Myst: The Prequel to Riven

when i was a puppy, no older than 5 years old, my mother showed me a cool pc game she had. you know what it was, by now, obviously...

there were two places i remember her showing me, quite vividly.

first, on myst island, she showed me a room with a chair that resembled a dentist's chair.

"check this out," she said, turning off the light in the room in-game. the walls became lit with starscape that went invisible previously.

as she sat, a curious mechanism lowered from the ceiling and revealed a date-and-time panel. quickly she input the date and time of my birth, pressed a button, and a window on the left side scrolled and scrolled until finally stopping on a constellation.

"see, it shows what the sky looked like on the day of your birth!" she explained. "isn't that cool?"

to be honest, i don't think that's true, now that i'm a fully grown dogthing, but at the time, it was amazing. how could they do such a thing? she even modified the time so my twin sister could see hers, too.

another notable spot she showed me, though much more briefly, was the channelwood age. the name "channelwood" is quite literal here: a place featuring channels of water and an ancient grove of redwood trees. i imagine this particular concept wedged itself solidly in my psyche, a settlement in a water-filled woodland, where pathways networked between the trees and elevators allowed the use of the tree boughs for support.

i've made attempts to play this game in the past that always seemed to fizzle out. i own realMyst on steam, but it doesn't work on modern machines at all anymore, and even back when it did, i never made it very far at all. i even tried the 3DO port, but the graphics were kind of subpar compared to the PC version (not to diss the port work, though, they did really good for such an intricate game!).

the way i ended up finally enjoying it was through a virtual machine set-up. i set up a windows XP VM using virtualbox and acquired Myst: Masterpiece Edition, and let 'er rip.

myst is a game that looks somewhat more complex than it is. it's not nearly as accessible as more modern games, with more linear progression than a more modern game like the witness, another game i played recently that is more open-world. not to say it's totally linear, of course - i was able to play through stoneship age before i even tried to get through channelwood age, after all, despite both being possible - but once you're properly in the world, the puzzles are to-the-point.

the solutions range from 'pretty straightforward' to 'how the fuck was i supposed to know to click that'. stoneship in particular had an issue i like to refer to with the phrase "searching the front", as that was the hint text given to me at a point that made no sense. how do i "search the front" of a room if it's one room, and i can't click anything along the closer wall?! and don't get me started on "wait a moment, let me get a better read on the situation" when it has no hints to give you. at one point, i shouted, clearly audibly and visibly frustrated, "did my mom even beat this stupid game?!" though i was somewhat playing it up for laughs from my friends in the call.

as difficult as it can be to find the starting point of a puzzle, the game's puzzles as a whole are not too extensive, with surprisingly few steps to follow, making it more approachable in that way. i would best define them as "simple, but obtuse", much like other early puzzle P-n-C games. it's like finding the end of a thread that's been bunched up; obviously there must be a starting point, you just have to really look for it.

puzzles aside, i have a large amount of respect for how established and well-designed the set pieces are. so many little doohickeys that don't actually have anything to do with the puzzle, like an orb on a pedestal in stoneship that wiggles and splits the pedestal in four when clicked, like a magic trick, or the skeleton in a box in mechanical age that has no bearing on anything whatsoever but does feel like the digital equivalent of going "boo! haha."

all in all, i really look forward to playing riven eventually. everyone says it's really good, and after watching The Making Of Riven (1998), i can see how. lots of detail taken to make everything look believable (the bit about the submarine was particularly impressive for the time!), and a lot of thought put into how everything connects in a lore way.

now my question for you today is: what is your favorite 90's game in a similar vein? something with fmv or puzzle or point and click elements. i want to hear it!