Popular culture has a remarkably short attention span, especially so in the world of video games. A new game is one that’s been around no more than a month or two; an old game is one that was released over a year ago. Talk to many video game enthusiasts and you’ll get the impression that games released, say, five years ago, are ancient history, archaic as the Model T, something their grandparents played. Many people react to these antique games with something akin to disdain, as if they resembled discoveries from the back of the refrigerator. This is no doubt due in part to how closely games are tied to the forward march of computer technology; it is inevitable that a game from five years ago is going to appear graphically inferior to one produced today. That said, while games are dependent upon imperfect technologies, it is important to remember that the best games will strive to transcend these limitations and excel despite them. This is the context in which we’ve been examining the Myst series: it’s twenty years old, placing it somewhere between Gilgamesh and Beowulf in video game years, but like any work from antiquity, it still has power and meaning worth examining. As we wrap up this journey, I want to take a final look back to consider what the Myst series accomplished, why it’s important, and what its significance will be in the future.

Here’s the formula: You play as a character with no name or personality beyond what you project onto it: essentially, you play as yourself. You are plunged into an unfamiliar environment, with no real understanding at first of the world or its characters. By exploring, you learn about the characters and their backstories. Eventually you will encounter some of them, and in the end you will be asked to make a decision which will impact the characters. Along the way you will encounter obstacles which can be overcome by utilizing logic and clues found during your explorations. You are an active participant in a story. You are not the protagonist.

All the games adhere to this rough framework. Some of them take more liberties with it than others, and most contain additional elements which aren’t necessarily present in the others. This structure has proven its reliability as a medium for interactive storytelling, and luckily it’s also vague enough that it can support an infinite variety of stories, with or without Linking Books. Linking Books are, of course, something of a must in this particular series, but there are a few more specific elements which impart the distinct Myst flavor.

The most obvious element of the Myst series, and probably the most widely discussed, is a concept we might call “character at a distance.” The characters of the stories, and by extension the stories themselves, are learned not by witnessing them directly, but by examining objects related to the characters. These can give us a very intimate understanding of a character (a diary, a bed) or a very public one (the Gold Dome). In either case, the player meets the characters in this metaphorical sense long before encountering them in person–if she ever does. Counterintuitively, this technique often provides a fuller knowledge of character than more traditional methods. Sirrus and Achenar, for example, come across as fairly trustworthy before their sadistic belongings reveal them as lying psychopaths. Other media use this technique as well, of course; any well-made novel or movie will include details about characters’ belongings. What makes Myst’s approach truly remarkable is that it uses this method as its primary narrative device, making dialogue and face-to-face encounters almost marginal in many cases. In most media, this technique would probably be tedious, but in an interactive space, it proves to be a remarkably strong formula. If we’re playing a game, we want to be doing something, even if it’s just rooting around in someone’s cabinets.* Examining people’s things is an interactive way to experience their personalities, and as such it made for a potent storytelling tool in this context.

Another important device which the series employs regularly is the concept of landscape as character. Scenery in Myst is rarely presented as a simple backdrop, but rather as a complex and storied living thing with its own distinct personality. Each Age we visit has its own unique atmosphere, which both enhances player engagement and differentiates it from other Ages. While there are some similarities between, say, Channelwood and Narayan, both have many distinguishing characteristics which add up to completely different environments. Just as we get to know the human characters, we slowly become familiar with the traits of the worlds as well: Riven’s peculiar water, the crumbling archways of Kadish Tolesa, the glowing ore deposits of Amateria. This isn’t to say that the only differences are visual; sound, especially music, plays a strong role as well. While the first game was forced to re-use many sounds simply due to technical restrictions, most of the games which followed use unique sounds in every area, lending a more specific feel to each area even when the player’s eyes are closed. (I highly recommend closing your eyes while playing every once in a while. There’s a lot of truly remarkable sound design in these games.) While the Ages are distinct from each other, most of them also contain distinct sub-areas: Riven is of course the most obvious example, but even small Ages like Stoneship demonstrate this. The lighthouse, the ship, the telescope rock, the two bedrooms, and the compass rose are all part of the same Age. They are very different in form and even in overall aesthetics (to some degree), but they combine harmoniously to the full picture of what “Stoneship” is. To call the construction of these environments “level design” does them a disservice; even Cyan’s term “world assembly” seems awfully clinical. Just as the characters write Ages, the places we visit in the game are very much written, as fiction; each one is a work of art in its own right, even divorced from any other context. Within context, of course, they are one of many elements which support the game’s overall structure, but make no mistake: in a game about exploration, success hinges almost entirely on the strength of the environments.

Equally prevalent in this series, but rarely discussed, is the concept of the player as a “non-character participant.” In most games, the player character, regardless of how thoroughly they’re developed, plays a central role in the events of the game, and is almost invariably the game’s protagonist. This isn’t completely true of Myst. While the player character does perform actions which further the story, he is not developed at all (never mentioned by name anywhere), and is not included in the storyline’s drama. The player character is on the sidelines, literally pushing the switches which move the story forward, but the bulk of the narrative is backstory (which is non-participatory by definition) and character interaction (which is non-participatory in this series). We become, in a way, witnesses to the story, and our only ability to affect its outcome arrives in the form of the bad-ending vs. good-ending choices, but since the bad endings aren’t “real,” the choice is somewhat deceptive. Think of the series as a play in which you’re seated on stage. You can move around the set and examine it from different angles, but you’re not one of the actors, and the action will play out the same regardless of what you do. While in most of the games we play “The Stranger,” the actual protagonist (or, in many cases, sympathetic villain) changes: in the first game it’s Atrus, then Gehn, Saavedro, Yeesha, etc. The significance of this is somewhat interesting: most other games put the player into the role of protagonist (regardless of whether that character is developed or not), which incorporates the player into the story to a degree which no other medium can emulate. By placing us alongside the story, Myst is presenting itself as a more traditional sort of narrative, one in which the audience sees but does not participate in the action.

If a story is going to be based on the interactions between its characters, then naturally those characters must be fairly well-developed. In general Myst succeeds at this, particularly in the sense that it presents multiple sides of its characters. This ties in to the first point, character at a distance: the primary way that Myst builds multifaceted characters is by building discrepancies between what characters say and what we find out about them elsewhere. Many of the characters are unreliable, willing to distort the truth or lie outright when it suits their purposes, but we get to know them well enough that we can not only understand that they’re lying, but we can understand why they’re lying. This is a large part of why Uru and End of Ages seem comparatively shallow: we don’t see very many sides of those characters, so they don’t in general seem very complex. For the most part, though, this series does characters well, creating people who are both believable and relateable, regardless of whether we’re rooting for them or against them.

Finally, the series uses puzzles as a prominent gameplay mechanic, and always at least attempts to disguise them as natural parts of the environment. This is sadly the area in which these games most often stumble; none of the games manage to perfectly incorporate every puzzle (although Riven comes close) and many puzzles are obvious “roadblocks” which could serve no practical function in real life. Making all the puzzles serve real-world functions is, of course, a tall order. Real life objects are generally designed to be straightforward, and so people are unlikely to design things which are overly cryptic or complicated, photocopiers notwithstanding. Coming up with an object which is plausible both as a puzzle and as a functional device isn’t easy, so I do cut the designers some slack here, especially since in most cases they do at least make an effort to incorporate the puzzles into the universe. We’re never once asked to “play Mastermind with the dragon,” and I respect them for that.

The elements defined above are a large part of Myst’s success. In many ways the series was a new kind of narrative, but in others it was a traditional narrative presented in a new way. People love stories, and despite the popularity of sequels, they love new stories and new narrative techniques. The first Myst arrived at a time when personal computers were still something new; even by the time Riven came around many people still didn’t have computers in their homes. The novelty of personal computers created an increased demand for things to do with them, and a game which presented a clear, original story, complete with attractive imagery, easily filled that niche, and in retrospect it’s not that surprising that it sold as well as it did. This is not to cast a shadow over its strength as a work of art, which I think we’ve covered in enough depth already, but it is worth considering exactly why it became the original “bestselling game of all time,” despite the fact that it’s often remembered as something boring or frustrating.** At the simplest level, these games present a story, one which can be enjoyed without the difficult button-mashing which was more prevalent at the time, and there was (and still is) a lot of demand for that.

And what of the novels? Exactly how they fit into the grand scheme of things is somewhat unclear. By and large, knowledge of the novels is not critical to enjoyment of the games, although some details will be obscure without them. Furthermore, the novels are not great examples of novel writing in the same way that the games are, for the most part, examples of great game design. I would say that the most important thing to recognize in the novels is the fact that they demonstrate the innate potential of the Myst universe; that the legacy of D’ni provides a foundation for an endless number of stories, within or without the confines of video games.

So where do we go from here? At this point it appears unlikely that Cyan, Ubisoft, or any other entity intend to make another mainstream-release video game. Likewise, The Book of Marrim has been stagnant for so long I think we can safely assume that it’s kaput. The fact is, a corporate entity needs to see evidence of money to be made before they’re willing to invest in publishing something, and at this point the “Myst” name isn’t one that guarantees success. But, as we’ve established, Myst’s universe still has some life left in it. This makes it fertile ground for fan creations of any kind. I have at times come down kind of hard on the concept of a Myst movie, due largely to my concerns over mishandling the material. But if the project is in the hands of people who know and understand the series… go. Do that. There’s nothing I’d like better. Projects like “Starry Expanse,” the realtime Riven re-make, are likewise wonderful endeavors. While there’s nothing wrong with Riven’s graphics, they are very low resolution, and it’s high time to see that corrected. Projects like these pass the torch from the original creators to an entirely new set of artists, whose interpretations have the potential to meet or even exceed the concepts of the originals. I encourage Cyan to maintain its lenient policies on such works in the future. And if, dare I hope, an indie studio approaches Cyan with a proposal to make a new Myst sequel, may they reach an agreement amenable to everyone. Turning over the rights to such a longtime labor of love must be a difficult thing–but I imagine we can all agree that the series is worth more alive than dead.

Even more importantly, we should remember that the formula of Myst need not only apply to games about Linking Books. Character at a distance, landscape as character, the non-character participant, integrated puzzles; all of these are concepts which can be applied outside the D’ni universe, and it is here that the truly infinite nature of the formula becomes clear. Let’s take a brief look at two games which follow in the footsteps of Myst: Machinarium and Dear Esther.

Machinarium is an adventure game about a little robot who must explore a large world to find his feminine-ish robot companion, who has been locked away in yet another Rapunzel scenario. Gameplay revolves around exploring the vast environment and solving puzzles in order to progress. Strangely enough, the game appears to have little in common with Myst if compared against the list of tropes I outlined above: the characters are all archetypal, the landscape is too varied to be a unified entity, the player character is also the protagonist, and the puzzles (sadly) tend to resemble brain teasers from a science museum gift shop. In other ways, however, it is very close the spirit of Myst. Its world is a delight to look at; each hand-drawn environment is filled with whimsical details and new avenues to investigate. Another similarity to Myst is that much of its story is kept secret at the outset and revealed piecemeal throughout the game. The game begins with the protagonist being unceremoniously dumped into a garbage pile, and it’s not until late in the game that we learn how he ended up there. So while it’s not very similar to Myst in terms of its construction, its emphasis on exploration for its own sake and the mysterious storyline makes it a clear spiritual successor.

Dear Esther, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. Some elements of it are strikingly similar to Myst (it opens with the player standing on an abandoned dock connected to an uninhabited island), and it does play on more of the tropes than does Machinarium. The player character is an unspecified person who may or may not be part of the backstory (it’s a very ambiguous game), the island is complex and clearly worthy of the status of “character,” and the gameplay revolves around exploration and gradual revelations of backstory. (It should be noted that the backstory is kept deliberately vague even at the end, so the player is never exactly sure what transpired.) Gameplay involves exploring the environment, which is lush and detailed throughout, occasionally hearing a narrator voice which reveals most of the story details. We explore a number of environments which the narrator refers to, but sadly, the personal effects of the characters are somewhat unspecific. This means that “character at a distance is not in use here; most of the objects we find are somewhat generic, and often duplicates can be found in other places (multiple copies of the same book, or the same shirt). (I’m not sure if this is perhaps intentional. Maybe the objects are meant to be seen more as symbols than actual remnants of habitation, but personally I would have preferred Myst’s approach.) The game’s characters are thus somewhat unreadable from their belongings, but the narrator gives enough detail that they still feel believable. As mentioned already, the island itself becomes the game’s standout character; it has a strong and consistent visual style and an unmistakeable atmosphere of forlorn neglect. There’s no Final Big Choice, or even any puzzles to speak of, but insofar as the game is about exploring an environment in order to understand the people who once lived there, this game was clearly steeped in the Myst tradition.

The video game sphere can at times seem saturated with titles about specific abilities: simulations of war, survival, future technologies, magic, superhuman traits, et cetera. There’s a place for these games, and there are plenty of reasons to like them: there’s something really exciting about being handed, say, the gun from Portal and given free reign over its unique teleportation mechanic. We want to use this medium to experience things we can’t do in real life. The beauty of the adventure game, however, is that it rarely involves doing anything unusual, but is rather about being somewhere unusual. Portal’s story, amusing as it often is, exists primarily to serve as a backbone for the main attraction: solving puzzles using the Handheld Portal Device. In an adventure game, the story is the primary attraction, and as such a successful adventure game must have a strong story. For the most part, Myst succeeded on this front, and should be recognized for that. Maligned as the games are by many people today, there’s a lot which can be learned from them, and (approached with the correct expectations) a lot to be enjoyed. Its overarching storyline is likewise a complex and multifaceted thing, which even divorced from the series is still an impressive piece of work, suitable for many more treatments. And the adventure game itself, as evidenced by Machinarium and Dear Esther, is undergoing something of a renaissance; game designers are building story games again, and many of them are well worth a look for Myst fans, video game enthusiasts, and, yes, initiates from the general public. Exciting things are happening. The genre which Myst revolutionized in 1993, which has for a while seemingly died away, is coming back in force. It’s a trend which needs to be encouraged, nurtured, and contributed to. Buy these games. Talk about them. If you have the inclination, make some of your own. Yes, it’s that theme from Uru coming back one last time: this isn’t the time to sit in the ruins of a once-proud civilization. It’s time to build a new civilization, one with worlds and stories to rival Gehn’s wildest dreams.

*Of course, surreptitiously investigating the belongings of friends and relatives is an age-old pastime anyway, and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Myst’s popularity is probably in part due to the way it taps into the innate nosiness of humankind.

**There’s an interesting parallel to the Rubik’s Cube, although I’m at a loss to explain how that became a fad.

Final Notes

This series has taken me considerably longer to produce than I expected, and there’s still a lot more to be done. There’s a slew of things we haven’t yet discussed, such as realMyst and various unreleased content which I’m calling The Myst Apocrypha. There are also subjects which merit further discussion, such as the treatment of women in the series and the ways in which music is used. And, as you may have noticed, the first few essays are markedly shorter than those which come later, a fact which should probably be remedied. Some of you have inquired about the possibility of a compilation of this series, in either paper or electronic form, and I think that’s a sound idea. Over the next few months (hopefully somewhat less than a year, fingers crossed), I intend to expand the existing essays as needed, and create some more to cover the Apocrypha and whatever else merits further discussion. I may or may not post these pieces here as I write them, but rather save them for a completed anthology. If there’s anything you want covered in more depth, by all means speak up. I’m trying to come up with a definitive exploration of Myst here, so the more suggestions the better.

I’d like to thank everyone who commented here and on MystCommunity. Your enthusiasm and spirited discussion has made this project far more enjoyable. Particular thanks to Michael “Jevasi” Maresch, who has been providing me with a lot of bits of apocrypha and secrets which I never knew existed. And if you’ve just read the essays but not commented, thanks to you as well–but feel free to leave a comment if you have anything to say.

Perhaps we will meet again someday. You know where to find me.

“What you still don’t understand, you have failed to hear or don’t need to know.” – Yeesha

“Consider it a ‘Myst’ opportunity.” – Esher

At long last, here we are. From the heights of the Fifth Age to the lows of Serenia, through Stoneship and Ahnonay, from the Cavern to Terahnee, we now gather for one last journey, one last quest. I begin to understand why Yeesha talks like that; it’s much easier to write than meaningful sentences, yet it still manages to sound profound.

All silliness aside, Myst V is the end, “the final chapter,” as the box proclaims. Considering how vast and varied a journey it’s been, wrapping it all up is a tall order. We have loose ends from Atrus’s family turmoils, we still don’t know Yeesha that well, the question of the Restoration is still in the air, and (of course) the Bahro. Naturally we also want to check out a few of our favorite old haunts, and see some new places as well. Myst V: End of Ages manages to hit a few of these notes. It has some nice character moments, some spectacular Ages, and the occasional pinch of nostalgia. Unfortunately, it also has some fairly serious flaws that drag down the experience considerably. Is it a fitting end for the series? Considering some of the high points we’ve seen, for the most part it isn’t. At best it’s a predictable end to the series, delivering most of the elements we’ve come to expect, both the good and the bad. Let’s begin.

The game opens with an Atrus voiceover. (Well, why not, every other game has followed this convention and there’s no need to break a precedent, even when it doesn’t make sense anymore.) Atrus talks about how he’s lost everything and everyone he ever cared about, including (he thinks) Yeesha, and ends by saying that he will soon go on to a better place. The implication seems to be that he’s dead, which Yeesha shortly later emphasizes by saying that Atrus’s “time has passed.” It’s a somewhat grim start to the experience; given that Atrus is a very central character to the series, it feels like finding out about the death of a friend secondhand. At the end of the game, of course, it turns out that Atrus isn’t dead at all; the whole thing was just a metaphorical way of saying he lives in Releeshahn now. It’s hard to guess why the game is set up this way. Nothing is really gained by this deception, unless making the player depressed right at the outset can be considered beneficial. Even when we find out Atrus is still alive, it’s not so much a relief as it is an irritation, because then we feel like we’ve been lied to. It’s a minor point, but it does affect the tone of the game, coming at the beginning as it does.

