Myst IV: Revelation Review

Depending on your state of mind when you boot the game up, you’ll find Myst IV to be either the most boring game you have ever played or by far the most interesting. There aren’t really any shades of gray with graphical adventure games like this. Either you love it for the complex puzzles and leisurely pace or you hate it for the lack of action. Myst IV is no different. Fans of the genre will love it, though, and that is what counts.

Storyline

The storyline of the Myst games follows a scientist named Atrus and his scheming sons Sirrus and Achenar. Atrus has the power to write “ages” which are different worlds that take the form of books and you can enter and exit the different ages at will. You don’t actually play as Atrus or his sons, however, and your character is simply an unnamed friend who wants to help Atrus. Your goal is to help unravel the secrets of the ages while learning all you can about the other characters. The story is told mostly through lengthy journals that you can find along the way and do a great job of fleshing out the worlds and characters if you are willing to read through them.

Gameplay

Gameplay in Myst IV consists of exploring the various ages and solving puzzles that open up new paths and lead to, you guessed it, more puzzles. It is not a 3D world, however, and the game is instead made up of thousands of static scenes that you navigate through with an onscreen cursor. Each scene has a number of things you can interact with and examine by paying attention to the different animations of your cursor. The game is remarkably easy to control once you understand what the cursor is telling you and fans of the genre will feel right at home. Because of this style of gameplay, the game moves very slowly as you can only move around the world one screen at a time and your success in solving puzzles is entirely dependent on your ability to comb over every square inch of every scene to find clues so don’t expect a lot of action. One negative aspect to Myst IV is that the load times between scenes are excruciatingly long. You spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for the game to load and that isn’t a good thing since it moves so slowly to begin with.

Puzzle Solving Skills a Must

The hook to graphical adventure games is the puzzles that you have to solve in order to move the game forward and Myst IV has some of the best puzzles the genre has ever seen. The game world is filled with books and scraps of paper and buttons and switches and items and it is up to you to piece the clues together and solve the puzzles. Symbols and patterns and secret codes are hidden throughout the game and even if you don’t recognize their significance right away you will surely use them eventually. What makes the whole game so interesting is that clues for many of the puzzles are spread throughout several ages so you have to go back and forth between worlds piecing things together until you can solve things. Most of these puzzles are extremely hard to figure out and the clues are usually pretty vague so this is definitely a game for people that like to sit and ponder things for a while. Luckily, there isn’t any hurry to complete any of the puzzles so you can sit and think all you want. When you do figure something out and get to move forward it is an incredibly satisfying experience because you really have to work for it.