Myst IV: Revelation

First game I ever played :D

I couldn't really get into this one. The beginning drags quite a lot and honestly made me more bored than anything. The pendant mechanic was also really unfun and kind of went against the appeal of Myst as a series to me. Myst strives on it's environmental storytelling, so having these audio log style mechanics broke my immersion, quite a lot. The puzzle design isn't as strong. And this might just be me, but I actually think this game looks worse than previous installments. It has its moments, but I was pretty disappointed, overall.

This game is nostalgic experience!

This is the worst - by far the worst - of the Myst series as far as I am concerned. The first part of the game was pretty enjoyable, but the closer I got to the end the more tedious the tasks became and had nothing to do with cognition, but rather a grim determination to complete tasks that were bordering on near impossibility due to a combination of poor color definition and a problem with cursor control that made a lot of the tasks hit or miss at best. I would literally do tasks 10, 20 or more times before it would 'register' as being correct even though on the face of it I was doing the exact same thing every time. Extremely frustrating and did not reflect anything like the amount of effort required to complete the game. In fact, I reached the end of my patience and finally gave up at the final tasks. It isn't like I have a tin pot PC or something - take a look at my specs. To top it all off I spent a couple of days 'fixing' a problem with the game crashing at onset until I finally resolved it by switching on HDR in my display specs. HDR???? Makes no sense to me as the game is hardly high def, but it actually resolved the problem. Not worth the effort.

I can't say whether it's a good game or not, but what I can say is it just straight up doesn't work with my computer. Don't know why. The previous games worked fine, and those were built for even older hardware. When I hit "Play" a new process called "Myst IV" appears in the task manager, the resolution on my screen drops until the normally pea-sized icons on my start menu are the size of quarters (were screens in 2004 really [i]that[/i] bad? I was just a kid then, but I imagine I'd remember that), and my mouse becomes only partly functional (which I guess might correspond with how it works in-game), but the game window never appears. I waited a whole hour, according to Steam, before deciding to teach myself how to end a task in task manager using only the keyboard (Alt+E, if you're curious). It was an enjoyable hour (mostly spent reading), but not because I got to play this game at any point therein (I did not). Don't know what kind of computer all these people reviewing the game on its actual merits were using, but apparently it wasn't the kind I've got. Perhaps one day I can look forward to hating it as much as they did (though hopefully not as much as my computer did).

The game plays well up until you reach the marble puzzle that will not accept a solution locking out the players chance to rescue Yeesha. I have played this game all the through many times the past when I was younger 81 Mac M3 chip and Parallels

The music is great, the graphics are pleasant despite their age, and the animations are nice but it has many flaws. Not worth it if you are not a Myst fan

I completed the game without any hints or spoilers. I thought all the puzzles were pretty fair, but a few of them were a bit of a stretch and required a fuzzy leap of insight. There also wasn't any single mind-blowingly cool puzzle, in my opinion, like there was in Riven or Exile. However, ultimately everything was fair, there was plenty of cool stuff, there weren't any obnoxious red herrings, and I appreciated the lack of pixel-hunting for barely-visible secret paths or panels, which remains IMO by far the worst thing in the Myst series generally. I like the story and setup generally and particularly the characterization told via the journals. Some of the acting is pretty awful, though, even by my tolerant standards. The main issue in the game for me is the navigation and interface. It just takes too dang long to move around compared to previous games. Having to spend >1 second every single time you change screens REALLY adds up. There is also one particular puzzle that requires a particular bit of maneuvering (invoking, fairly clearly, the interface itself) that has HORRIBLE detection. I also found it unfortunate that sometimes, objects that COULD be manipulable under certain circumstances were treated as static background if those circumstances were not triggered, instead of earlier games' (superior) practice of having the object clearly fail to work or be manipulated to no effect. The hand should not be "tapping" on things that can actually do something! Ultimately, the complaints did not prevent me from finishing, so this is a thumbs up in the end, but a tempered one, and the game very much deserves the "mixed reviews" it currently has on Steam.