Once the intro is complete we arrive in Atrus’s old prison in K’veer, without any real understanding of why we’re there or how we got there. (This will be a recurring problem throughout the game.) The place is crawling with Bahro, which up until this point have been seen only once. It’s a bit disconcerting to see so many all of a sudden, but it does set the stage for the game we’re about to play, because it is all about the Bahro, for better or for worse.

Also noticeable right from the outset is the new game interface, a realtime 3D world with point-and-click navigation. The game defaults to a “classic” mode in which we have the fixed viewpoints familiar from the Myst and Riven era, only with the addition of smooth transitions between points. There’s also a “classic plus” mode, which is similar to that of Exile in that it allows the player to look around smoothly by using the mouse. This seems ideal to me; it makes the world seem free and immersive without the nuisance of steering around things (although there’s an option for that as well, for anyone who prefers it). This node-based navigation is not without its quirks, though. The nodes can sometimes be far apart and at strange angles to each other, and the transition speed is noticeably faster than a walking pace, so sliding between them often feels unnatural and distracting. Still, it strikes a nice balance between the freedom of realtime environments and the simplicity of the point-and-click system, and overall I think it’s the best navigation scheme of any of the games.

As for the realtime graphics themselves, it is a very noticeable difference, though not always in a good way. The environments, while very attractive, aren’t as realistic as those of the pre-rendered era, and the first-person perspective calls attention to this (moreso than did the third-person perspective in Uru). And while realtime environments can hypothetically lead to more dynamic surroundings, the amount of movement and wildlife onscreen fails to measure up to the standards set by Revelation. The jungles of Haven, for example, are teeming with animals, most of them not visibly looping, whereas an age like Laki’ahn appears to have only one animal species, and all it ever does is run in a tight circle. Some effects are nice, such as the waves at the water’s edge and the swaying grass, but these ages do in general seem more static than anything we saw in Revelation. (To be fair, Revelation set a remarkably high standard in that regard.) The Ages also seem quite small, in terms of explorable area, compared to many earlier examples. I’m not asking for a gigantic world like Riven, which is obviously beyond this game’s scope, but many of the Ages here have less variety than even relatively tiny Ages like Stoneship. Note that this is not to say that the Ages are unattractive: most of them are among the most beautiful of any of the games. Noloben in particular was well-known from early Uru screenshots, and it doesn’t disappoint when seen “in the flesh.” As realtime environments go, it’s hard to say anything bad about them, but in carrying over the control schemes of the pre-rendered era, their shortcomings are more apparent.

Getting back to the game itself, we for the first time get to step outside the locked room in K’veer and make our way down to a large hall containing a weird bubble thing surrounded by tusks. (This series contains a surprisingly large amount of tusks, come to think of it.) Inside the bubble we find a mysterious golden thingie that makes a weird noise when we touch it. The walls of the bubble constantly shift to show other Ages, which makes for some nice subtle foreshadowing.

Upon stepping out of the bubble we are accosted by Yeesha in the first of many, many speeches we will have to endure. Where in previous games, story fragments were discovered throughout our explorations, in this game the vast majority of story content comes in the form of long lectures delivered by other characters. These characters are represented with real-time avatars animated with motion capture and videos of actors’ faces, an effect which tends to land them squarely in the Uncanny Valley. They look more realistic than the CGI characters of Uru, which is important considering how much time we spend looking at them, but certain elements of the character models (irregular specularities on the faces, drawing errors at sharp angles, and seemingly random gestures) are off-putting and distracting. It’s disappointing that the team decided to go this route, especially considering that realMyst demonstrated that it’s possible to combine realtime sets with full-body actor videos. On a technical level, though, the characters work well enough.

Yeesha has aged visibly since the events of Uru and in that time has transitioned from all-powerful demigod to eccentric natural-food-store lady. Her ramblings are even more incoherent than usual, and her vague description of the journey ahead doesn’t really enhance our understanding of anything. I opened this essay with a quote from this speech, because it well encapsulates the entire problem with this game: if you’re confused, you either aren’t paying attention or you’re concentrating on something irrelevant. If only everyone had access to such a convenient disclaimer. As the game progresses the statement begins to feel more and more like an apology for the mess of plot holes and dead ends the story becomes entangled in. Luckily, though, we won’t be subjected to much Yeesha-rambling this time around. In fact, we won’t be seeing much of Yeesha at all, because most of the speechifying will be performed by–

Esher. Through the novels we have been able to meet a handful of D’ni citizens, if never in a huge amount of depth, but until this point we’d never met one in the games. This means that the events of the games are always viewed from an outsider’s perspective. Since the player is herself and outsider, there’s something to be said for that arrangement, but with this many installments it’s high time that we get a peek at the D’ni interpretation of events for a change. Esher is not that character. At times he seems to have depth, to be as wise as his advanced age would lead us to expect, and other times he’s a vitriolic and embittered one-note villain. He’s like a senile grandpa who alternates between reminiscing and ranting about how Republicans are using powerlines to read his thoughts. Esher doesn’t provide any real insights to the D’ni mindset because he’s so dead-set on his cartoonish agenda, speaking over and over again on the same points: he hates Yeesha, he hates the Bahro, and he wants to see D’ni returned to its former glory. He makes many, many speeches over the course of the game, reiterating all these points ad nauseaum, yet in all other things maintaining a careful vagueness to keep us from grasping character, or backstory, or any of those tedious kinds of things. (And while he says he wants to help with the quest, he gives puzzle hints only about once per Age.) The deeply personal soliloquoys of Gehn and even Saavedro are not in evidence. These are lectures, plain and simple, giving us no insight into either Esher himself or to the world of the D’ni at large. To put it bluntly, Esher’s execution is awful. His speeches are so transparently worthless that the player begins to dread his frequent appearances, becoming hesitant of moving anywhere for fear that he’ll appear and start talking. The frequency of his speeches could perhaps be forgiven if he was at least saying something interesting, but in general, to hear one of his speeches is to hear all of them. Esher is just plain annoying, and the few moments when he seems like an interesting character are subverted in the endings, both of which reveal him to be a delusional psychopath. Esher, and even the entire speechifying mechanic, have good potential, and seeing them wasted this way is disappointing, even beyond the annoyance of listening to them.

After enduring speeches from both Yeesha and Esher, we find ourselves atop the volcano near the Cleft, where the passage to D’ni begins. We’ve seen only glimpses of this in Uru, and won’t get to see a lot of it here either, but it is nice to see just a little bit more of it firsthand. Of course, we can hardly walk more than a couple feet without Esher appearing to talk about how the D’ni were wicked awesome and Yeesha is evil yadda yadda, but at least we’re getting to see something cool we’d only heard about before. The area surrounding the Great Shaft becomes a sort of explorational hub, functioning much like Myst Island or J’nanin in that it contains Linking Books connecting us to the game’s various Ages. (It is unlike the aforementioned Ages insofar as half of the books aren’t protected by corresponding puzzles.) As in any Myst game, the Ages don’t need to be visited in any particular order.

Strangely enough, the books we find in the Great Shaft don’t link directly to the Ages, but to an intermediate age called Direbo, where we can link to the Ages via weird bubbles and pedestals with nary a Book involved. In fact, Books will be used only for Linking to and from Direbo; all other Linking is accomplished by Bahro magic, and occurs very, very frequently. There’s so much Linking in this game, and so many ways to do it, that it begins to feel somewhat mundane. It’s a big change from the pre-Uru era, where Linking is performed rarely, and under very specific conditions, so that it feels somewhat exciting and special. End of Ages utilizes Linking as a puzzle mechanic a lot, which while not an inherently bad idea, does make Linking somewhat blase after a while. It no longer means we’re about to transition something special, it’s just a means to an end. Even the iconic Linking sound becomes a lot less intriguing when you hear it six or seven times in the process of solving a puzzle. Linking has a mystique, if you’ll pardon the pun, which suffers considerably when overused as it is here.

The game’s puzzles tend to fall into a handful of different categories, many of which we’re all too familiar with already. Each Age contains at least one puzzle which is dependent on the Bahros’ ability to alter the laws of the universe, a skill which we can utilize by drawing specific pictograms which they interpret. Pictograms are also used to enable Linking between specific locations within an Age. These puzzles are somewhat central to the End of Ages experience, but they’re repetitive in their approach, so the novelty wears off as players begin to realize that it’s really the only original element the game will bring to the table. The other puzzles are, by and large, varieties we’ve seen before: trial and error, machines without manuals, and locks whose combinations are left lying around. While puzzles have never been my favorite element of this series, those seen here have a particular tendency to feel phoned-in. Most have no clear in-universe function (such as the weighted podium in Laki’ahn) and none of them really feel remotely original. The crystal organ and mangree puzzles in Revelation were frustrating, to be sure, but they were at least trying to do something interesting (and both are tied directly to the game’s storyline).  If I’m going to have to think to solve your puzzles, I want to see some evidence that you put thought into creating them, otherwise they just become humdrum routine.

As I mentioned already, the Ages are small but visually impeccable, and while they often don’t offer many things to do, just looking at them and wandering through them is a worthwhile experience. The Bahro pedestals (the waypoints of the pictogram puzzles) actually complement the Ages relatively well from an explorational standpoint; in placement and function they are are similar to the Journey Cloths in Uru, but provide a more interesting mechanic to work with. While navigating from one pedestal to another can still be tedious at times, it’s not as incremental as searching for Journey Cloths over and over again. The pedestals, while not perfect, are in many ways what the Journey Cloths should have been, an actual interactive object which enables easier movement throghout the landscape. (Despite my gripes with the overuse of Linking, it is a convenient system, particularly in games without a Zip Mode function.) Like Uru, End of Ages is primarily about taking in the scenery, and to that end it really is designed quite well.

We’ll examine each of the Ages in brief, starting with Taghira (or, as I call it, “The Li’lest Age”). It’s probably one of the smallest and most inconsequential of any Age we’ve ever seen, and while pretty it’s the most forgettable element of this game. It’s a Prison Age, and a pretty brutal one at that: it’s nothing but a huge frozen rock surrounded by an unending ocean. Considering that murder was supposedly so rare in D’ni, it’s hard to conceive of what crimes could merit such a cruel place of exile. (Then again, this is the post-Uru Evil D’ni, so I imagine the transgression must have been something along the lines of operating a snack cart without a permit.) In any case, Taghira is a featureless wasteland, nothing but white ice and a small handful of funny-looking trees, around which the prisoners built a heat-conduction system. It’s not that Taghira is ugly or uninteresting, it just doesn’t have that much to see. There’s no sign of any of the former inmates, no personal effects or spaces of any kind. Aside from the weird trees, Taghira doesn’t have anything that you can’t see in the Rime Age from realMyst, and in fact Rime contains a number of elements which Taghira doesn’t–and yet Rime is basically just a “bonus” while Taghira is one of this game’s central locations. (Rime is a small frozen age made available at the end of realMyst. In Rime you can see some strange whale creatures in the water, watch auroras, read an exclusive Atrus journal, and do a number of things with Atrus’s “crystal viewer,” which would later appear in Revelation.) The concept of exploring a Prison Age is a fascinating one, particularly if we could get to know the stories of the prisoners, but Taghira, while pretty, seems to be little more than a dry run intended to demonstrate basic gameplay mechanics.*

Progressing down through the shaft, we next come to Todelmer, an Age conceived for the pursuit of astronomy. I imagine that some people may have been put off by its science-fiction vibe, but for my money, Todelmer is one of the most visually spectacular Ages of the series. Todelmer’s sky is dominated by every astronomical feature imaginable, everything from nebulae to colossal planets, and it’s hard to look in any direction without seeing something mind-bogglingly beautiful. The constructions atop improbably tall rocky spires which rise from a very intriguing-looking surface, completely inaccessible but begging to be explored. What also helps Todelmer is the plausibility of its concept: any astronomer would want to study from such a place, given the ability to travel to one, so it’s a natural step for the D’ni to Write this. Among the highly mundane Ages we encounter so often in the Uru era (Nexus: it’s not just an Age, it’s a public transportation system!), Todelmer stands out as one which was written for a specific function, but takes full advantage of the all-encompassing power of the Art.

Next we arrive at Noloben, the Age where Esher lived following the Fall. As mentioned earlier, the aesthetic of Noloben is unique and attractive, a rich combination of surreal beachscapes, windworn rock, and lush grass. Where Todelmer is beautiful in a stark and titanic way, Noloben’s beauty is more vivid and personal. The only real problem with it is in its actual content, in that there hardly is any. This is a place where Esher lived for many, many decades, and yet his “lab” has the appearance of a recently-rented apartment that he has barely started moving into. He has a cage, some grim-looking tools, and a few scraps of unrealistic notes, and it’s just not enough to create a believable workspace, let alone a living area. (I suppose it’s possible his actual living quarters were on a different island, but still we should be allowed to see them, because therein is the strength of this series.) Noloben presented some opportunities for a dramatic exploration of character, in much the same vein as Gehn’s legacy on Riven–and Esher was effectively stranded in his Age for something like three times as long. The scenery is nice, but there should have been more stuff here.

The final Age resumes the theme of the Evil D’ni which was so sadly lacking from the preceding two: Laki’ahn is an Age dedicated to blood sport. Specifically, it is dedicated to watching native warriors battle some sort of ferocious marine animals which grow valuable gems inside their bodies. At this point I think we’ve all become pretty jaded to the sins of the D’ni, but this particular chapter seems almost petty. So the D’ni enjoyed watching dangerous sports. So do most real-world societies. They endorsed the slaughter of animals. Most real-world societies slaughter huge numbers of animals for various reasons. They forced the locals to fight on their behalf. Well, that’s implied but there’s no direct evidence of that, and in all likelihood the natives were experienced at hunting these things already, so in that sense the D’ni were watching something that was happening anyway. And one more point: the arena has less seating than many high school jogging tracks, suggesting that this wasn’t actually a very popular sport. In summation, I’m not that impressed by this as a demonstration of collective sin. As for the aesthetics of the Age, it’s attractive but somewhat bland. It’s a tropical-resort kind of place, and while it has a handful of unique elements (the huge smooth boulders, the weird bird-things) it doesn’t have anything we haven’t seen before. It is expansive, easily dwarfing all the other Ages in the game in terms of explorable area, but (once again) there’s not much story content, and overall it tends to look fairly uniform.

Once the Ages are complete, we are linked back to K’veer and granted access to the golden Tablet, which we have gradually learned unlocks the full power of the Bahro. Yeesha insists that we shouldn’t give her the Tablet (much to Esher’s constant delight), although she does want it, and since there’s no reason to give it to her, it’s a pretty clear bad ending. Esher, ever conniving, comes up with his own plan to get his mitts on it: he plays on the player’s nostalgia by telling her to bring it to Myst Island. Naturally, we all want to go to Myst Island, especially since the descriptive panel reveals it to be destroyed by tempestuous weather. The first time I played this game I already figured that the solution was to give the Tablet to the Bahro (thereby effectively giving them dominion over themselves), but I figured I’d just go ahead and link to Myst and give it to them once I had a look-round. Well, it doesn’t work that way. Going to Myst is an automatic bad ending, because even if you do drop the Tablet, the Bahro don’t show up. The only choice left is to give it to Esher and watch him make a comical fool of himself, cackling maniacally, handing out gratuitous insults, and explaining how this will help him defeat Batman. I’m tempted to apologize for this setup and say that it’s actually an ingenious way of playing against the player’s desires, offering him something he wants, but only if he’s willing to lose the game to get it. Could it be a metaphor for the tablet, which the characters want but comes at a cost of their humanity? Bearing in mind that anything sounds good if you just analyze it to death, I do think this is something of a problem. I knew not to give Esher the tablet, but I just wanted to see good ol’ Myst Island again. The Bahro can and do travel everywhere else, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. If that one little issue was corrected I wouldn’t be complaining, but it’s in there, and I’ve always been a little miffed about that.

As for the good ending, the Bahro snatch the Tablet quite readily once we drop it, and Yeesha falls to her knees and thanks us for accomplishing the “impossible” task of relinquishing the Tablet to the Bahro. The Tablet is one of these One Ring sorts of things that enable the bearer so much power that they can’t possibly be parted with. Of course, to the player the tablet does literally nothing (it can’t even be used to draw all the pictograms we’ve already learned), so the decision to get rid of it is something of a no-brainer. Granted, it would be difficult to give the player godlike powers in the final act, but it would be nice to get at least a little taste of the Tablet’s much-advertised powers. (Even in Esher’s bad ending, the tablet appears to be completely inert despite his maniacal interactions with it.)

Now that the Bahro are their own masters, they teleport us to Releeshahn, where we get a reunion scene with Yeesha and a suddenly-not-dead Atrus. Yeesha talks in her usual vague shtick and Atrus does the thing where he thanks the player for his trouble. Atrus’s facial videos are the most disconcerting of the three characters, somewhat resembling the world’s most weird-looking ventriloquist dummy, and the camera drifts slowly backward as he approaches, as if trying to keep its distance. (pic) Yeesha is also odd in most of this scene; whenever she isn’t talking she stands off to the side with an expression like a petulant teenager. (I’m nitpicking here, but in the final moments of the series’s grand sendoff, I think that nitpicking is justified.) Esher gets in one last appearance as a prisoner of the Bahro, screeching about how he’s the Grower and this is all so unfair and saying pretty much anything that will succeed in painting him as a total lunatic, despite the fact that he’s been depicted as rational but misguided this whole time. Esher had so much potential as a good character, and it’s sad that neither ending allows him to keep at least his dignity if not his sanity. In any case, the Bahro take him away to an unspecified fate and quickly give us a lift in order to get a better look at Releeshahn. It’s a beautiful-looking place, a testament to the Art’s ability to provide an ideal place to live…kind of like Terahnee.

