I think this might actually be the worst game in the Myst series. It is by far not a bad game, but it's also not nearly as good as Myst and Riven. I haven't played the other ones yet, but I hope they are better. So what's so bad about it? Well, there are many minor things. For example the new 360 degrees view is implemented in a way that hinders fast and fluid movement. In the other two games, you could speed through a whole age within seconds if you needed to go to a different puzzle location quickly. While cinematics for elevators and so on are still skipable, you now have to wait for the view to automatically face in the direction first. This is not skipable and can take several seconds. The puzzles focus much less on logic and much more on trial and error. There is a whole age where I did not have to make a single note but just clicked through it until I was done. Other puzzles just give you the solution beforehand. In Riven, you had to collect clues over the whole world and many puzzles were related. That's not the case here. At last, the elephant in the room: The story. Oh boy. In Myst, you did not know that you had an antagonist until late in the game. In Riven, the antagonist was sympathetic and never did you any harm (if you did not get a bad ending). Here, you are facing the Riddler. He is making you solve puzzles, which means they are not an organic part of the worlds. The worlds are explicitly there to be puzzles. Since, as the creators say, Myst was all about the idea of creating puzzles that seem to belong in their envirmonments, this was most offputting to me.
I really liked this game at first and had a lot of fun with it. It has baeutiful graphics and gameplay with balanced difficulty and fluid movements you can almost feel. I enjoyed how relentless the enemies are and how they force you to fight in impossible places. But at some point the graphics became stale, as I started to notice the lack of animation. Some enemies barely have any movement in them at all. The backgrounds and environments are sterile, without any detail, probably due to the randomized maps. Only the bosses are a bit better, but they are annoying to fight. Some of them take ages, without posing much of a threat. Even the gameplay became a chore after some time: Fighting is repetetive as hell. It took longer than I thought, but at some point the hordes of spawning mobs got on my nerves. Exploration is not rewarded - it's punished. You run into a dead end, persued by endless mobs and face an endless way back. And all the running you have to do! This is a game that should not have had a central hub. All in all: It's good fun for some time, but don't try to finish it.
