I read somewhere that Uru came out of an attempt to make an MMORPG version in the Myst universe. They added JUMPING (why!?) and the world is 10x larger than it needed to be. It took me about 20 minutes just to walk a full circle around the very first area to find what I needed. That doesn't include the usually being confused and lost at what to do (this is a Myst game after all). The need to change between 1st and 3rd person view complicates navigation astronomically. Luckily I discovered after that 20 minute circut of the first first area that the guy you can talk to in the first are is a hint system (thank god!). The second area I tried I had to use a walkthrough to complete because I messed up and had to leave the Age and found out via the walkthrough that a button I pushed RESET THE PUZZLES and made it impossible to backtrack later if I was missing clues. This is why I'm rating this so low. The story and worlds are designed with the same quality expected of Myst, but unpleasant to play. HOWEVER, you HAVE to play this game to fuly understand Myst V. -sigh- I persist...
Maybe It's because I'm binging them right now, so seeing them all side by side, but this addition to the franchise feels less technically refined and the story doesn't quite make up for it. Still I gave it 4/5* since it's still well worth playing. Exile had the benefit of an amazing actor as Saavedra (in 2025, you might know him as Wormtongue from LOTR), which undoubtly also skews my opinion. I think Spire specificaly could have been made more user friendly. Not only did it have the typical "I walked right past it and didn't see it" problem that many games of the era had it ALSO had math-based puzzles that needed to be hinted at earlier in the level just in case the player was like me and wasn't particularly good at such puzzles. I feel that this area was the weakest, but could have been the best, so I'm admittedly being a little harsher than usual.