There’s one other element to this ending that merits special consideration. There’s an implication, one never voiced outright but nonetheless in evidence, that the freedom of the Bahro means that the Art will no longer work. Beyond the fact that this contradicts everything we ever knew about it (the Ink comes from special beetles, remember?), it’s a pretty depressing way to end the series, since the Art was the thing that made it so exciting. It effectively means that the happy ending is based on turning your back on the premise of the series and passing the torch to one of its most unpopular elements. I don’t hate the Bahro, but I’ve certainly not been given much reason to care about them…past suffering is not an entitlement. This ending is only positive in the light of the Evil D’ni interpretation, in which the Art was nothing more than a tool of oppression. But as we’ve seen, the Art is far more than that. It’s a means of escape, a medium of art, a conduit of pleasure, a tool of science, a source of food, a freaking mass transit system. Anyone who would advocate extinguishing the art, especially on pretenses as ill-founded as Yeesha’s, is not a hero. That person is a villain–and a very short-sighted one at that.

Finally, for the sake of thoroughness, it’s worth pointing out that even beyond the characterization problems, the game’s story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The existence of the Slates and the Bahro is never explained in any way. Esher implies that the Bahro placed the pedestals, but why they can’t just release the tablets themselves is never discussed, let alone why they’re bound by the system in the first place. Yeesha leaves a series of journals lying around Saavedro-style which provide a mention of how she discovered the tablets in the first place, but no real detail is given. Her journals also give us brief insight into a friendship, possibly even a romance, which she struck up with a D’ni survivor named Calam. However, in characteristic Yeesha fashion, the details of this are obfuscated and glossed over, even the seemingly critical point that Calam was murdered and then Yeesha killed the murderer. That somehow seems like something we might want to know more about. There’s an interesting distinction to be drawn between End of Ages and the original Myst. In Myst, we start off knowing nothing about the world or the story. Gradually we are able to put together the pieces until nearly all the story elements are revealed. There are a few aspects surrounding the specifics of Sirrus and Achenar’s climactic plan which remain vague, but we get all the basics. In End of Ages, we start out with a limited understanding of the world and the story, and the game never really builds on that. The questions which are unanswered at the beginning are by and large still unanswered at the end. The word “Myst” perfectly encapsulates the first game: it’s a mystery of sorts, and takes place in a metaphorical fog which slowly evaporates to reveal the hidden truths. In End of Ages, the fog remains.

I feel bad treating this game as harshly as I have. It’s not terrible, really: it has flaws, but nothing that completely destroys the experience. Like Uru, it’s little more than a bunch of Ages to explore, and unlike Uru, it does at least try to have a story, characters, and a greater degree of interactivity. The thing that makes this game so disappointing is that it’s the end, and the end could have been a lot better. Considered as Uru II, it’s a worthy and satisfactory installment. As Myst V, the culmination of the series, it just tends to pale in comparison. It lacks the sharp, original storytelling and atmosphere of Myst. It’s not sweeping and realistic like Riven. It doesn’t have a strong central character like Exile, or vivid, dynamic Ages like Revelation. Even Uru generally outperforms it in terms of the expansiveness of its environments. The game’s greatest problem, sadly, is not innate to itself but one of comparison. Like a child who can’t live up to the standard set by talented siblings, End of Ages just tends to seem sort of neglected. Cyan Worlds collapsed at about the same time it was released, and there’s definitely a sense that creating the game was a rush against time, just trying to get something out the door before the money was completely gone. As such, its cobbled-together quality is perhaps to be expected. Is End of Ages a bad game? No. It’s troubled, but not bad, when all is said and done. It’s just that in a perfect world, it would have been something much different.

*There’s nothing wrong with a tutorial area necessarily, but speaking as someone who played both Noloben and Todelmer before Taghira the first time, I can vouch for the fact that it’s not a crucial element in this game.

Other thoughts

• The question of whether to rebuild D’ni is revisited one last time, with predictable interpretations. Esher wants to see D’ni restored to its heights, although whether he wants to rebuild the Cavern specifically is uncertain. Yeesha, of course, wants to make a new D’ni, and since the last thing we see in the series is Releeshahn, it’s clear that Yeesha’s position wins in the end. The way this question is handled throughout the series is kind of interesting. The “good” characters inevitably agree that the City should remain ruined, but strangely enough it’s not a debate the players are ever asked to take part in. (Except perhaps in Uru Live, whatever that counts for.) We see the characters worry about it, but it’s not something we as players need to think about, almost like following the political debates of another country.
• Since the origin of the Bahro is never explicated properly, it’s clear that we’re going to have to come up with some fan theories about that one. Here is mine: Most of what Yeesha says is wrong, either by misinterpretation or deliberate distortions on her part. Esher comments offhand that Noloben was the home of the Bahro, and that there were many of them there when he arrived. He also talks about his experiments on them, and seems to harbor a very personal sort of grudge against them. So my theory is that the Bahro were originally a native species of Noloben, and were not, in their original state, capable of the magic powers we see later. Let’s speculate that they have the ability to incorporate genes from other lifeforms into their bodies, granting them new abilities. Esher was curious about this ability and early on in his experiments fed them ink beetles, from which they quickly began to develop abilities pertaining to the Art. (The fact that the Bahro need to touch a specific spot on their bodies to Link seems to suggest an ability which was not originally innate.) Intrigued, Esher began trying to teach them more about it, but he became alarmed as the full extent of their abilities became clear. Soon they’d completely surpassed his ability to control them, and he was terrified as he watched them run amok through the Ages, which he found to be doubly offensive considering how recently the Ages had been dominated by his people. Esher thus becomes determined to see the Bahro defeated, and when Yeesha comes along she misconstrues everything. This still doesn’t explain the Tablet, but since the Tablet doesn’t appear to actually do anything maybe it doesn’t have to.
• The music in this game is fairly solid overall, but in many of the Ages it tends to loop constantly, rather than tonally representing specific areas separately. Todelmer and Taghira are particularly bad offenders in this regard. The sound design is also somewhat generic for once. There are lots of iconic and recognizable sounds in the earlier games, but there aren’t a lot of evocative and unique noises to be heard here.
• A fun activity: whenever Esher starts saying something bad about the Bahro, imagine he’s actually describing himself. Among other things, he is an “abomination,” “a regrettable part of this journey,” and (my favorite) a “perverted tool.”
• Those Yeesha-face projector screens are seriously unsettling. I can’t watch them at all; they make me really uncomfortable.
• On a similar note, why must Yeesha’s journals be read aloud? It’s great for those of us who are slow readers, but it should have been optional as it was in Revelation. I have to take my headphones off to read the journals, and then I hear Yeesha whispering at me the whole time.
• Esher’s weird accent has been discussed many times already, but for the sake of completeness I want to mention it anyway. For some reason he pronounces “D’ni” like “Dk’ni” (or perhaps “duck knee”), or (less frequently) “Df’ni.” “Ti’ana” he pronounces as “Tiag’na.” Everything else he pronounces as you’d expect, and doesn’t have any other accent despite the fact that he’s speaking a language which he didn’t learn until sometime around age 175.
• I kept thinking that Yeesha reminded me of someone, and if finally stuck me that she’s the Log Lady from Twin Peaks. Of course, the other characters in Twin Peaks freely admit that the Log Lady doesn’t make any sense, and while she does introduce each episode, she’s not the primary source of plot information.

Next time: The Great Tree of Possibilities: Final Thoughts

On many occasions I’ve mentioned Myst to an avid video game enthusiast and seen the same reaction: their eyes glaze over and they say that they thought it was boring. As I’ve established throughout these reviews, one’s enjoyment of these games is due in large part to one’s willingness to meet the game’s story at the level it’s being presented. Uru, as we have seen, tends to be even more difficult to appreciate, since its story is obscure at best, and feels somewhat empty even to invested players. This final installment, sadly, does nothing to correct that precedent, and unfortunately compounds it with an almost complete lack of storyline and some of the most tedious and repetitive puzzles ever devised. Uru: The Path of the Shell is not without its charms, but the inescapable fact is that it is, in all honesty, pretty boring.

So here we are. We traveled with Yeesha on a tour of D’ni’s sins and learned about the bahro. We watched the demise of the DRC and learned that following Yeesha is the one true path because every other option is evil for some reason. So we’ll keep following Yeesha, why not. Her newest Journey revolves around Guildmaster Kadish, who we last saw lying dead amongst his own riches. We can surmise that Yeesha expects us to learn something from Kadish’s example, but Yeesha keeps quiet about what exactly that is. For the moment, as so often happens, we have nothing to do but explore.

The game opens in The Watcher’s Sanctuary, a sort of lavish ballroom from which Kadish propagated a new religion. The The Watcher, we learn, was a Nostradamus-like prophet who foretold the coming of someone called The Grower. Over the course of the game we will learn that Kadish was pretending to be the Grower by means of elaborate hoaxes, but that Yeesha genuinely is the Grower. This is where things start to go wrong.

Uru has at this point brought us a number of unprecedented digressions from the Myst universe as we knew it, but this, to me, is where the definitive “shark jump” occurs. The bahro and various linking shenanigans were hard enough to swallow,  but now ancient prophecies are coming true and Yeesha is the Chosen One. Here’s the problem: When this series got started, it presented players with a universe in which there was exactly one form of magic: the Art. The series used that as a mechanic to travel to other worlds. These worlds, while often bizarre and surrealistic, were always depicted as credible and abiding by the laws of the overall universe, which means (for example) that you’ll never find an Age in which the laws of physics work differently. The characters’ stories are likewise defined by this free movement between worlds. Their lives have the potential to be very different than our own, which presents many unique storytelling opportunities–especially for characters like Gehn and Saavedro who would be interesting in any context. We’re attracted to the Myst storyline for two reasons: 1. We want to visit these strange and wonderful worlds, and 2. We want to learn the stories of people who live in them. These characters can do something we can’t, and we want to know what they decide to do with that ability. That’s all we need to be hooked. Adding more magical things to the universe serves only to make it less credible.

We’ve accepted a few new forms of magic up to this point because they’re at least related to the magic we had before: the Journey cloths, the Relto book, and even the bahro are at least marginally connected to the Art. Prophecy is another matter entirely. To prophesy is to see the future. To see the future is to establish a universe in which pretty much anything is possible, because it becomes possible to know anything. Introducing prophecy where it did not previously exist implies that your universe no longer follows any rules at all.

This is not even to mention the actual content of the prophecy: that Yeesha is the Chosen One. The concept of a Chosen One, a character who is uniquely and often supernaturally qualified to fulfill a specific destiny, is so overused in fiction that it has probably become one of the most well-known of all tropes. As such it’s a difficult concept to use well, as we’ve seen it a million times before, and Uru does nothing original with it. We’re told that Yeesha alone can lead the D’ni to some unspecified future, and that’s about it. Her destiny, whatever it is, subverts all the conventions we’ve come to care about, and since we hardly know her as a character at all, there’s not really any reason to care about what takes place here. All of Uru’s storytelling problems converge at this point: we don’t know the characters, we don’t like what they’re doing, but we’re told that what they’re doing is right.

From the Watcher’s Sanctuary we can access all the primary locations of the game: the Ages of Er’Cana and Ahnonay and Kadish’s infamous puzzle-maze. There’s nothing to do in the maze at this point, so the first step is to check out the two Ages. There’s one last notebook of exposition from a helpful DRC member which explains that Kadish kept these two books here on purpose. Er’Cana was an agricultural Age for which he designed a good deal of machinery, and Ahnonay was a special Age in which Kadish demonstrated his magical time-travel abilities, which are apparently one of the Grower’s many talents. (The DRC journal remains agnostic as to the validity of these claims.) Yeesha keeps silent throughout this entire journey, so from this point onward our actions are largely self-directed; her only involvement is to tack up a lot of bumper stickers referencing specific verses in the Watcher’s prophecies. We will make this entire journey alone, without encountering any other characters. This is by far Myst’s loneliest chapter.

Moving on to the two primary Ages, let’s take a look at Er’cana. To its credit, one thing that Path of the Shell does do very well in general is its striking visuals, and Er’cana is among most dramatic environments in all of Uru. We arrive at the bottom of a narrow, sandy crevasse with smooth windswept walls, and gradually make our way out into a wider canyon which leads up to Er’cana’s industrial facility. This initial area is vast and starkly beautiful, a quiet and lonely landscape which has largely returned to the wild, and in that sense is somewhat reminiscent of Teledahn. The atmosphere is somewhat different inside the industrial complex, which is filled with a lot of noisy and very impersonal machinery. This is where Er’cana really diverges from Teledahn: both are functional landscapes, partially reclaimed by nature, but where Teledahn has a very distinct sense of history and Sharper’s personal perspective, most of Er’cana is just machinery. The puzzles here are fairly straighforward; most involve activating or deactivating various things in order to clear a path through the factory. The ultimate goal here is to manufacture a batch of large pellets which create light when submerged in water. These are needed later on to illuminate a cave containing an important clue, marking the second time in Uru in which we have to rely on awkward sources of illumination in order to see something in the dark. (Using fireflies is not a valid solution, though there’s no reason it shouldn’t work a second time.) Of course, we’re not told why we need to make these things at first, so the only reason we know to solve the puzzles is that there’s simply nothing else to do. As in the rest of this game, there’s pretty much no story content here, which makes the explorations somewhat hollow despite the nice visuals.

Ahnonay is something entirely different. As mentioned earlier, Kadish designed Ahnonay as a place where he could demonstrate his ability to time-travel. As we explore the Age, we see this effect come into play as well: what starts out as a tropical island suddenly becomes a stormy wasteland, and then just as suddenly seems to be floating through the void of space. We ultimately learn that the landscape we see is actually a fake, the three variants contained in separate little bubbles which can be rotated into place before link-in to give the illusion that the Age is changing. (For the sake of completeness I should mention that there’s a fourth variant as well, but it’s not in the normal rotation.) Kadish, supposedly, constructed this entire device in order to fool people into thinking he could travel through time, a process which involved walking around the perimeter of the Age, linking out, then linking back in to find it miraculously altered. As a magic trick it’s decent, but that Kadish could actually portray this as an authentic phenomenon seems somewhat hard to believe. The areas are small enough that even the most rudimentary exploration would give away the secret (for example, from many angles one can easily tell that the “horizon” is only a few hundred feet away) and the fake continuity seems highly implausible, particularly the space variant (even disregarding how the island could end up in space to begin with, why is there air and gravity?). Though both Yeesha and the DRC claim that Kadish styled himself as the Grower, I suspect that his show was tongue-in-cheek at best, and that he was more interested in showmanship and attention than the fulfillment of prophecies. (His puzzle-maze demonstrations also fit well in this interpretation.) As a hoax Ahnonay is difficult to take seriously, but as the most complicated and expensive magic trick in the history of the universe, it makes a perverted kind of sense.

As for Ahnonay’s puzzles, they are some of the most tedious and repetitive tasks ever brought to the video game medium. The marker hunt in To D’ni at least allows you to visit new places as you search, but Ahnonay’s puzzles tend to involve doing the same things over and over again…and if you’re trying to solve them rather than just following a walkthrough, you’re going to repeat yourself even more. The first task we encounter in the Age is to chase all the crablike “quab” creatures off of the island, a process which is cute once or twice but quickly becomes tiresome once you realize that you’re going to have to repeat it twenty or so times. Once that’s accomplished, you must shatter lots of crystals. From there on it’s a series of manipulations involving touching Journey Cloths at the correct intervals and swimming back and forth over lengthy distances in order to pull levers in sequence. All of this must also be punctuated by frequent linking in and out of the Age, with requisite loading screens. And since none of this is spelled out explicitly, solving the Age involves lots of trial and error. Playing Ahnonay with a walkthrough is tedious and repetitive, but playing it without one is a trial of patience which even a seasoned Zen master would find punishing.

A recurrent theme in Path of the Shell is that of the passage of time, a concept which is frequently integrated into the puzzles. It’s an interesting idea, and one with a lot of potential, but very difficult to do in a way that would be both enjoyable and interesting. In the case of this game, the temporal aspect of the puzzles consists primarily of waiting. In total, players will spend a total of forty-five minutes of real-world time simply waiting for things to happen in the game, assuming that the puzzles were solved correctly. (In the event that you’ve made a mistake, some of these waiting periods will need to be repeated.) The aforementioned forty-five minutes are broken up into three different puzzles. One is a process which takes fifteen minutes to complete, and in the interim you are free to do whatever you like. The second requires you to wait in a cave for fifteen minutes, but you’re allowed to wander around the cave while you wait. The third and most notorious is one in which standing still for fifteen minutes is the solution. I am open to games which integrate unusual mechanics and unorthodox puzzle solutions, but there’s something truly absurd about a game in which the solution to the puzzle is to leave your computer while the puzzle solves itself. (About half of my notes for this essay were prepared during this period.) At least, for once, it’s not a case of trial and error (as this waiting period is described fairly explicitly), but something interesting to do, even something stupid and pointless, would be more interesting than standing around doing nothing.

The game’s final act is somewhat perplexing experience. After finding and walking the ultimate Path of the Shell (which in this case is a simple labyrinth drawn on the floor), we suddenly link into the familiar false fireplace in the Myst Island library. The library has been stripped and the door is securely shut, so the rest of the island is inaccessible, but the “you” character is now “really” on Myst Island, a location which the “you” character previously visited only in a video game. Uru’s weird “you-are-you” effect somehow makes this seem like a stunning development, despite the fact that we’re just seeing a scene from one game inside a different game. There’s nothing wrong with that; it is in fact quite exciting, but you feel kind of dumb if you ask yourself why you find it exciting.

