Uru is the largest singleplayer Myst game ever made, and yes, it's in beautifully art-directed realtime 3d, the audio is great, the puzzles are great, and, well - what can I say - it's a fantastic game. Uru takes place in the present day, with the idea that you're in our present-day world and you discover a passage into the ruins of the ancient underground city of the D'ni. Backstory in Uru is rich and well tied into the Myst novels/games, but firsthand story is (sadly) rather thin. The graphics are a bit technically dated by now, but the art direction and visual design is so good that it's hard to say that the graphics in this game are anything short of gorgeous. The game is also massive in size - there are more worlds in Uru:Complete Chronicles than in any other Myst game except for Myst Online: Uru Live - which was an expanded version of Uru:Complete Chronicles! There is a lot of great content here, a wide variety of nicely designed realtime 3d worlds, and (this being a Myst game) some pretty tricky puzzles, ranging from (sometimes frustrating) physics-based puzzles to locating hidden objects, to the sort of thoughtful mechanical puzzles Myst games are generally more known for. The audio is also quite good, both the realistic sound effects and the music. The Kadish Gallery, especially, is stunning to listen to. But you'd be making a mistake to limit your awareness of "Uru" to Uru:CC. Simply put, this game was meant to be played as an MMO - a multiplayer adventure game - and it ran that way under the name "Myst Online: Uru Live". During that time, Cyan Worlds released a stream of new worlds for the game which aren't in this single-player version, like Eder Delin, Minkata, Jalak, etc - but there were never enough subscribers to cover the cost of the regular production of high-quality 3d worlds. So, Myst Online: Uru Live was cancelled. Cyan Worlds now (generously) wants to open-source that larger version of the game, as well as the game engine, level design tools, etc - which'll happen whenever they can spare enough cash and time to finish that. Buy the Myst games here at GOG.com, buy Cyan Worlds' "Myst" games, they're great games to begin with, but more than that, high sales of the Myst games and other recent Cyan Worlds projects (like MagiQuest Online) will help Cyan Worlds get the multiplayer version of Uru reopened sooner. For more info on the condition of Uru, check www.mystonline.com.
"Myst" first came out in 1993, and changed the games industry, making CD-ROMs into a popular format and selling some 10 million copies. The graphics, while technically dated, are still brilliantly art-directed. The music is also excellent, and the puzzles, while fairly difficult, are diverse and logical, and definitely solvable, especially with the Masterpiece Edition's embedded hint guide! This game was followed by "Riven" in 1997, which was done with over ten times the budget of Myst and photoreal graphics. Riven is also an exceptional game with a superb story and puzzles seamlessly integrated into the gameworld - and, of course, wonderful sound design. Three more sequels followed Riven, all of them great games. There's also Uru, which is/was a huge, realtime 3d Myst MMO, but it was cancelled. Cyan Worlds (the Myst creators) plan to rerelease it as an open-source game, as soon as they can raise enough spare cash to assign the needed staff to do so. So, basically, by buying Myst and Riven here at GoG, you're not only getting two legendary classic games that are well worth it in their own right, you're also speeding up the release of a Myst MMO and its game engine, world creation toolset, etc, as freeware. In any case, Myst is a great game, the first in a series of great games. Highly recommended!
