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Myst 3 intro music1/7/2024 In terms of playstyle and puzzle design I would say this entry resembles Riven in a lot of ways, but with a decent amount of influence from Myst, and I consider the combination resulted in a very satisfying and playable game. There were a few sections where clumsy implementation made these interactions either difficult to discern or somewhat frustrating to execute, but overall the effect was a big net positive. I talk about this a lot in my post about The Room series, and while it was not done quite as skillfully here was it was in The Room, it still created a much stronger sense of connection with the world. ![]() “clicking and dragging” to move and manipulate objects, rather than simply clicking once to change its state. One positive UI change was the addition of proper mechanical interaction with objects in the world – e.g. As I played I did become accustomed to most of these things (or was at least able to overlook them), but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a solid 10-20% of my total playtime was taken up simply through waiting. But there were some areas that would disable zipping out, often gated by lengthy un-skippable cutscenes or other mandatory interactions. This was mitigated by the “zip” system that allowed for fast-travel between certain points within an age. The time to load each screen while travelling through the game was also somewhat shocking to me – approximately 1-2 seconds for each screen transition. Similarly it was very handy having an in-game way to capture images to reference later, but a several-second animation would play each time either the camera or photo viewer was opened, somewhat reducing their utility. I really like this idea, however, the cursor “hand” would perform a short animation into and out of these states during which actions couldn’t be taken. Take for example the cursor – it now has “active” states that indicate when the player has moused over an object that can be interacted with. For a game that is based around doing a limited number of actions a large number of times, it included a lot of design choices that made those repetitive actions take longer than necessary. This game was also in no hurry to do, well, anything. It was possible to alleviate this a bit through changing my mouse’s settings, I couldn’t eliminate it entirely, which did cause some frustration during puzzles that required specific timed movement, or required moving my mouse slowly and steadily. The most serious was that my mouse cursor would occasionally jump around the screen while trying to move it. While compatibility issues with new hardware and software aren’t exactly flaws in the game, I think they are worth mentioning as they can still hamper the player’s enjoyment of it. Despite all that, I found myself enjoying it a great deal, to the point that its strengths far outweighed its flaws. I was even set up to expect it to be somewhat lackluster given the trajectory I saw from Riven to Myst III, the fact that this was now the 3rd development company to be in charge of its production, and the fairly mediocre review scores online. Out of all the entries in the series it has had the most technical issues when running on current-gen systems, and some odd UI choices didn’t exactly create the best first impression. ![]() Myst 4 was a game that I ended up liking a lot, despite all its efforts to the contrary. I recommend reading my previous entries for more context: Thoughts after playing Myst, Thoughts after playing Riven: The Sequel to Myst, and Thoughts after playing Myst III: Exile.
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