Of course, when there’s a fireplace in a Myst game, you know you’re going to have to enter a grid code, and this is no exception. After entering a code gleaned piece-by-piece throughout the game, the fireplace spins around to grant access to the K’veer book from the first game. (The code from the first game works too, but when the fireplace spins around you see a new Relto add-on rather than the K’veer book, strangely enough.) Upon linking to K’veer, a loud Yeesha voiceover cuts in. (And it is loud. In fact, it turns the game volume back up to maximum if you’ve changed it.) She declares herself the Grower, proclaims the Grower’s destiny as master of both time and space, and derides Kadish for claiming such powers. She also states that she’s liberated Kadish’s bones from his vault. Once her little speech is over we return to K’veer. There’s not a lot to see here, but Yeesha does leave a message for Atrus in which she tells him that thanks to her new destiny, his “burden is lifted.” This seems to represent a sort of passing of the torch from father to daughter,  and is a fairly nice character moment. (Although personally I think Atrus’s reluctant but levelheaded stewardship of the D’ni is probably preferable to Yeesha’s inscrutable powers and questionable sanity.) Yeesha generally comes across as spiteful and dismissive of anything having to do with her father, so it’s refreshing to see that she actually does care about him.

All this brings the game to a somewhat overbearing and perplexing conclusion. We’re still not really sure what The Grower is supposed to do or what, exactly, her powers entail.  And yet it does bring a degree of closure to the Uru storyline, which in the end seems to be a story about Yeesha’s struggle to transcend the worldly remains of D’ni to become a demigod. (The wisdom of including such a transformation in the story is somewhat beyond the point now.) There’s one more hidden ending, here, though: naturally we have to go see if Yeesha was telling the truth about Kadish’s bones, so it’s time to revisit Kadish Tolesa. But in the vault nothing appears to have changed. The skeleton is as we left it and the room is still piled high with bags of cash, carpets, and paintings of Teledahn. The inquisitive player, however, will eventually find a small linking book hidden in the corner. It links to an alternative version of the vault which is largely empty and which does not include Kadish’s bones. In the new vault we hear the musical theme of the Great Tree of Possibilities (D’ni’s metaphor for the infinite nature of the Art) and find various scraps which imply that Yeesha traveled back in time and rescued Kadish from his fate. It’s a strange ending, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered (exactly why did Yeesha save him when she’s always badmouthing him?), but in its own understated way it’s very nice. Uru in general spends a lot of time beating you over the head with what you’re supposed to think, so it’s refreshing, for once, to be told nothing and left to form your own conclusions.

Other thoughts

• This is the only part of the Uru arc to feature the “rides” that were so common in the rest of the series.
• The chair elevator in Ahnonay makes the same sound as Gehn’s gallows control chair. After spending hours slogging through Ahnonay, being reminded that I could have been playing Riven instead kind of stings.
• Another problem with the quab puzzle in Ahnonay is that the quabs are really cute and I would have preferred to let them stay on the island. (In general puzzles involving animals are a disaster. Real-life animals are very unpredictable, so these puzzles are often kind of implausible and ill-conceived by nature, even when executed successfully.)
• One more note about Ahnonay: in numerous places you can see clumps of grass suspended in midair beyond the edges of cliffs. That’s unusually shoddy world-building by Cyan standards.
• The sound design in Er’cana is terrific. It does a great job of establishing atmosphere, drawing a stark contrast between the soft wildlife of the outside and the alien machinery within. One room, the pellet-baking area, is completely silent, devoid even of that familiar hollow rushing sound, lending the area a sense of importance and solemnity. It’s a creative and attention-getting technique, strangely enough.
• I never noticed this detail (see image below) before this recent playthrough. Any ideas about why there’s  a drawing of the Fissure in Er’cana? (You can find this by following the broken train track until you see a niche in the canyon wall.)

Next time: Myst V: End of Ages

Screenshots are property of Cyan Worlds, Inc.

Book features:

1. Issues 1-10, naturally
2. The existing pages of the canceled issue “The Bargain”
3. Both April Fool’s Day jokes.
4. Selected excerpts from original online commentary
5. Brand new retrospective commentary unique to the book
6. A complete guide to the comic’s easter eggs

Click here to buy it. ‘Tis fun either way.

once upon a time, I would
create a single polygon the shape of the perimeter of the fence line.
project this to terrain/ground
wall plus this nonplanar face
set the proflie in wall plus to have a 30 degree bend at the top about a foot down (two points) -gives a “3d” fence with barbed wire geometry at top
texture with nearest (to have forced poles at the corners – do texture accordingly) -wasnt a CDB db
then those polys were all reset to view 2x
shade

(Source here.)

“There’s a couple things that the fans will like. I think the first is the fact that they get to go to D’ni. And anybody who knows our stuff on a little bit deeper level knows that D’ni is someplace you want to go.” – Rand Miller, interview from Myst 10th Anniversary DVD Edition

Long before Uru was released, it was well-understood among the fan community that the game would finally allow players access to D’ni itself. This was, undoubtedly, the game’s strongest selling point among the fans. It was something of a disappointment, therefore, to find that Ages Beyond Myst offered only cursory glimpses of the Cavern: a couple small balconies, a rooftop, and a tiny office. Sure, you could catch a glimpse of Kerath’s Arch (a well-known D’ni landmark), but unless you were one of the lucky few who had access to Uru Live, D’ni seemed to be nearly as far away as ever. It wasn’t until the collapse of the multiplayer edition that the Cavern was opened to all, in the form of this first expansion pack, To D’ni. It was made available free of charge, which makes it clear that its intent is to grant D’ni access to as many people as possible following the demise of the online community. It’s not much of a game, per se, but it’s not really trying to be: we, the fans, wanted access to D’ni, and they gave it to us. In addition to that we also got some closure to the Uru Live storyline, a objective (albeit a somewhat dull one), and some foreshadowing of the expansion yet to come. Overall it’s somewhat impressive that Cyan Worlds managed to release something of this scope even while reeling from the destruction of its longtime labor of love, but the inescapable fact is that To D’ni’s meager content is somewhat beaten down by its tedious and repetitive gameplay mechanics. To D’ni wanted to be more than a couple additional environments, but in actuality that would have been enough.

As I illustrated in the two opening quotes, the phrase “to D’ni” has an interesting kind of duality to it: it can be seen either as a dedication or a destination. As a game, To D’ni is about going to D’ni; as a work of art it can be seen as something made in honor of D’ni. This concept is reflected in its gameplay; To D’ni is very much a game in which the journey is more important than the destination, and one’s ability to enjoy it is dependent on one’s ability to appreciate the ruins for their own sake. Flawed as it is, this installment, more than any other part of the series, is an exploration and celebration of D’ni itself.

To D’ni begins with the addition of a single new Linking Book to the player’s bookshelf, one which links to Bevin, a small neighborhood on the outskirts of the Cavern. Within Bevin there is literally nothing to do but wander around, and there’s no real suggestion of how to proceed. The only thing which might plausibly be considered a clue is a notice board which indicates that Teledahn steward Douglas Sharper visited recently. This is, I supposed, meant to suggest that we’re to travel to Sharper’s office, but as a clue it’s not a particularly intuitive one. (I suppose one might argue that there’s nothing inherently wrong with unintuitive clues, but I do suspect that many, many players needed to use a hint guide to proceed past Bevin.) Upon traveling to Sharper’s office we learn the backstory of To D’ni: a tragic accident has killed Phil (a DRC member and occasional Yeesha ally), forcing the DRC to re-evaluate their mission. Due to the tragedy and other insolvable complications (such as Ubisoft, presumably), the DRC decides to call it quits. By the time the player arrives in the Cavern, the DRC is gone. Sharper’s journal also foreshadows elements of the next installment (mentioning the phrase “Path of the Shell” for the first time), and provides a clue needed to solve the game’s final puzzle. This first act of the game is a fairly disjointed one, often requiring a walkthrough just to figure out what the objective is, but it’s also the only part which feels something like a story. Phil is one of only a handful of characters who exist in Uru, and while visiting his small spaces doesn’t quite compare to wandering through Gehn’s vast territories, it does convey a sense of personal intimacy while it lasts.

Once the Phil chapter is over we gain access to Ae’gura (D’ni’s capital), and to the Great Zero, a high-tech navigation system used to find coordinates throughout the Cavern. From here onward To D’ni’s gameplay comes into its own, by which I mean it becomes tedious and repetitive. To complete the game, the Great Zero must be activated, and to do so requires the player to wander aimlessly throughout the Cavern in search of holographic markers. This quest is literally no different than an Easter egg hunt. There are no clues as to the locations of markers, so finding them consists simply of stumbling across them, one after another, until you find enough to satisfy the Zero’s quota. The search forces us to wander to every (accessible) corner of the Cavern, but since we wanted to do that anyway, the tedium of the search actually somewhat detracts from the exploration rather than improving it.

This objective notwithstanding, the act of exploring D’ni is worthwhile and interesting. While we don’t visit many places directly related to the storyline, the sense of D’ni’s overall history is quite strong. The City is cavernous in both literal and metaphorical senses, and the traversable area is fairly large, particularly by Uru’s standards. While the player’s movement is restricted, the illusion of a continuous landscape is pulled off very effectively. D’ni is designed as a highly functional and practical landscape, making it easy to imagine the citizens who once inhabited it. The pride of the D’ni, as well as their predilection for efficiency and skilled workmanship, is evident in all the architecture. The only thing that’s really wanting is a sense of the personal, something to offer a connection to specific individuals who once lived here. This omission is due in part to the fact that we’re unable to access the interiors of most buildings, but even those which are open tend to be cleared out (apparently by the DRC). The small “pub” accessible through a collapsed wall is about as close as the game comes to giving us a true sense of personal life, and it’s a nice moment that I would have liked to see more of. Whether or not one wants to go through the entire Great Zero calibration sequence (and to be honest, little is missed by skipping it), Aegura is one of the most interesting areas included in the Uru trilogy, and is well worth a look.

Perhaps the biggest contribution this game makes to the D’ni lore is in the form of a huge amount of written background material. There are literally dozens of notebooks detailing the exploits of various D’ni kings, and several more about the ins and outs of D’ni culture. (The latter are technically available in Ages Beyond Myst, but are more relevant to this discussion.) There’s a lot of information here, and the level of detail is downright incredible. Many generations of D’ni history and politics are at the player’s fingertips, covering everything from political churnings to the evolution of the D’ni religion. That said, it’s hard to stay motivated enough to actually read it all. (I will admit that I’ve only dipped into small amounts of it, mostly in preparation for this essay.) While it’s interesting in its own way (and, to be sure, a very impressive accomplishment), it really is the purest form of backstory: an unvarnished pile of exposition which will come across as forbidding to all but the purest D’ni-history diehard.

Once the Great Zero is finally activated, we can track down the mysterious coordinate from Sharper’s journal, which turns out to represent a weird sort of linking portal in the shape of the Path of the Shell emblem. It’s one of a couple different touches which foreshadow the next installment, and I appreciate that despite To D’ni’s shortcomings, it is at least integrated into the overall story arc. The phrase “Path of the Shell” manages to take on a number of different meanings over the course of the series, and here it refers to the Great Shaft (a vast vertical tunnel between the Cavern and the surface), where the game ends. There’s not a lot to do or see there. Of immediate interest is a journal left behind by Richard Watson, D’ni historian and real-world Cyan employee, in which he expresses his sadness over the demise of the DRC but looks ahead to the alternative resoration which Yeesha promises. The familiar question of whether D’ni should be restored recurs again here, and again the game answers firmly in the negative. Watson’s reasoning is that a “restored” D’ni would still be just as dead, and therefore it’s better to join in Yeesha’s quest to build a new, living D’ni. The sentiment is understandable, but Watson’s new quest is somewhat too vague to be a very engaging proposition. Furthermore, from what we’ve seen of Yeesha’s quest so far, it seems to be less about building a new D’ni society than it is about demonizing the old one. It’s a somewhat odd ending taken by itself; Myst V follows up on it to some degree, but in its own context it feels somewhat empty. Its strangeness is compounded slightly further by the fact that the game’s final objective is simply to jump into the Great Shaft (and link away at the last second, the same as if you’d fallen by accident). This ending isn’t a failure, per se, it does provide a sort of closure, but like most aspects of To D’ni, it does so in a somewhat awkward and contrived manner.

To D’ni was, by and large, thrown together to allow offline players (that is, everyone) access to the formerly-restricted D’ni environment, and both the sentiment and the breadth of it are deeply appreciated. What it lacks in story it makes up for in atmosphere, and its only grievous shortcoming is its tacked-on objective. In no other part of the series do we get to experience this much of D’ni firsthand, which means that, like the DRC, our own exploration of D’ni also ends at the close of this installment. To D’ni finally makes the Cavern available, but it also it takes it away.

Other thoughts

• I’m guessing that the Great Zero’s laser beam must have been turned off most of the time when D’ni was still thriving, because I can’t imagine wanting to put up with that all the time. Even within the game it makes revisiting the Cavern somewhat less pleasant afterward.
• When linking using Yeesha’s weird symbol, one can hear the distinctive Linking sound used in Riven. It’s a nice kind of consistency; apparently that’s just what an unaturally-powered Link sounds like. (I suppose it should have retroactively been used for the Selenitic book as well.)
• Phil’s bookshelf includes the books from Path of the Shell, implying that he completed that quest before he died. How he did so is something of a mystery to me, though, as I don’t think it’s implied that Yeesha was taking people on that quest until some time after To D’ni takes place. As for the rest of Phil’s books, it’s endlessly frustrating that you can see them but you can’t take them off the shelf.
• Many of the names on Bevin’s visitor log are those of familiar Myst fandom members. Former uber-fan (since vanished) lonelyto25 is among them. His name, according to a D’ni idiom, means “as lonely as possible.” In this context, his longtime handle takes on a degree of irony which wasn’t present while he was still around.

Next time: Uru: The Path of the Shell

Screenshots are property of Cyan Worlds, Inc.

Fitzhugh, Louise – Harriet the Spy – 1/7

I enjoyed this book as a kid and I was pleased to discover that it holds up just as well, if not better, read as an adult. If you’ve never read it, go get it now, no matter how old you are.

Keyes, Daniel – Flowers for Algernon – 1/17

Short story version is probably still my favorite, but it’s worth a look.

O’nan, Stewart – Wish You Were Here – 1/27

A good example of a book in which nothing happens. The story is driven entirely by its characters.

Updike, John – Problems and Other Stories*
Millhauser, Steven – The Knife Thrower and Other Stories*

Millhauser is weird and fun.

Miller, Rand and Robyn -  Myst: The Book of Atrus – 2/14
Jin, Ha – A Free Life – 3/13
Keret, Etgar – The Nimrod Flipout*
Murakami, Haruki – 1Q84 – 5/6

Murakami is writing some of the best surreal stories around, and this gargantuan novel is possibly his best yet. Don’t miss it.

Miller, Rand – Myst: The Book of D’ni – 5/9
Maxwell, William – So Long, See You Tomorrow – 5/19
Kress, Nancy – Steal Across the Sky – 6/23

Possibly Nancy Kress’s worst book. Most characters are all right, but the story falls flat on its face in a mire of overused tropes and credibility problems. Avoid.

Lethem, Jonathan – The Fortress of Solitude – 8/03

First Lethem I’ve read and I didn’t realize he was a magical realist at first, which made the introduction of magic somewhat jarring. Some very good writing here.

Gregory, Daryl – Pandemonium – 8/22

Nice debut SF novel. Not perfect, but still good.

Dick, Philip K. – A Scanner Darkly – 9/04

Strangely enough, I’d never read this PKD before but it has to be one of his best. Very little in the way of actual futurism, just a psychological and jarring exploration of a bizarre drug that does not (yet) exist and the characters who are affected by it.

Miller, Rand and Robyn – Myst: The Book of Ti’ana – 9/12
Murray, Paul – Skippy Dies – 9/29

An interesting novel from a new Irish writer. Comic in general, but also insightful and at times deeply moving. Definitely worth a look.

Shriver, Lionel – So Much for That – 10/13

This book is a big mess. Strong characters, except for the ones who are cardboard, and lots and lots of soapboxing about the failures of the American healthcare system. Still, I do intend to check out some of her other books, because if this one is just a fluke than the others are probably quite good.

Powers, Richard – Gain – 10/26 *quit

I often like Powers, but this one always sounded boring to me. Turns out it was.

Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice – 11/19

Jane Austen here provides a terrific moral for all fiction writers, and indeed for life in general: there are as many sides to every story as there are people involved in it.

Seena, Danzy – Caucasia – 12/3

One of the strongest novels I read this year. Strong characters, insightful exploration of contemporary issues, an incredibly good title…what more could one want?

Oates, Joyce Carol – My Sister, My Love – 12/23

VERDICT: Top recommendation has to go to Murakami’s 1Q84. Whether you enjoy literary fiction, fantasy fiction, or both, you will probably love this book. Least favorite, alas, must go to Kress’s Steal Across the Sky. I have high expectations of Ms. Kress and this book is simply not up to her normal standards.

NON-FICTION

Heins, Marjorie – Not in Front of the Children – 2/3
Freinkel, Susan – Plastic: A Toxic Love Story – 2/25

Interesting exploration of plastics and their significance to our society. Worth a look.

Levy, Stephen – Hackers – 6/15

This early history of hackers is filled with colorful characters and anecdotes, but what really makes it fascinating is to read it in the light of all that’s taken place in the thirty or so years since publication. No Internet here, no open-source movement, but you can see the seeds being sown. Highly recommended.

Paterniti, Michael – Driving Mr. Albert – 7/9

It’s a philosophical road trip with Einstein’s brain! The philosophical part is the big problem, though. A largely tedious book which tries to be much more than it is. Skip.

