Officially Alienated
After finally playing Myst: End of Ages and URU: Path of the Shell, I have to declare that I’m now officially alienated from the Myst franchise.
I’d say I’ve been a pretty hardcore fan since the Myst series began. I bought all the games, soundtracks, novels and even part of the limited-series comic book which were stopped for screwing up the story.
The original Myst was revolutionary. The story was enthrawling, mysterious, interesting and ultimately fun. Riven was also pretty revolutionary in terms of sound, visuals and plot. However the puzzles i felt were disconnected with the logic of the plot. Then Myst 3 which still was visually stunning felt even more disconnected. From then It was all down hill.
It seems as though the plot and puzzles were inversely proportional to the sound and visuals. The overall environment of the ages they developed were absolutely amazing. My favorites being Channelwood, Narayan, Spire, Todelmer and Ahnonay. However, the reasoning behind some of the puzzles and how they integrated into the overall story was lacking.
I noticed a lot of instances where the puzzles began contradict the overall understanding of how the Art and linking works. Instead they try to shotgun-explain the contradictions as simply "Well Yeesha did it because she’s supercool". With these infinite-variable-like explainations, i can’t help but see the Christian overtones in these games, which became a turnoff for me. When I play a game I want to have fun, not be fed religious propaganda.
Yeesha was a terrible character. Her incoherent, psycho, hippie babble drove me mad. End of Ages was a disaster. It was supposed to answer questions but instead, i was left with more. And the Bahro thing was just plain dumb. I found myself cheating my way through it because i just wanted to get it done since the fun of solving puzzles was simply not there anymore.
However, I gave them another chance as I read somewhere all the games except for URU was not considered cannon as they were just representations of a real universe covered in URU. Which was a neat way to explain the suckage. Except that Yeesha was still in URU and I wanted to punch her in her silly tattooed eye. Same silly empty babbling, same disconnected puzzles.
Path of the Shell sealed the deal. The solution to one of the puzzles was to stand still for 10 minutes…. I mean wtf!? And for some unexplained reason "Perhaps Yeesha did it cause she’s god", I linked at will to Myst.
And with that, I’m done with the whole series. I could go on and on about other such inconsistencies and lack of thought but I feel I’ve made my point. And it’s a shame because I wanted to become part of the gaming community with URU Live but I just can’t enjoy the game anymore.
I’m entertaining the idea of starting a collaborative writing project to, in a sense, rewrite the Myst universe story, plot and puzzles using the visuals and the novels as the source. The whole series premise was pretty interesting just very badly carried out.
