisit a lot. Can't get past the first page. Maybe when I have days on end to work it I will try again. Just no excitement there.

First, I have not played the game yet, so the stars more or less just reflect my expectation. Why I still (or already) write this: Note that this is actually a ScummVM game, i.e. it runs in the same Engine (emulator) used for adventures like Monkey Island etc. So once you installed the game (which worked fine on Wine/Linux) you can just extract the data files from the installation directory and run it in the version of ScummVM for your system (i.e. don't run the scummvm.exe through Wine, but use ScummVM for Linux and add the game there). So far, everything seems to work fine (interaction, sound, video), and looking forward to actually playing this classic. I don't know what all those Running-on-Windows-7/10/11 problems are about, but as long as you get it installed at all, you can try this, too, using the proper ScummVM and not the one that comes bundled with the game.

Installed this on Windows XP and it crashed. Stay away if you want this to work on XP.