Weber, Katharine – The Memory of All That – 7/17

VERDICT: Not a big non-fiction year for me, as you can see. Top pick: Hackers, for reasons mentioned above. Anti-recommendation: Driving Mr. Albert, for reasons mentioned above.

COMICS

Amir and Khalil – Zahra’s Paradise – 1/10?
Burns, Charles – X’ed Out – 1/12
Larson, Hope – Mercury – 1/18
Bechdel, Alison (ed.) – The Best American Comics 2011 – 2/17
various – Kramers Ergot #5 – 2/19
Seth – It’s a Good Life, if You Don’t Weaken – 2/24
Small, David – Stitches – 2/26

I’m always suspicious of graphic memoirs, but this one was quite good on a lot of fronts.

Clowes, Daniel – The Death Ray – 3/10
Huizenga, Kevin – Curses – 3/23
Burford, Brendan, ed. – Syncopated – 3/24

An anthology of non-fiction comics by many different creators. Terrific stuff.

Burns, Charles – Big Baby – 3/29

Fun weird short stories from earlier in Burns’s career.

Robinson, Alex – Tricked – 3/29
Griffith, Bill – Lost and Found – 4/30
Sturm, James – Market Day (re-read) – 6/3
Klenell, Johannes (ed.) – From the Shadow of the Northern Lights vol. 1 – 6/19
Clowes, Daniel – Caricature – 6/30

Clowes is better in this short story form. Concise and memorable.

Nilsen, Anders – Big Questions – 7/1

Not necessarily a good book, but definitely an interesting one. In general I don’t like the kinds of stories that have cryptic philosophical morals, as this seems to, but beyond that aspect it’s an interesting sort of 900-page mood piece. Nice drawings too. Worth a look.

Piskor, Ed – Wizzywig – 8/18

This story of a typical hacker would have been a lot more enjoyable if I hadn’t just read Hackers, which was basically the same thing in much more detail, featuring real people.

Miller, Frank – The Dark Knight Returns – 9/03

It seemed like about time I read this classic of comic book literature. Sigh. The panel arrangements and artwork are quite nice, I’ll admit, but… maybe I just don’t get Batman. The story did nothing for me, and I got tired of Gotham TV. I’m sorry.

Ware, Chris – Building Stories – 10/31

Chris Ware outdoes himself with this big box of depressing stories told through over a dozen different page formats.

Backderf, Derf – My Friend Dahmer – 12/5

Derf’s account of his childhood friend, serial-killer-to-be Jeffrey Dahmer, is disturbing, engrossing, and raises a lot of questions. His unmistakeable art style completes the package.

Bechdel, Alison – Are You My Mother? – 12/31

I was rather disappointed by this book. Bechdel stresses throughout the book that it was difficult for her to write, and sadly, it shows. It’s advertised as a book about her mother, but it’s far more about Bechdel’s own psychoanalysis sessions.

VERDICT: Of course Chris Ware is going to win any list he appears on, because that’s how it works. Building Stories changes what a graphic novel can be, but doesn’t lose track of its story in doing so. Read it immediately. Loser: I’m almost afraid to say that the title is going to have to go to Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. I know it’s a classic, I can see why it’s a classic, but I just didn’t enjoy it that much.

MOVIES and other things that move

The Iron Giant – 1/1
Neon Genesis Evangelion (original series) – 1/2
The People vs. George Lucas – 1/7

Who owns a work of art, and who has the right to change it? A fun documentary about George Lucas with heavy implications.

Oldboy – 1/9
The Science of Sleep – 1/13

What a dislikeable protagonist. I hated him so much that my hatred for him is now the main thing I remember about this movie. I guess there was also some cool animation?

Nausicaa – 1/14

A very disorganized but still engrossing early Miyazaki film.

Magnolia – 1/17

Wow. Just wow. It is hard to imagine that a film could have so much potential and manage to botch it as badly as this one. A dozen or so strong characters, all going through potentially interesting events in their lives, and still it’s a disaster. Why? Well, you can start with plot threads and montages that serve no purpose. If that’s not enough you can add some synchronized song sequences. Still not satisfied? FINE. Watch frogs rain from the sky, pickypuss. If wasted potential was the only condition, this could be the worst movie ever made.

Brazil – 1/21

This SF film, basically 1984 played as a comedy, deserves to be seen by everyone. Why it isn’t more well-known is a mystery to me.

FLCL (finished) – 2/1
Firefly (finished) – 2/22

All that stuff people say about Firefly? It’s all true. Watch it.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown – 2/25
Black Swan – 2/26
The Headless Woman – 2/29
Serenity (2nd time) – 3/7
Au hasard Balthazar – 3/10
The Secret of the Grain – 3/15

A story of a family starting a restaurant which starts almost torturously slow and builds toward an incredibly suspenseful climax. It’s not for everyone, but I thought it was terrific.

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2nd time) – 3/21

Jim Carrey gets more than a little annoying, and the movie adaptation decrees that girls are helpless, but the visuals are phenomenal. Especially the closing credits animation. (That is not sarcasm, the closing credits are terrific.)

Fullmetal Alchemist (finished) – 4/12

If you’ve never watched an anime before, this would be a good place to start. Very suspenseful and detail storyline with lots of good characters. It starts off rocky, but once it’s good, it stays good.

Fullmetal Alchemist Movie – 4/14

The same cannot be said of this dismal followup. A big dose of Just Add Nazis, plus a number of other blunders (gypsy singalong ten minutes in?!) spells disaster.

Time Bandits – 4/21
Young Frankenstein – 4/29

First time I’d seen it, and I found it to be surprisingly overrated.

Bill Cunningham New York – 5/9

An interesting documentary about an interesting character. There should be more like this.

Inland Empire – 5/14

Okay, David Lynch. You’re insane. We get it. (Can’t say I didn’t enjoy it in a weird way.)

Samurai Champloo (finished) – 5/19 (12:45 AM)

Another top-notch anime series. Plays fast and loose with feudal Japanese history, and does so with daring gusto. Good characters, strong plot, and lots of action.

Star Wars IV (probably 3rd time?) – 5/24
Lynch One – 5/26

This documentary is broken. Feels less like actual information and more like watching David Lynch through a window.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (2nd time) – 6/10
Marie Antoinette – 6/16

An unorthodox look at one of history’s most vilified figures. Very underrated, in my opinion.

Wild Strawberries – 6/24
The Straight Story – 6/30
Address Unknown – 7/2

A stark and disturbing drama taking place in the aftermath of the Korean war. Strong characters and some really memorable visuals.

Between the Folds – 7/25
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (finished) – 7/26

Don’t blink or you’ll miss a crucial plot development! Whoops, you missed another one! Seriously, stop blinking, we need to get in a dozen plot developments per second here.

The Weight of the Nation (finished) – 7/28
L’Avventura – 7/04
Pride and Prejudice, BBC miniseries version (finished) – 8/20

I’d always thought of this seven-hour Austen adaptation as the punchline to a joke, but it’s really well-executed. Good actors and a good script.

Wings of Desire – 8/21
There Will Be Blood – 8/28

An underrated power-play between a greedy tycoon and a manipulative preacher. Fireworks in every line of dialogue, and an incredible score.

Coraline – 9/12

Terrific stop-action animation. Somewhat predictable script. Dismal performance in feminist terms (supposedly strong female protagonist needs to be saved at last second by hapless loser boy).

Julie & Julia – 9/15

Here’s a tip, writers. If you make the protagonist’s boyfriend be a total asshole, we won’t want him to come back when he leaves her. We will, in fact, be praying for the protagonist to murder him every time he appears onscreen. WE WILL HATE HIM AND WANT HIM TO GO AWAY.

Bowling for Columbine – 9/19
Barry Lyndon (2nd time) – 10/6
Pan’s Labyrinth – 11/24

Not a perfect movie. But not a bad movie. My main complaint is that the villain is too evil.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – 12/15

A promising start to the new trilogy. Gollum scene is impeccable.

Yi Yi – 12/22

Ending the year on a good note, this Taiwanese film has characters galore and terrific visuals.

VERDICT: Tough choice, but I’m going to say Address Unknown was the best movie I saw this year. It’s not something I’d recommend to everyone, but if it’s the kind of thing you like you shouldn’t miss it. Worst movie award must go to Magnolia. It’s like taking a good movie and mixing in every bad idea imaginable. If two-thirds of it had ended up on the cutting-room floor, it might have been something great. Unfortunately, that is not what happened.

BONUS ANIME VERDICT: Fullmetal Alchemist and Samurai Champloo tie for first place. Both are very good for different reasons. Neither are perfect but both come close. Worst: the Fullmetal Alchemist movie. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Still better than Magnolia, though.

That’s all for 2012! See you all back here in a year.

Imagine a new social network based on poems. The site will debut with a selection of original poems, and you and your friends will be able to read them and base your interactions on them. Gradually new poems will be added to the mix and the userbase will be able to slowly understand and help to build a narrative around the poems, creating a sort of living, breathing artwork. It’s a clever idea, and a couple poems released as teasers show that the site has a lot of promise. Sadly, however, when the site finally debuts, something has gone wrong in development. Instead of the vibrant scene you were promised, there’s just one page with a handful of poems. There’s not even anywhere to post a comment. The poems are still well-written, and you enjoy reading them, but you can’t shake the feeling that you could have been a part of something much bigger. Welcome to the beautiful and depressing world of Uru.

After completing Riven, Cyan went quiet and began work on a multiplayer Myst game which was codenamed “Mudpie.” Myst having been perhaps the quintessential single-player experience, a lonely adventure with no room for cooperation, the concept was a surprising one. Fans were largely intrigued but somewhat apprehensive. Cyans’ occasional preview screenshots offered glimpses into a game that seemed perennially just out-of-reach, accompanied by promises of social gameplay, freedom of movement, real-time graphics, ongoing storylines, and (perhaps most tantalizing of all) access to the D’ni city itself. During the game’s five-year development period, Cyan’s publisher, Ubisoft, requested that a single-player version be built as well; dialup users were still a majority at the time and Ubisoft didn’t want a product that required broadband. The single-player version was released on schedule under the title Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. The mutliplayer version, Uru Live, was subject to numerous delays and was eventually canceled. Over time it resurfaced in various incarnations, but never in the form it was intended. The vast majority of players never experienced any online play at all, and know Uru only from its offline skeleton, a vast yet incomplete universe which always opens to a view of your mostly-empty bookshelf. We will be looking only at the single player version of the game, starting with Ages Beyond Myst and then continuing through the two expansion packs, To D’ni and The Path of the Shell. This, like it or not, has become the Uru canon, and we will treat it as such, but (to paraphrase Atrus) it’s important to think about what the creators hoped to achieve, compared to what the game truly is.

Uru is in many ways something of an oddity in the series overall, even without the multiplayer component. We leave behind not only Atrus and his family, but their entire time period, transitioning into the present day and a universe which includes vestiges of the real world. We get to experience the history of the D’ni civilization, but only in the role of archaeologists and historians, as D’ni is already long-dead at the start of the game. Myst’s creators and fans had long enjoyed blurring the line between fantasy and reality, but the games themselves were unaffected by the outside world prior to Uru, which goes so far as to make a number of real people into in-game characters, such as longtime “D’ni historian” Richard Watson and Myst creators Rand and Robyn Miller. The game environment is also filled with real-world clutter: styrofoam, t-shirts, composition notebooks, and the infamous orange construction cones, reinforcing the idea that the digital environment is a recreation of events which we’re supposed to imagine are literally taking place. It’s an interesting conceit, especially in the context of the intended multiplayer experience, and one which (to my knowledge) has never been attempted anywhere else. Uru is also distanced from the other games by its realtime graphics and freedom of motion, aspects which it utilizes (to varying degrees of success) in many different puzzles. (Myst V uses realtime graphics as well but does not ever make use of the player character’s physicality.) Uru’s most unfortunate departure from the Myst formula, however, is its absence of actual story. The preceding games were invariably about following and understanding a story from the inside out, reading diaries and pawing through ephemera to learn about the characters and their lives. Uru, while still including the usual invasions of privacy, doesn’t really have much in the way of characters or plot, so much of what we find reveals not pieces of a sweeping narrative but something more, well, realistic: the humdrum rhythms of daily life. There is a storyline of sorts (as we will see), but its characters are obscure and its actual content feels marginal and is largely disappointing. This is in part another symptom of Uru’s “dead-on-arrival” state, as the story was supposed to be dealt out in tiny pieces and reinforced by the players, but that doesn’t make up for its absence. While it tries to be as accessible as possible, Uru nonetheless is a somewhat forbidding game, often coming across more like an austere experiment than a viable adventure experience.

Uru was also frequently advertised as a departure from role-playing games: a game world in which you play as yourself rather than as a character, an innovation which the creators found so appealing that it was incorporated into the game’s very title: you-are-you. This whole idea seems somewhat less novel, however, when compared to the original pre-canon-fatigue Myst, which was described in many of the same ways. “You have stumbled across a most intriguing book,” the game’s manual informs us, making no mention of “The Stranger” and giving every indication that we’re supposed to approach the game as if it was a story happening to us. While the complications of keeping a tidy canon eventually forced the Myst player character to take on an identity, it’s important to remember that “you-are-you” was not a new idea. Uru was also frequently described as an opportunity to escape from reality; its early magazine advertisements showed a typical elevator door opening to reveal the Age of Teledahn on the other side. This concept is practically taken directly from old Myst advertising. A 1999 magazine ad for Myst: Masterpiece Edition describes the gameplay experience as a way to “forget everyday worries” and “get away from it all.” (Finding this ad was a somewhat surreal experience for me. Having spent a lot of time critiquing Myst as a work of art, it seemed somewhat disingenuous to see it being sold as a cheap alternative to a cruise.) My point in all this is not to paint Uru as unoriginal but to highlight the fact that it followed many of the same paths as the original Myst, and in many ways did so more closely than Myst’s direct sequels. The theme of “new beginnings” runs throughout the D’ni story arc, and Uru can be seen as an attempt to bring about a fresh start in the series overall. Yet it was also a callback to what had come before: smaller Ages, simpler goals, and understated action.

The first game in the Atrus-free arc opens, predictably, with a voiceover from Atrus. He is speaking to Yeesha about a dream Katran had (why isn’t Katran the one speaking?) which predicts that groups of strangers from the surface will soon be drawn to D’ni by some sort of supernatural compulsion. The dream also indicates that Yeesha, the “desert bird,” will be their guide. This introduction highlights one of the problems with Uru overall, a problem which I also called attention to in relation to Serenia: there’s too much supernatural stuff going on. We’ve come to expect just one supernatural thing in this universe, linking books, and they follow a lot of very specific rules. Uru introduces a lot more magic, ranging from excusable to downright annoying. For example, the Uru player character cannot die because she carries a special linking book which allows her to link away at the last second. The book is not left behind after the link, though, violating what had up until now been understood as an axiom. This is forgivable, though, as it’s a necessary gameplay mechanic (similar to how the Trap Books were understood to be non-canonical). The prophecies, however, seem a bit much, as do some of the more elaborate Linking-related shenanigans. We spend a lot of time in Uru linking with things other than books, and Yeesha herself has somehow learned to link at will. If Uru is supposed to represent the “real” D’ni, why is it filled with things we’d previously been told did not exist in the “real” D’ni?

The first big differences between this game and the originals are immediately apparent after the intro is over: the player sees a control-system guide (never needed in the old era’s point-and-click simplicity) and a third-person representation of himself in the environment. As a social game, the addition of avatars was critical, but in the context of a single-player game I think it ultimately hampers the gameplay experience. When I first played the game it seemed novel, but as the years have passed I find I prefer the first-person experience, which allows more freedom to look around and lacks the jarring “jump-cut” transitions the third-person frequently employs. Uru ultimately becomes a game with no real objective beyond looking at things, and the third-person view does little beyond making it harder to do so.

The game begins at the Cleft, where Anna, Gehn, and Atrus all spent formative years. A hologram of the now-adult Yeesha explains the objective of the game via a long and impassioned speech about the stream in the Cleft. It all sounds vaguely poetic, but the more I hear it the less actual sense it seems to make. It’s somewhat disappointing that in trying to make Yeesha seem cryptic and mysterious, the creators succeeded only in making her meaningless. She is never really developed as a character in Uru, because whenever we hear her speak, it’s only in this nonsensical poetry that give us no insight into her actual personality. We don’t get to look at her stuff, read her diaries, or do anything that would cement her as anything other than a voice that preaches at us in a funny way. It’s less like participating in a narrative and more like doing the bidding of a weird deity, and that’s something of a shame.

The quest Yeesha tasks us with, “The Journey,” consists of visiting five different D’ni Ages and wandering through them as a sort of distanced observer. In each Age we find seven Journey Cloths, each of which must be touched by the player before the Age can be completed. Yeesha places these cloths at intervals throughout the Age, so the player is forced by necessity to explore the entire environment. Yeesha’s primary goal at all times seems to be to paint the D’ni in as bad a light as possible, demonizing and criminalizing the entire society on the grounds that it oppressed the bahro, a species of strange creatures which seem to hail from the space between Ages. As such, the Journey Cloths are placed strategically, forcing us to visit various prisons, cages, torture chambers, and elegant gardens which Yeesha presents as evidence of wrongdoing. The Journey Cloth concept itself is somewhat shallow, though, as there’s little to mask the fact that it’s nothing more than a glorified easter-egg hunt. The original Myst used the same mechanic to a degree: you visit an Age, search for a red or blue page, then search for a Myst book, all the while stumbling across more incriminating evidence. There are important differences, though: each of the pages found in Myst enable the brothers to reveal more and more of their stories, thereby drawing us deeper into the game’s narrative, but the Journey Cloths do nothing but provide an arbitrary accomplishment to increment toward completion. Additionally, the reward for finding all the Journey Cloths is not a better understanding of the story, but another annoying sermon from Yeesha. In both games we see evidence of wrongdoing while exploring the Ages, but while Yeesha simply uses it to strengthen her main thesis (D’ni = evil), the brothers of Myst spend most of their time trying to disprove the player’s notions, creating a back-and-forth not only between the brothers but between the player and the game itself. If Uru feels a little stagnant at times, that’s because it is.

