THIS IS IT. This simply is one of the best adventure games ever made. It changed the landscape for adventure games forever, and raised the bar for other developers. After all those years this one still stand on top alone ! The world is so believable and atmospheric that you truly get a sense of being there. The puzzles are so clever and integrated within the environments, that it can suck you in for hours. I've been lost on these islands for many hours, and loved every second of it. Truly recommended !
Myst is one of those great classics ! It changed the gaming landscape in 1993, and basically was the birth of a new kind of point and click adventure experience. Together with its sequel Riven the game created some of the best atmospheric game stories ever. It spawned some great mythology, that was explored in some very well written novels. Then things changed. Robyn Miller, one of the chief writers and designers and original creators of the story and games left Cyan Worlds. From that moment on, things changed, and not necessarily for the better. The 3rd and 4th installment of the Myst Series were both developed by different studios, and in the mean time Cyan was doing something on their own. 10 years after the first Myst game released, Cyan released this "something" This something was called (myst) URU, which on paper had a lot of potential. Unfortunately with Uru, Cyan decided to throw a lot of the old mythology out of the window. They even went as far as branding their own previous games as "non canon" to fit the new gameplay style that Uru brought better. (Think MMO with lots of puzzles) This of course was not well received, and a lot of the previous fanbase turned their backs to the series. Uru did have so great elements, but most of the damage was already done, and storywise this saga was no less than a burning wreck. Uru as a result failed, since it was not able to get a stable community to back it up. A lot of upcoming content was shelved or even canned. Then all of a sudden came the announcement that myst 5 was in the making, and Cyan was creating this game themselves. A lot of the unreleased content for Uru went straight into myst 5, and even storywise it has more in common with Uru, than it has with the classical Myst games. This is why I rank this game with only three stars. As a story its vague and disjointed, as a final installment in a series its utterly useless, but it is by no means a bad experience. Cyan knows their craft well, and in this game they have been able to create some very interesting and beautiful worlds for us to explore. The puzzles aren't as hardcore as the 1st 2 games, but they do the job, and most of them are good fun to solve. So as a game it works. Shame that it can not live up to it's amazing predecessors though.