Luckily, the “Ages Beyond Myst” more than make up for the shortcomings of gameplay and story. The Cleft alone makes the experience worthwhile to a Myst diehard, allowing us direct access to a locale familiar from the novels, and the presentation is by and large quite believable. The descriptions from the books are brought to life, and the “you-are-you” effect is played to great effect: we’re encouraged to imagine that we’re exploring the Cleft “for real” and the execution is strong enough to let us excuse the fact that we’re actually just sitting in front of a computer.

The five Ages vary considerably in size and all follow a somewhat linear progression, but each has a unique atmosphere and its own flavor of beautifully-executed visuals. The sense of history could be stronger at times; a lot of the Ages seem downright empty, which is unfortunate considering the rich tapestry we’re ostensibly exploring. Uru is about big things, and unfortunately this means that it often skimps on small detail to a degree. While gigantic buildings are crafted with exacting care, the game has very few of the close-up shots familiar in the preceding games, and forcing a closer look usually just reveals a low-quality texture meant to be seen only from afar. Exploring on this larger scale is still enjoyable, and the game’s dominating landscapes can still be almost awe-inspiring, but more opportunities to stop and look at the little things would have been beneficial.

Uru makes extensive use of the newfound freedom of movement in its puzzle designs, which in many cases diverge from those seen before. There are puzzles which require running, puzzles which involve walking specific paths, and puzzles which involve standing in specific spots, none of which would have been practical in a pre-rendered game. Some of these seem fresh and intriguing, but others never succeed in being anything but annoying. Most prevalent among the latter are the dreaded kicking puzzles, which must be solved by pushing objects around with your feet. I’ve always wondered exactly how these managed to get all the way into the finished product, because they’re frustrating as hell and put a lot of strain on the suspension of disbelief. If a game is asking me to imagine that I’m really there, I should not be forced to ask why I’m moving rocks by kicking them instead of picking them up. The puzzles tend to display something like growing pains, conveying a sense that the creators were still trying to get a handle on what to do, and what not to do, with the freedom of movement.

Each of the Ages in the game is meant to portray a different perspective on D’ni’s sins, so let’s take a look at each in turn, beginning with Teledahn. This Age, otherwise known as “the one with the mushrooms,” was among the most anticipated locations in the game, as it was the subject of many preview screenshots (including a few of the earliest released). It’s described as an extremely old Age, one which changed hands many times over D’ni’s history, sometimes seen as desirable and other times as worthless. Uru gives us access to only a few acres’ worth of Teledahn, but the game does do a fairly good job of implying additional area beyond what we see. What we do see in person fails to suggest much beyond the Age’s most recent history, but in all honesty one could expect no better even in real life. The art direction here is among the best in the game, suggesting a murky, slimy place permeated with stagnant smells and dust. The water teems with life, some visible, some only heard, suggesting a rich ecosystem. There’s even an optional puzzle (one which need not be completed to solve the game) in which the player coaxes a large lobsterlike creature to come out of hiding, just for the sake of looking at it. It’s a clever idea to add these kinds of hidden details to the game world, and Uru should have done a lot more along these lines. One of Yeesha’s most important pieces of anti-D’ni evidence is present here as well: the remnants of a long-abandoned slave trade that was conducted here in secret. The addition of slavery is the game’s most hamfisted attempt at that slandering the D’ni reputation, and yet it’s made clear that the slave trading was being carried out in secret, which suggests that it was still against D’ni law. One would think that something clearly defined as crime would be irrelevant to Yeesha’s thesis, but as we will discuss in more detail later, Yeesha is quick to judge the society by the sins of the individual. Moving on, Teledahn is also the only Age in which we find a diary, in this case belonging to one Douglas Sharper, an explorer affiliated (to some degree) with the D’ni Restoration Council (DRC), a group of explorers from Earth. Sharper has been put in charge of “restoring” Teledahn: exploring it, making its machinery operational, and ensuring that it’s safe to visit. His diary records his daily activities toward these ends, particularly dwelling on his frustrations with the bureaucracy of the DRC. This is the primary source of information about the DRC which we see in this game, and it paints it primarily as a stagnant and misguided organization which is blind to the “truth” about D’ni (that it was not a perfect society). As for Sharper himself, the journal establishes little about his character other than his love of football. I understand that he appeared in the flesh for the privileged few who played Uru Live, but for the rest of us Sharper is little more than a name. Teledahn, however, is a rich and memorable experience, certainly one of the game’s highlights.

Gahreesen, an age used by D’ni’s Guild of Maintainers, is the only Age in the game where we really get a sense of the strength of D’ni itself. (The other Ages either belonged to individuals or have no buildings.) Gahreesen is dominated by huge fortresses (garrisons, as the name puns) built on rotating pedestals. While the spinning buildings seem absurdly unnecessary at first, we eventually come to understand that such designs are the only way to ensure security against a technology like The Art. (You can’t write a linking book which connects to a specific room if that room is constantly in motion, because the link position is relative to the Age rather than the architecture.) Gahreesen is filled with details like these, which enhance its credibility greatly. It’s also the only Age which requires you to visit another Age in order to complete it: a secret linking stone hidden in Teledahn is the only way to access the prison at the top of the fortress. This does a lot to disrupt the linearity we experience in the other Ages, so it’s a shame that the technique is only used once. The nature of the Age highlights the differences between Yeesha’s motivation and that of the DRC: Yeesha sees the Age as disgusting because it exemplifies the amount of work needed to protect D’ni’s ill-gotten assets, but the DRC see it as a particularly interesting example of D’ni’s engineering prowess, which they admire. To the player, Gahreesen is an enjoyable Age: the puzzles are about right, it uses the possibilities of real-time gameplay admirably, and it gives us a lot of background to look at.

Kadish Tolesa is more of a diversion, an Age which effectively based exclusively on puzzles. As the player wanders through through the Age’s massive forest (home to some of the game’s most beautiful scenes), she encounters a variety of puzzles designed to safeguard the wealth of Guildmaster Kadish, one of the richest men in D’ni at the time of the Fall. (Predictably, Yeesha’s message is that Kadish was too greedy.) To complete the Age, the player must look for clues in Kadish’s lavish antechamber and apply them to the game’s intentional puzzles. As discussed previously, intentional puzzles typically fail to be as engaging as those which exist organically, but the main credibility problem here is that Guildmaster Kadish leaves the key to his vault lying in plain sight all the time, albeit in an obtuse form. He does try to throw potential robbers off the trail, though, by the inclusion of false doorways which imply a path leading in one direction when the true path is hidden elsewhere. The game treats this as background detail, but these red herrings suggest a different direction the level itself could have taken: what if, rather than an age based on puzzles, Kadish was itself a puzzle? What if these false doorways could be opened to reveal puzzles that don’t actually lead anywhere? Or suppose instead we were faced with many puzzles at a time, and only some of them were meant to be solved. What if it were ultimately the path we travel through the age that unlocked the vault, rather than the successful completion of sequential puzzles? This would have been a far more difficult task for the level designers, it’s true, but potentially could have been much more interesting. Still, Kadish is a well-executed Age with a quiet, broody atmosphere conveyed expertly through both visuals and sound.

This brings us to the sister Ages of Eder Gira and Eder Kemo. These are “garden Ages,” the kinds of places where the D’ni would go for a picnic. Gira is an inhospitable desert, Kemo a horticultural masterwork. They’re both fun to look at and explore, but they ultimately fall somewhat flat, as they have no story engagement whatsoever. We learn nothing about the D’ni from them, we don’t encounter any new characters, and we find nothing which challenges our understanding of the world. In Kemo we find a DRC notebook containing a D’ni fable involving a garden Age which was taken from its prior inhabitants by force, and Yeesha attempts to imply that the same was true of Gira and Kemo, but we don’t see any evidence to support that. Games are a visual medium, and to make us, the players, believe these kinds of assertions, we need to see some sort of evidence. In the original Myst, we don’t come to believe that Achenar is bad just because Sirrus says he is, but rather because we see direct evidence of Achenar’s evildoings (and likewise for Sirrus, of course). We never see anything to suggest that Gira and Kemo were ever anything but the bland, small parks that they are today, so Yeesha’s sermon in this case seems to be reaching.

Once the Ages are complete, the player eventually is able to return to the Cleft and retrieve a final message from Yeesha, who warns us that there will soon be a major schism between the explorers of D’ni, that half will side with the DRC and their tedious, superficial mission and the other half will side with Yeesha and the bahro. By this point, however, neither of these groups have done much to attract the player’s allegiance. The DRC come across as tiresome bureaucrats who place protocol above the thrill of discovery. Yeesha comes across as a killjoy who seems to think that all closets must contain skeletons. The bahro themselves are nothing but an enigma, an element foreign to all previous installments which never quite manages to sit comfortably. I’m personally not inclined to side with either group here, as neither really subscribe to the Myst mentality of wandering for its own sake, which is particularly strange when you consider that Uru, with its limited story content, is perhaps the purest example of that approach. (Also, it seems somewhat odd, and self-defeating, that Cyan would actively encourage its online players to become ideologically divided in this way.) There’s something of an echo here of the original’s “two bad choices and a good choice,” but in actuality there’s no choice available at all, just an imaginary conflict which we couldn’t participate in even if we wanted to.

Yeesha’s message, in this and the two installments which follow, is that the Art corrupted D’ni society just as deeply as it did that of Terahnee, just on a subtler level. Where Yeesha’s arguments fail, however, is the fact that she holds up select examples of evildoing to imply that the society overall is corrupt. This is known as the fallacy of composition: a society can contain evildoers while not being evil itself. As aficionados of the D’ni universe, many Myst fans were somewhat disappointed by Uru’s depiction of the D’ni as a corrupt race, and that it’s done in this way somehow makes it even worse. Were there criminals in D’ni? Yes, of course. Was it necessary for D’ni’s entire populace to die in order to atone for their sins? I would say not, but Yeesha argues unwaveringly on the point that the Fall was deserved retribution. This position is shallow, callous, and succeeds only in making Yeesha appear irrationally attached to a moral which only she can see.

Ultimately, what is Uru, and what is it good for? Unlike its predecessors, it is not a story game. While the Yeesha/DRC conflict forms a story of sorts, the primary narrative is one formed by the player herself based on her observations of the D’ni ruins. Uru is about wandering, looking at the world, and imagining what it was in its prime. And even as we consider the Ages’ fictional histories, we’re also aware of the alternative Uru, the one where the Ages were filled with fellow explorers and new content appeared on a daily basis. The success of this single-player version depends largely on your own attention and imagination. During this last playthrough, I happened to notice a small door high on the wall of the Teledahn slave office. I’d never spotted it before, and it has no relevance to the gameplay. But someone decided to put it there, both in the game’s universe and in the real world of game development. Why is it there? No one can say. But imagining the possibilities is, ultimately, what Uru came to be about.

Other thoughts

• At times Uru’s recurrent theme of “The Proud” being too greedy and therby ruining everything seems to hit awfully close to the story of the game’s development: Uru the online game was undermined by Ubisoft’s concerns about its profitability, and their demand for an offline version ultimately spelled the demise of the original premise. Coincidence? Well, probably, but it’s kind of interesting nonetheless.
• Kadish, in Judaism, is a series of prayers related to mourning rituals. Among other things, it asks God to rebuild Jerusalem and offer peace, forgiveness, and salvation to its people. If this parallel was unintended, it’s certainly a striking coincidence.
• The linking book in Kadish Tolesa’s final chamber bears the DRC’s mark of approval, which suggests that they too managed to get all the way through the Age, which seems unusually thorough and daring by their standards.
• Despite its attempts to feel completely realistic, Uru falls short in a few places: the player avatar is on a few occasions expected to survive drops of twenty or thirty feet (landing, in general, on solid rock), and is not instantly knocked over and drowned beneath the huge waterfalls in Eder Gira.
• There’s some pretty incredible groundskeeping taking place in some of these Ages. Eder Kemo appears to be weeded and pruned regularly, and someone must be sweeping the paths in Kadish Tolesa several times a day, judging from the fact that they’re not covered in fifty feet of fallen leaves by now.
• This essay does not mention Relto.

For more insights, be sure to look at greatgreybeast’s review on gog.com.

Next time: Uru: To D’ni

Screenshots are property of Cyan Worlds, Inc.

We’ve reached the end of the Atrus-centric installments, which leaves only one direction to go: the backstory. Backstory is an important part of any fictional universe, as the additional details we learn from it add to the believability of the world overall. The Myst series, having created this vast edifice of D’ni to support Atrus’s story, has an almost infinite amount of space for additional backstory. We want to know more about D’ni, its inhabitants, and its history. Myst: The Book of Ti’ana, and our final two games, Uru and Myst V, give us a glimpse of the days before Atrus and the span of the D’ni society of old. As we move through the D’ni-centric arc, we’ll consider the following questions: can backstory itself be a story? If not, what does it take to make a backstory into a frontstory? Let’s begin.

As I stated back in the Book of Atrus review, the Myst novels as a whole become a sort of “backstory bible” which fills in the story gaps left by the games. This is most true of the Book of Ti’ana, the only installment of the series which takes place before the Fall of D’ni. The book opens with a tunneling operation in progress; the D’ni are mounting an expedition to find out what lies on the surface of Earth. (Note for the uninitiated: The Cavern, where the D’ni live, is below the surface of Earth, but the D’ni themselves are not from the surface. They linked directly into the Cavern from a different Age. And yes, that does mean that at some point someone wrote a “Book of Earth.”) Among those in the corps is Aitrus, grandfather of the Atrus-without-an-”i” who we know already. He is a young guildsman, brimming with enthusiasm and eager to set foot on the surface. Most of the storyline at this point revolves around the fact that the tunnel to the surface may or may not be completed due to various whims of D’ni politics. This is largely a false sort of tension, as we already know fromThe Book of Atrus that the tunnel was eventually completed, and while it succeeds in establishing that the project is controversial, the same could have been done in far less than the sixty-plus pages the book devotes to the subject. While the tunneling continues we also become acquainted with Veovis, a lord from the Guild of Writers who seeks to befriend Aitrus for reasons which are never fully explained. Toward the end of the chapter, Aitrus rescues Veovis from a tunnel collapse and their friendship is, for a time, cemented. The tunnel is ultimately completed but sealed and unused, the D’ni electing to continue existing in secret rather than expose their society to the unknown factors above. Much like the events it describes, this first act is a lengthy and inconsistent thing. While it establishes two of the book’s primary characters, much of what they do is humdrum routine. In one of its few breaks from this monotony it describes Aitrus going exploring by himself, but his “adventure” is arguably even less interesting, since character interaction, already pretty sparse, is rendered impossible. While the book opens in medias res (leaping straight into the story without trying to explain the context), it doesn’t really take full advantage of that technique, as it jumps in at a point before the story is actually interesting.

In the next act we cut to the surface, where we meet the title character, still called Anna at this point (she won’t actually be called Ti’ana until more than halfway to the end of the book). Anna lives in the desert with her father, a prospector who searches for valuable minerals on behalf of a vaguely-Arabic lord. When her father dies, she decides to explore a tunnel they discovered earlier, which naturally turns out to be the tunnel to D’ni. She manages to get all the way to the City itself, where she quickly becomes the center of a massive controversy. The D’ni, distraught over this violation of their precious secrecy, debate what to do with her: they won’t let her return to the surface now that she knows of their existence, so the only choices are to let her remain in D’ni or banish her to a Prison Age. Due to her intelligence and lack of ill intent, she’s allowed to stay in D’ni, and is taken in by Aitrus’s family. The story follows the predictable course from then on: Aitrus and Anna become friends, Atrus reveals D’ni secrets to Anna (such as the existence of Linking), and they eventually fall in love and decide to marry. The controversial relationship between Aitrus and Anna drives most of the conflict in the book, as many people, most notably Veovis, are against allowing Anna to be a member of society at all, much less to actually mix D’ni and human blood. The friendship between Aitrus and Veovis is ultimately destroyed by these tensions, and Veovis is so distraught over the issue that he becomes disenchanted with D’ni as a whole, driving him to become the evildoer we see in the final act.

If it seems like I’m glossing over these events, it’s because they’re honestly not that exciting. As in the opening, the characters are defined too vaguely to be very interesting, and much of the action follows the same format: Aitrus pushes the envelope with Anna, Veovis gets mad about it, and everyone moves on. Sure, the chip in Veovis’s shoulder keeps getting bigger, but no one else really changes much. The relationship between Aitrus and Anna is at least not saccharine-sweet, but neither is it that original. By their proximity we can predict that they’re going to fall for each other, and the book never once tries to make us think otherwise. This section is, sadly, just sort of predictable, and once we learn that the protagonists always get what they want, even though it makes Veovis angry, anything that might have passed for tension otherwise is somewhat defused.

The third and final act details the infamous Fall of D’ni, in which Veovis plays a major part. Veovis is overwrought by Aitrus’s marriage to Anna, believing that the immorality of their union is self-evident and unable to understand why the Council ruled in its favor. His friend Suahrnir, a member of the Guild of Maintainers (D’ni’s police force), encourages him to speak to a defrocked guildsman named Ae’garis, now a convicted criminal who writes fiery political screeds. While Veovis is often blamed as being the direct cause of the Fall, a close reading reveals that he’s little more than a useful puppet for Ae’garis and Suahrnir’s scheming. Ae’garis, frustrated at being accused of treachery (he maintains innocence) wants to see D’ni destroyed out of revenge. He’s a frustrating character because we’re never given any real insight into his personality: he’s just grade-A bottled evil, and his desire for revenge exceeds all reason. He has the potential to be a really interesting character, but the book never tells us enough about him to make him one. (The closest it comes to implying anything about his background is the fact that he carries a picture of a young woman in his journal, presumably a lover/mother/sister/daughter/etc. who is no longer part of his life. While the detail does sort of humanize him to a minute degree, it doesn’t come close to explaining why he’s so evil.) Even stranger is the fact that Suahrnir’s role in the Fall is often uncredited: we regularly hear (in other installments of the series) about the evils of Veovis and Ae’garis, but it’s Suahrnir who really enables the whole thing through his wide-reaching access to D’ni’s police and penal systems. It’s Suahrnir who gains access to critical areas of D’ni, Suahrnir who steals the Linking Books they need, and Suahrnir who arranges to spring Veovis from his Prison Age. His role in the whole thing is unparalleled; neither Veovis nor Ae’garis have the means to carry out widescale destruction without his help. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that his character is developed even less than Ae’garis’s, and his motives in all this are never explained whatsoever. This book is meant to explain the backstory of the Fall, but since Ae’garis and Suahrnir’s motives aren’t explored, our understanding of how it came about is not significantly expanded.

The Fall itself is brought about suddenly and efficiently. After Veovis is convicted of murder (which is apparently extremely rare in D’ni society), he is sentenced to death to prevent him from escaping his Prison Age to wreak further mayhem. Anna, however, intervenes on his behalf and he is instead sentenced to exile in a Prison Age made specially for him, one which is supposed to be secure. Ae’garis and Suahrnir manage to spring him anyway, and the three of them begin making plans for their final attack. They spread disease spores into D’ni’s sophisticated air system, saturating the Cavern with them and thereby wiping out most of the population within hours. They then spend the ensuing weeks linking corpses into every Age they can find in order to spread the disease as far as possible. Aitrus eventually succumbs to the disease and dies, but Anna and young Gehn escape to the surface to begin their lives anew. It’s a sweeping tragedy on an epic scale, inflicted by the few against the many. It’s a story which by all rights should be gripping and emotional, but instead it falls somewhat flat. The writing itself is the element at fault. Between the lack of strong characters and unevocative description, the book barely manages to rise above dry exposition. Much like real-life history, there are both engaging and boring ways to write about it, and The Book of Ti’ana has a tendency to land somewhere in the middle.

The Book of Atrus and The Book of Ti’ana together provide most of the backstory of the series, but the two books are not equally readable. While I would argue that The Book of Atrus succeeds in being a good novel taken by itself (that is, outside of the context of the series), The Book of Ti’ana does not. As we’ve established, it suffers from clunky pacing, extraneous subplots, and (most serious of all) vague, undefined characters. Few have any discernible motivations. Aitrus has a stated desire to set foot on the surface, but for the most part it doesn’t drive his actions (and the book places little significance on the moment that he attains it). The Book of Atrus’s success is in no small part due to the clear motivations of its primary characters, Atrus, Gehn, Katran, and Anna. Atrus wants to learn, and wants to return to Anna. Gehn wants to resurrect D’ni and become lord of the universe while doing so. Katran wants to leave Riven and distance herself from Gehn. Anna wants to ensure that Atrus is safe. Note especially the ways in which the characters’ motivations intermingle with the desires of the other characters, which leads to a lot of interesting dynamics. Also important is the fact that the characters’ motivations drive all their actions: Gehn, for example, has practically no interest in Atrus until the point when Atrus might be useful in his quest for godhood. Once Atrus instead proves to be a hindrance, Gehn tries to kill him. As the characters in The Book of Ti’ana don’t generally have strong motivations, the authors are unable to drive the plot this way. This is highly unfortunate, because that’s what makes a novel engaging to read.

Despite these issues, though, most Myst fans enjoy this book. This is because one’s enjoyment of a backstory-based work is proportional to one’s engagement in the “frontstory.” A similar situation exists in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth universe: its most familiar installments are The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, both “frontstory” type works with traditional storytelling techniques, but there’s also The Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is not for everyone; it’s a massive epic of backstory spanning numerous generations and conquests, and its style is often dry and forbidding. Casual fans, in general, can’t even begin to read it. Diehard fans, on the other hand, can read it straight through and enjoy it. Works of backstory cannot necessarily be universally appreciated: whether or not we enjoy them is partly determined by how interested we are in the information we’re learning from them. Naturally there’s still some expectation of quality (The Book of D’ni demonstrates that it’s possible to write backstory that even fans won’t appreciate), but fans will forgive minor narrative issues as long as they’re learning something about your fictional universe.

Up until this point we’ve seen D’ni as little more than a backdrop: a dead, faraway locale that we never really understand in much depth. With the Book of Ti’ana, Uru, and Myst V, D’ni itself becomes the primary character, and the themes of the D’ni-centric arc, pride and rebirth, are both introduced here. Where Atrus tends to paint a very favorable view of the D’ni and their accomplishments, the D’ni-centric arc will lead us in a very different direction, a muckraking expedition into the heart of D’ni’s sins, one which seems determined to force us to accept a tarnished image of a society we’ve been encouraged to admire. It’s a strange decision on the part of the creators, one which can be difficult to grapple with as players/readers, a subject we’ll discuss in more depth in the upcoming Uru reviews.

For now, let’s focus on these themes as they are introduced in this book. As stated above, the primary themes are pride and rebirth, and can be extended into two dichotomies of pride vs. humility and rebirth vs. sacrifice. Pride, specifically hubris, is generally depicted as the primary contributing factor of D’ni’s downfall. The concept of hubris, defined here as “presumption to challenge the gods,” is played very deliberately throughout the book. The most explicit example of this can be found in a passage near the beginning, in which Aitrus, admiring the consistent success of the massive tunneling operation, muses that D’ni is “godlike” in its defiance [pg. 42 in hardcover edition]. The book, and the series in general, never wavers on this point: the consequences of challenging the gods are dire. This extends to those who presume to be gods themselves, a valid concern to a race in possession of a technology which enables godlike powers. The D’ni, in fact, consider this presumption to be “the ultimate heresy” [pg. 312], a line which even Veovis is unwilling to cross. From Gehn and from Terahnee we can see the consequences of this conceit, but D’ni’s fall comes as the result of a more subtle form of hubris, the kind Aitrus observes in the tunnel. The D’ni are so proud of their society that they are unwilling to admit any outsiders at all, and Veovis is so proud that he would sooner see D’ni destroyed than allow it to be contaminated. Pay particular attention to the chapters immediately following Anna’s arrival, in which most of the D’ni expect her to be little more than an animal, assuming themselves to be the undeniable paragon of creation—as clear an example of hubris as one could want. D’ni’s fall, though inflicted by three individuals working alone, comes as a sort of divine retribution, the ultimate consequence of its deep-seated pride. Here the second dichotomy comes into play: the citizens of D’ni die to atone for the sins of the collective society, while Anna and her son escape alive to “begin again” on the surface. This idea also recurs throughout the series; every great calamity ends with something rising from the ashes to begin a new era. The theme of sacrifice vs. rebirth is particularly critical to D’ni itself; the long-running controversy regarding whether to rebuild the City is largely driven by conflicting opinions regarding whether it represents a necessary sacrifice or an innocent victim. D’ni, for all its success, was a highly flawed society, and The Book of Ti’ana is in many ways the first installment of a sweeping exposé. The first level of corruption has been brought to light, and as the series progresses we will see just how deep it goes.

Overall, The Book of Ti’ana is best described as a work which sets the stage for later installments. While it’s enjoyable to those who are engaged enough in the material, it doesn’t hold up that well on its own. It’s a book with a clear goal (explain how D’ni fell), and for the most part it reaches its goal in a fairly businesslike and efficient way. This is, I think, where the book was sold short. There is nothing wrong with this story; in fact, it has the potential to be an incredible epic. Instead, though, it comes down on the wrong side of the old “show-don’t-tell” technique, favoring a dry, remote style rather than taking the effort to really put us inside the characters’ heads. One of the most effective passages, to me, is that which describes the young Gehn’s experiences in the Guild house. Here we get a real sense of his feelings, his acute solitude and his fear of his fellow apprentices. In this brief moment, the reader can feel Gehn, can in a sense be Gehn, and is thus drawn into the story in a way which rarely occurs elsewhere in the book. The Book of Ti’ana is not a failure by any means, but a few more moments like this could have made it something great.

Other thoughts:

• If you thought the feminist reading of Riven was depressing, well, this one is the real doozy. As usual, D’ni is depicted as a male-dominated society which rarely allows women any status. At the beginning of the book we have a pretty typical Pandora’s Box scenario. In this case the metaphorical box is opened by men, but the chaotic element they unleash is, naturally, a woman. Had a male surface-dweller entered D’ni, the effect would have been negligible because even if a woman wanted to marry him, she wouldn’t have the political clout to fight for it. (This assumes that there were no gay Guildsmen, but that’s an issue for another time.) Anna upsets the status quo because her sex itself poses significant problems to its conception of order, as she is unwilling to submit to the status they’ve assigned to women. As the book goes on, she continues to be depicted as the only woman with any real influence, but of course practically every suggestion she makes drives D’ni closer to its downfall, culminating with her disastrous suggestion to pardon Veovis. To summarize the setup as bluntly as possible: The boys-only club was getting along just fine until a girl broke in, and then it was totally destroyed.
• To accomplish their evil plots, the villains use a lot of linking-book trickery, such as linking straight to the panel of another linking book (allowing an instantaneous link into another Age). Most of these schemes are directly contradicted in Uru, which shows that the Guild of Maintainers’ facilities on Gahreesen contained dozens of safeguards designed to prevent exactly this kind of crime. Therefore much of this book is probably now non-canonical.
• In The Book of Atrus, we see Gehn’s skewed idea of the point of the Korfah V’jah ceremony, which he believes to be an initiation into godhood performed immediately after the completion of a first Age. Here we learn that the Korfah V’jah was actually a rare honor bestowed upon particularly good Writers, sort of the D’ni equivalent of a Nobel Prize. It’s a pretty typical, and telling, misinterpretation on Gehn’s part.
• The D’ni are pretty lucky that the Cavern happened to be underneath land, given that most of Earth’s surface is covered by water. Strangely enough, this potential disaster is given no discussion at all, even though pouring the entire ocean into the Cavern would be much more calamitous than trouble with the natives.

Next time: Uru: Ages Beyond Myst.

Screenshot from Uru is property of Cyan Worlds.

Myst IV: Revelation is an impressive accomplishment: surely no other work of art in human history has managed to be so immersive and realistic while simultaneously preventing any degree of credibility. Where it’s good it rises to great heights…which unfortunately gives it that much more distance to fall. Exile set a fairly low standard, and while Revelation largely improves upon Exile’s mistakes, it fails to emulate Exile’s successes. This makes for a frustrating game: too flawed to be great, but with too many good bits to be written off completely.

Revelation, like Exile, was contracted out to a new studio while Cyan worked on Uru. In this case, Ubisoft assembled a team of creators specially for the purpose, dubbing it “Team Revelation.” Cyan again handed down some guidelines about the story, but I have to wonder how specific they were, and exactly who is responsible for the bulk of Revelation’s writing, because it’s undoubtedly the game’s Achilles heel, as we will see.

In terms of visuals and immersive effects the studio did admirably. Using the aptly-named “ALIVE” game engine, Revelation combines impeccable prerendered imagery with various real-time effects: insects, clouds, lighting, water, etc. Another extremely subtle but wonderfully immersive effect allows the player to lightly tap on objects to hear what they sound like, for the first time adding a layer of interactivity to otherwise inert objects. This all works together for a brilliantly engaging and believable game environment, one which feels more lifelike than that of any other game in the series.

But, as I have stated, this is all ripped asunder by some downright idiotic writing and storytelling decisions. Terrible dialogue, terrible acting, flat characters, and one of the most convoluted and ridiculous plots of all time are what we’re in for, folks.

One more thing before we move in for a closer look: Note below the definitions of the word “revelation.” It has a number of different meanings, as you can see. Do any of them apply to this game? Let’s find out.

Revelation, noun.

1. the act of revealing or disclosing; disclosure.
2. something revealed or disclosed, especially a striking disclosure, as of something not before realized.
3. Theology:
   1. God’s disclosure of Himself and His will to His creatures.
   2. an instance of such communication or disclosure.
   3. something thus communicated or disclosed.
   4. something that contains such disclosure, as the Bible.

(Source: dictionary.com)

Revelation starts up somewhat differently from most Myst games in that it plays an intro movie every time it is run. In it, Atrus reveals that his sons did not die at the end of the original Myst when he burned their Trap Books. (Is this the titular revelation, coming literally before the game has started? If so, that’s a bit odd, since in fiction the revelation is also the climax.) Now, anyone who hung around the Myst message boards knew this already: the Trap Books seen in Myst and Riven are, strangely enough, considered “non-canonical.” This means that while they are a cornerstone of the gameplay in those titles, they are purely a fictional creation on the part of the game developers, not something which actually exists in the “true” universe of the D’ni. However, up to this point it was accepted by developers and players that, insofar as they are useful as a gameplay mechanic, they do exist in the Atrus-centric games of the series. This is where the “canon fatigue” I mentioned in the first review sets in. As the understanding that Trap Books are a “fictional” stand-in for canonical Prison Ages spread  throughout the community, there was naturally some demand for a game which would allow us to see where Sirrus and Achenar had been trapped. This was at first acknowledged by adding ambient noises to the bad endings in realMyst, Myst’s realtime-3D re-release, but Revelation takes it to the next level, realizing the brothers’ prisons in full, explorable detail. The problem with this is that it effectively eliminates the entire first game from existence, especially for those players who have not followed these convoluted and highly-meta canonicity issues. If there are no Trap Books, there can be no Red and Blue Pages, and no way that the brothers could have communicated with the Stranger (the player character). In fact, Revelation bears this out in that the brothers do not recognize the Stranger, don’t point and say, “I know you! You’re the one who wouldn’t bring me all the pages!” So while Revelation does reference events from the previous games, such as tricking Katran into going to Riven, plotting against Atrus, and the wars on Narayan, it effectively erases from existence any of the things that the player actually did in Myst (and by extension the capture of Gehn in Riven). Canon fatigue: a buildup of contradictory “facts” that eventually erode the continuity of the storyline. This is not, however, an issue that I feel anyone needs to be held accountable for: it’s a problem that’s bound to be encountered in any long-running serial fiction. This is a particularly visible and destructive manifestation of the problem, which is unfortunate, but canon fatigue problems are, I think, somewhat unavoidable. Admittedly, too, this is an issue that affects the series overall, and does not reflect badly on Revelation taken by itself.

All this and we haven’t even clicked the “Start New Game” button yet. The game proper opens straight into a cutscene: riding on a speedy tram with Yeesha. (Exile and Revelation both treat these kinds of rides as integral to the overall Myst experience, apparently extrapolating this idea from Riven’s maglevs and log-cart, and while rides are somewhat entertaining they can (and will) be overemphasized.) Yeesha is now about 10 or so, indicating a rather significant amount of time elapsed since the events of Exile (in which she’s only a baby). The game is quick to paint her as a precocious child: observant, talkative, and quick to put down her parents in subtle but dismissive ways. She’s played by Juliette Gosselin, who does a relatively good job considering that she wasn’t yet a teenager during production. Her delivery tends to be a bit wooden, but many of her lines are hopelessly stilted to begin with, so I cut her some slack, especially considering the cringeworthy performances most of the adults in this production will deliver.

At the end of the cutscene we arrive at Tomanha, previously seen in Exile, and meet Atrus in his study, where he explains the problem: Katran thinks that Sirrus and Achenar should be set free and he wants the Stranger to offer an objective opinion. While fans often joke about Atrus exploiting the Stranger to solve his screwy familial issues, this is where his reputation really gets cemented, because the starting action of the entire storyline really is that Atrus needs you to settle a marital squabble for him. But before that happens, we need to calibrate a doohickey for him in one of the most pointless puzzles of the entire series, one which is in fact so pointless that the game will actually automatically bypass it if you look away from it a couple times. Atrus walks you through it step by step, and no matter what the player does it has the same result: everything explodes and Atrus, unwilling to admit defeat at the hands of his own equipment, insists on going for replacement parts. At this point Atrus makes his leave, and (as usual) leaves the player to stumble through the ensuing events without any help. (He later claims an “electrical storm” prevents him from linking back. This reason is entirely without precedent, and makes Atrus look like a boldfaced liar. He might as well have said that his dog ate his Linking Book.) I should note, also, that Rand Miller’s reprisal of the role of Atrus is probably the strongest performance in the game; ironic considering that he’s the only member of the cast who is not a professional actor.

Leaving Atrus’s study we get a chance to explore Tomanha a bit. Like pretty much every other place Atrus visits, it’s been built up to a degree that’s downright surreal, with the trademark elevators, motorized bridges, and irrational building placement. That said, it’s a pleasant and engaging environment, and lulls the player into a false sense of security, a sort of “lull before the storm.” We also encounter Yeesha a few times, each time doing something completely different, which makes her come across as having some serious ADHD. The Yeesha clips foreshadow later elements of the story: we learn that she’s been meeting with her brothers regularly and that she’s been to an age called Serenia, where she recently received a necklace which “shows her things.” After solving a puzzle involving a needlessly complicated fusebox (unfortunately not the only such puzzle), there’s another cutscene in which there’s a large explosion and the player is knocked out.

When we come to, it’s nighttime in Tomanha. There’s no sign of Yeesha, and as we explore the environment we eventually discover her necklace from earlier. The necklace introduces a clever new storytelling device which allows the player to look back in time and witness past events firsthand. It’s an element which breaks the mold established by the previous games, in which all storytelling is conveyed through journals and ephemera. It’s a clever addition: in a game series which is entirely built around its storyline, adding a new storytelling mechanic is a good move. Unfortunately, however, the necklace is redundant at best. There are few puzzles which depend on its involvement, and most of the “memories” it reveals are things that are either irrelevant or are covered in greater depth elsewhere. While the necklace could have been an extremely versatile and central storytelling tool, it tends to abide by an understanding that it supplements rather than complements the other elements of the game. It is in fact so marginal that I somewhat suspect that it was conceived fairly late in the game’s design process. The could have been a truly groundbreaking storytelling element, so it’s somewhat disappointing that it instead ends up little more than a transmission tool for bad acting.
Eventually we make our way to the linking chamber where the two Prison Books are waiting and are offered the choice to first explore either Haven, Achenar’s prison; or Spire, Sirrus’s prison. It doesn’t matter which Age one chooses, and in fact it’s possible to return to the linking chamber and visit the other at any time.

Haven is an expansive and lush environment, its imagery drawn from any number of seafaring adventure stories. It’s a large environment, and much of its expanse is beyond the reach of the player, making it, in a way, as large as you imagine it to be. Age design is one of Revelation’s great strengths, as it does go against the expectations set in all the preceding games: Where before all ages were treated as islands in vast seas, literally none of these Ages follow this convention. Haven comes closest, but avoids being a confined island by the virtue that much of its landscape is distant and unreachable within the context of the game: and what we do see is big and diverse anyway. It has a number of distinct sectors: a damp and windswept beach (so beautifully realized that you can almost smell the rotting fish), a number of jungles (each subtly different to aid in orientation), a swamp, and a meadow. Looking across the entire Age from the raised promontory near the beginning is a truly astonishing moment, a piece of living CGI artwork like nothing I’ve seen in any other medium.

As we explore the Age we retrace Achenar’s exile: he began his stay on Haven by living in the massive shipwreck (a callback to the Stoneship Age of Myst), and his effects within the wreck speak to his motivations at the time: weapons, gruesome hunting trophies, and a journal filled with conspiratorial plots, conquest of Haven’s wildlife, and vicious anger. As we move through the jungle, however, following in Achenar’s footsteps, we become acquainted with its welcoming and healthy ecosystem. A puzzle involving its food chain involves us even further in paying close attention to its flora and fauna. Of particular importance are the mangrees, semi-intelligent primates with which Achenar eventually forms a close bond. When we reach Achenar’s later home, a house built in the middle of a lake (which is supposed to keep him safe from the “Karnak” animals somehow, despite the fact that they can fly), we learn that his time spent observing and interacting with the mangrees, along with his enforced separation from Sirrus’s scheming, has effected a change in his character. He has been remade by the Age, maintaining his sanity by coming to terms with his past and adopting wildlife management as his new calling. Unlike Sirrus, Achenar doesn’t write about his thoughts upon Atrus’s return, but from various necklace memories we get the impression that he is uncertain about his own feelings about the possibility of escape. This is his home now, and he’s not prepared to abandon it thoughtlessly. Haven is an impressively realized Age, and its effect on Achenar is conveyed expertly by leading the player through his footsteps chronologically.

Spire is likewise a rich and expansive Age, but Sirrus’s character is written somewhat more poorly than Achenar’s, which leads to its effect being somewhat dulled. Where Haven is a lush rainforest environment, Spire consists of a lot of floating asteroids barely capable of supporting human life. Its puzzles are based on concepts of geology and vibrational resonances: highly abstract fare that’s considerably less engaging than Haven’s whimsical ecology. To their credit, though, the puzzles do mirror their environment well, even if many of them are not particularly well-designed puzzles. The player follows Sirrus’s path through Spire just as she followed Achenar’s through Haven, learning that the inhospitality of the Age, along with his fury at being tricked by Atrus, gradually converted Sirrus’s trademark scheming into a full-blown psychopathic vendetta. For years he labored under the false hope of finding Atrus’s discarded Linking Book, working on little else. His second journal, found near the end of the Age, deals largely with his reactions to his reunion with the family. In one interesting moment, he quietly suggests repentance and a wish to be allowed to return to Tomanha with past evils forgiven, but Atrus’s resistance rekindles his anger and his journals leave off with a subtle suggestion of his upcoming evil plan. For now, my main comment is this: Spire is a hostile environment and it’s entirely understandable that Sirrus would be unable to live there for twenty years and keep his sanity intact. That said, his character isn’t really written with enough sophistication for us to be able to really feel his true emotions, or even discern whether he’s any more or less sane than when he first linked there. If anything the experience seems to have just made him incredibly stupid, as his infamously devious schemes are replaced with harebrained nonsense. What’s Sirrus really thinking, and how has Spire affected his mind? We never really know, and for that reason it somewhat pales in comparison to Haven. It’s just as beautifully realized from a visual standpoint, but its story is lacking.

Both the Prison Ages also suffer from a strange design quirk in that neither of them have a clear goal for the player. In Myst, the objective in each Age was clear: find a Page, then find the Myst book so that you can return to the library. In Exile, we find a useful symbol at the end of each Age. In either case, there’s a clear indication that the player has gained something and thereby “completed” the Age. Revelation’s Prison Ages, on the other hand, indicate completion with short and largely uninteresting rides, similar to the one in the opening cutscene. Both rides also have an element which teaches us something we’ll need to know in order to complete Serenia: but since most players probably don’t visit Serenia until after completing both Prison Ages, this information is not apparently relevant at the moment it’s found. The ride itself isn’t even strictly necessary, and one could just as easily bypass it and walk back to the linking chamber instead. This means that both Ages end with a subtle implication that the player’s work here is done, but without much in the way of actual closure. A ride is not in and of itself the motivating factor in finishing an Age, and the whole thing smacks of a misinterpretation of the structure of Exile (in which each Age ended with a ride which lead up to the final symbol).

Up until the end of the Prison Ages, Revelation is fairly strong. There’s some weak dialogue and some bad acting, but nothing so terrible as to ruin the experience. The Ages are rich and engaging, the music impeccable, and the air of mystery perfected beautifully. The first time I played it, I thought there was no way it could go wrong; I was already drawing comparisons to Riven in my head and was prepared to declare it one of the strongest entries in the series. Then I linked to Serenia.

Serenia: even its name is stupid. We finally get to see one of Katran’s ages up close, and it ends up being this living recreation of cover artwork from touchy-feely New Age music albums. The supposed “culture” of Serenia is entirely built around woo and bland concepts of nondenominational spirituality. It’s an Age where certain kinds of magic work, and conceptually there’s nothing wrong with that: the whole concept of Linking is based on magic, and we’ve seen apparently magic things in Ages before, such as the floating rocks in Spire and the immaterial insects mentioned in The Book of Atrus. The problem with Serenia is the way in which magic is approached: to put it simply, the game takes a lot of poorly thought-out magical elements and then beats us over the head with them repeatedly. Most of the magic we see in the series is of “unexplained but not inexplicable” variety, phenomena which have resisted scientific study so far but will be understood eventually. Atrus, in his journal, maintains that there are scientific explanations for Serenia, but the game does everything it can to convince us that in this case he’s wrong. That’s the biggest problem here: not the existence of magic itself, but the fact that players are not allowed to accept Atrus’s logical approach to it, and Myst has always has logical thought as a cornerstone.

And if the existence of explicit magic wasn’t bad enough, the Serenian brand of magic is wildly inconsistent, follows no internal logic, and gives rise to an equally scatterbrained culture. The only Serenians we meet are some sort of religious leaders. They are all women, apparently to try to defuse any potential feminist criticism of a game containing yet another Rapunzel scenario. Their primary duties involve taking trips into the psychedelic “Dream” world, from which they can learn things not immediately apparent in the material world. From Dream they learn that the Stranger will be visiting, approximately when he/she will arrive, and what he/she looks like. They mention this at every opportunity they can, and constantly stress how much they learn from Dream. However, Dream is apparently highly unreliable in its usefulness, because it neglects to inform the Serenians of far more pressing concerns. Of what use is a system which foretells the coming of a bumbling, clueless newcomer but completely fails to mention the impending invasion of a couple of scheming psychopaths who will destroy important equipment, steal artifacts crucial to the survival of the Age, and torture a little girl? If the Serenian mysticism is unable to alert even its top priestesses to the existence of a dangerous plot going on within easy walking distance, then their entire culture is built around a system that is completely worthless. (Not to mention the fact that they must be totally blind to not physically see Sirrus and Achenar running around, since the player encounters them often.) It’s impossible to take Serenia seriously for this reason: its mystical elements are out of place in the series, and while we’re constantly informed that they’re wicked awesome, in practice they appear to be only marginally more useful than psychoactive drugs.

Once the player makes it through all this idiocy (assuming she does, which I’m sure many people have not), we’re forced to endure something even stupider: “The Plan… Sirrus’s plan!” Sirrus’s plan is this: using Serenian technology, he will swap bodies with Yeesha, use this “disguise” to learn the Art from Atrus, then kill everyone and conquer the universe. In the previous review I wrote about how Saavedro’s evil plan is nonsensical, but still makes sense from a story perspective because Saavedro is irrational. Sirrus, however, is generally depicted as insane insofar as he disregards human life, but still very much a rational person otherwise. So why are we expected to believe that Sirrus would design a plan so likely to fail? Consider: his primary motivations are to escape Spire, get revenge against Atrus, and to learn the Art. Escaping Spire is the easy part. Getting revenge against Atrus would be as easy as killing the rest of the family. As for learning the Art, he could either go to D’ni and learn it Gehn-style or he could make up a new persona for himself and trick someone in Releeshahn into teaching it to him, a course of action I’m sure he’d be very good at. The Yeesha plan, even disregarding the tiredness of body-snatching tropes, has very little chance of succeeding, and as such isn’t very credible as a Sirrus plan. (And this may be a somewhat moot point, but: does anyone else really buy that Sirrus would want to live as a little girl for years?) Is the uncovering of this plan the titular revelation? I certainly hope not, because it’s certainly not a very rewarding discovery: between its implausibility in both fictional and real-world terms, and its rehashing of some of the most threadbare of all science fiction tropes, it’s decidedly one of the low points of the entire series.

From a gameplay perspective, the final act is somewhat weak as well. Once we gain access to the room where the Evil Plan is being carried out, we find Yeesha tied to the memory-transferrence chair. She says that Achenar is going to kill everyone and that we need to set her free immediately. Shortly thereafter Achenar shows up and says that Sirrus is already possessing Yeesha’s body, and gives us an order that contradicts Yeesha’s. Yes, that’s right: it’s time for our usual Final Big Choice: Who to trust, Achenar or Yeesha? Well, here’s what we know so far:

1. Sirrus’s plan is to take over Yeesha’s body.
2. Sirrus’s plan has been going fairly well so far (incredibly enough).
3. Sirrus claimed Achenar was planning to kill everyone earlier (which Yeesha is claiming now).
4. Achenar has up to this point been both trustworthy and helpful.
5. We just saw Sirrus’s apparently-soulless body a few moments ago.

If you decided to trust Achenar, then give yourself a pat on the back for being conscious. The game does everything short of putting up a big sign saying CHOOSE ACHENAR at this juncture, making the Final Big Choice so phoned-in that it ends up calling attention to itself. There’s not really much sense of accomplishment in being made to do something so transparently obvious. What’s worse is that this is the last moment of the game where anything remotely Myst-like takes place. From here onward it’s just two more unbearably tedious psychedelic Dream puzzles before we finally get to the ending cutscene.

The game ends like this: something is screwy with Yeesha’s memories and they can’t get back to her body, and the Memory Chamber is dying, so there’s not a moment to lose. To buy some more time, Achenar goes into the poisonous heart of the Memory Chamber in order to try to extend its lifetime while the player solves some more stupid puzzles. The stupid puzzles kill Sirrus (although his body is okay, so I guess he’s just a vegetable now…a fact which will never, ever be mentioned) and release Yeesha’s memories back into her body. When we’re done truckin’ in our trippy dreamworld sequence groovy man, we come to and see Achenar die in Yeesha’s lap. Which is… kind of dark? It’s really pretty depressing that the already-redeemed Achenar has to redeem himself again, this time by self-sacrifice, just because he got conned into working with Sirrus. This is made even worse by the fact that the Memory Chamber actually has a supply of breathing kits designed to protect against the poison gases (this is not speculation on my part, you literally see the things and learn about them). The whole scenario is suggestive of Exile’s good-ending/better-ending system, but alas: no matter what you do, Achenar dies, Sirrus survives as a vegetable, and Yeesha is traumatized for life. Is it any wonder this is the only entry in the series that got a T rating?

The game closes out with yet another Atrus monologue. He thanks the player for helping him yet again–yes, he thanks you, even though he asked you to determine whether his sons should be released and instead they both ended up dead. The more you read into Atrus’s character the less sense he makes: at this point three members of his immediate family have tried to kill him, as has one former friend, his sons have been instrumental in mass murder, are now both dead after traumatizing his only daughter, and he’s just standing around musing as if nothing is wrong. How much chaos needs to erupt in this man’s life in order to get a rise out of him? The whole scenario reminds me of the Biblical story of King David and his son Absalom: Absalom rebels against David and leads an army against him, but when Absalom is killed David is still stricken with grief, crying “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Samuel 18:33). That Atrus seems to be able to take any amount of trauma and be unfazed doesn’t make him a stronger character. It makes him a robot.

And so we reach the end of this, the final installment in the Atrus-centric sequence of games. It’s not a perfect game by any means, and it falls somewhat short of being a great game as well, mostly due to the unforgivable weaknesses of its final act. Up until that point, it’s able to glide admirably on its immersive atmosphere, and the shortcomings of its story and acting are largely unnoticeable. Its main problem is that it’s a small story told as if it were big. Achenar is the only character who undergoes change, making him the protagonist, but the story is centered not so much around him as it is around Sirrus’s big evil comic-book plot, which is too stupid to be taken seriously. Had the game aimed a little lower, tried to be a bit more quiet and a bit less cinematic, it could have struck gold.

A final consideration: what is the revelation? That Sirrus and Achenar are not dead? That Sirrus’s evil plan is stealing Yeesha’s body? Is it that red-green-blue and cyan-magenta-yellow are two nice color combinations (the only explicit use of the term in the game)? Consider it a final puzzle, dear reader, one which may be considerably more thought-provoking than poking the color clouds.

Other thoughts:

• Well, you know I’m going to do it somewhere, so let’s take this opportunity to look at how the game’s female characters are handled. Yeesha gets to be Rapunzel this time, but where Katran was just locked up and occasionally questioned, Yeesha is physically and mentally violated for the duration of her confinement. Did we really need to have her get raped in order to understand that she’s in a bad position? (Not sexually raped, but just as traumatic.) As for Katran, she hardly appears in this game except for a journal in which she mostly frets about family troubles and her inability to resolve them. It’s been pretty disappointing to me how badly this series holds up under feminist criticism.
• The other Katran-related issue is that Atrus’s journal mentions offhand that Anna died linking to an Age of Katran’s making, an event which apparently burdened her with heavy guilt and led to her oft-mentioned fear of Linking. It would have been nice to see this discussed in a bit more detail, but alas, this is the end of Katran’s involvement. The next time we hear anything substantial about her it will be the news that she’s dead.
• The control system of this game leaves a lot to be desired, many problems unfortunately stemming from the 360-degree movement system, despite the fact that it’s one of the game’s most immersive elements. It’s hard to get lost in a game like Riven because each shot is carefully composed to make it clear where you’ve come from and where the path is going. Unfortunately, allowing the player to look in any direction means that you can’t control what they see, and this opens the door to any number of disorientation problems. This is a particularly big issue in Revelation because the nodes are fairly far apart, meaning that often when one clicks to go forward, the next node bears very little resemblance to the preceding one. This problem is particularly egregious in the Haven jungle, where it’s often completely impossible to tell which path you just came from.
• Other control problems are caused by the sluggish mouse movements, which make puzzles like the mangree web and the crystal locks very difficult to solve simply because they require fast, smooth movements.
• A note regarding the aforementioned Prison Age ambient sounds in realMyst: by some strange coincidence, they exactly contradict the Ages as we see them in Revelation: Sirrus’s age sounds like a jungle, and Achenar’s stormy and abstract.
• Exactly which component of the Crystal Viewer exploded? From context it seems to be the sound component, but we can hear Atrus just fine when we contact Rime. Atrus, you are lying to us again!
• So, the “flying tent” sequence in Haven serves…what purpose, exactly? I keep thinking one of these days I’ll figure it out, but no answer has been forthcoming.
• A noteworthy error: Achenar’s drawing of the cerpatee bones includes its totem, even though he hadn’t made the totem yet when he made the drawing.
• Also: Why are they called “Karnaks”? That’s a place in Egypt.
• Okay, I know I’ve been tough on the Serenians, but really: if their whole society is reliant on that silly-looking stone that Achenar stole, why do they not have any extras? I would have guessed that it’s because it’s unique and irreplaceable, except that they explicitly state that they can find new ones somewhere.  Sigh. (Also, it seems strangely light for a rock of its size.)
• “I… am… Sirrus.” Truly a nonthreatening statement if I’ve ever heard one. I find that most villains sound more dangerous if they have a surname: Khan Noonien Singh, Carmen Sandiego, etc. Star Wars never would have been a hit with a villain named Darth. (Possible exception: “Bob” of Twin Peaks.)
• There’s a pair of flippers and a mask and snorkel on Yeesha’s dock. Nice to know that Atrus and Katran aren’t overprotective parents… they’re totally okay with Yeesha swimming in a flowing river a stone’s throw away from a fifty-foot waterfall.

And, finally:

Next time: Myst: The Book of Ti’ana

Screenshots property of their respective owners.