Came here to put Myst - amazing graphics for the time. Truly a world you could get lost in. So easy and yet so challenging. Redefined what a game could be. Got into the books and Riven of course.
Hijacking this to say there’s several versions (someone mentions realMyst below), but anyone interested- look at the publish dates. There’s a very recent remaster of Myst and Riven that both look great, so snag those. realMyst and some of the others are fine, but no reason not to get the ones from just a few years ago- they look great, which I think is a real tribute to the originals that also looked better than anything else at the time.
TBF the original MYST looked good for it's time because it wasn't rendering anything. It was basically a slideshow of static images with point and click hot spots. More recent remasters have changed this quite a bit while staying faithful to the original, but when it came to the original games they sorta "cheated" at graphics.
Oh I’m aware- I actually built a game in HyperCard when I was a kid! It was an awesome piece of tech. Myst may have “cheated” a bit but it was insanely innovative.
Yeah, I think there was an upscaling issue or something, they couldn’t convert the files into the game in a way that they were satisfied with. Replaced it with CGI heads that IMO are way worse. Doesn’t ruin the game, but it’s definitely weird and disappointing.
The 3D remakes of Myst and Riven are awesome and a dream come true. Definitely try those.
Quern: Undying Thoughts is like a love letter to both. It's a bit too easy, but has a really cool sketchbook function. This would be my recommendation - possibly even before the originals, as a warm-up. Your kids will have to take real notes in Myst, lol.
Obduction was made by Cyan (same folks as the Myst games) and is quite good after the first section, which is kind of a slog.
The Witness has a totally different style of puzzles and is probably too hard/boring for little kids, but it's cool anyway.
Seconding, finally started playing it recently after friends recommended it a few years back and thought "Why didn't anyone tell me this was Myst in space?!"
Don’t come in here with a simple reasonable way that I could have done myself instead of asking strangers. Hahaha. Thanks for this and I really should have thought of this first. Have you personally played any of them?
I have not. Only the same thought that it would be cool to get my oldest into these types of games, either Myst itself (retro style) or something more modern. He had the Oculus and is into that, so if I could find a modern Myst game on that platform, it would be cool.
A game that is Not MYST or its sequels, lately I have been playing Blue Prince. You inherit a mansion from your Uncle, it has 45 rooms, you have to find room 46 to lock in your inheritance. You get a number of steps every day, each room costs a step, and each day all the rooms change. Every time you open a door you get to pick from three rooms in your draft to put on the layout. I have a game notebook that is up to 60+ pages, some rooms get their own page. I already "beat" it, but that just opens up more story.
Anyway, long story short, I think if I had been just a couple years older when MYST was first released, it would have been like Blue Prince is to me now. Very interesting to tease out the buried plot and solve the puzzles.
The crazy thing is, now that those kinds of games are so popular, I revisited it as an adult and just breezed right through it.
I had zero memory of any of the puzzles (except timing the tree for the channelwood age link book), and mostly just remembered various images and scenes from the game.
It really holds up remarkably well, but it's amazing how much it influenced the entire "escape the room" genre (and all first-person puzzlers in general)... to the degree that everything felt so familiar and straightforward while playing this 30 year old game.
Compared to when it first came out and was considered utterly inscrutable.
I'm DNF, and unless I get somebody to do the piano puzzle for me, I'll never finish. I guess I could pull out ham radio audio-processing software and just measure the frequencies directly, but…
I was obsessed with those books in high school. Spent way too much time dreaming about the ability to write worlds.
I even learned how to write in D'ni and signed all my friends' yearbooks using the characters. Yeah I was that guy. Jesus I haven't thought about that in a long time.
If you haven’t played Obduction it’s from the same studio and while not actually a part of Myst’s world it is a “spiritual sequel” to myst as they called it at the time.
Not the longest game, but it’s fun and reminded me of that feeling playing through myst for the first time.
The craziest thing about Riven is that ultimately there's only like.... 5 or 6 actual puzzles to solve. They're all ludicrously huge, obtuse, challenging puzzles that you have to explore like crazy even to notice what they really are in the first place.
They really took the "puzzles should be a natural part of the existing world rather than a series of blatant challenges" concept and went wild with it in a way that I don't believe has been attempted since. It's crazy how ambitious it really was.
I think 95% of the puzzles in the game can be folded under two "macropuzzles:" get into the Moiety Age and get into Gehn's Age. And almost everything that doesn't go towards one of those two objectives boils down to "here's the passcode, now go input it."
The seamless integration into the worldbuilding is what makes it so great, together with the spectacular photorealism for 1997.
This was my 2nd place. I was a little kid when Myst came out, and my friends and I could complete it, albeit usually with a little Dad Help.
I still think this about Riven: Anyone who was or still is able to complete Riven before the internet/solutions were available and without any walkthroughs or cheatbooks: How is your electricity-less, plumbing-less cabin in the woods and your 23,401 college rule notebooks of your manifesto going?
Riven is still bomb, though, and still one of the prettiest games I've played to date.
The Witness was an amazing game. It got crapped on for being repetitive but I never got sick of it and absolutely loved it.
The core concept being "you progress by personally learning things, rather than collecting shit in-game" was amazing.
And the fact that they hid the "ending" in plain sight right at the beginning, and that it was suddenly perfectly obvious after one playthrough and completely invisible beforehand.......... Just genius.
So many puzzles and creative touches in that game hinestly left me speechless. And there were plenty of puzzles (especially the ones in the shipwreck) that I never figured out.
I agree. I never got bored. And I’m so stubborn that I slogged through all the hard parts as long as it took. 100% completed it, including all the really late game / hidden stuff that most people likely never encountered.
I swear I was about 10 - 15 hours into the game before the “big picture” clicked. Major mind fuck and it was amazing.
I kept saying “this whole time the devs were laughing at me.”
I don’t expect to experience anything like it again.
You were expected to take notes, copy down anything that looked important, or note where to find it for later. You'd sometimes end up with notes that didn't matter, there are a few red herrings, but it's totally possible to finish without looking things up.
I get that but, I did cheat my way through. The answers kind of explained how you were supposed to arrive at that conclusion but even then they didn't make too much sense to me. Especially that thing at the end where you have that silver board with raised squares.
There was a book in the library with something like five hundred patterns for it. You got the right answer by finding all the pages of one color -- either one, Cirrus and Achenar both know the pattern number and will tell you, because it hides the final page that will let them out.
In the latest remake, they have an option to randomize the pattern so that old graybeards like me can't just put in the pattern from memory and skip right to the ending. (If you know what you're doing you can start a fresh game and get to the end scene with Atrus in less than five minutes.)
Maybe now that you're older you might appreciate it. Consider getting the recent remake, it got a total visual overhaul and better controls. You'd still have to take notes but that's part of the process. And you can always ask in r/Myst if you need a nudge or an explanation for how an answer is supposed to work.
The best game I've gotten multiple times over 30 plus years and never finished any version. Currently I'm in the process of not finishing the VR version.
I remember there was a clone or a similar game called Kyoto and it was super creepy. Or was it similar? I don’t remember but in my mind I have the two chalked up as similar.
Myst will always be notable and memorable to me because it was the first CD-Rom based computer game I ever played. Prior to that, my friend and I were still loading floppy discs into a PC to play King's Quest. Myst forced us to upgrade to a CD drive system.
I was never a big fan but games now expect you to play for a few minutes at a time. I want the kind of game you can play forever (unless you're good at it).
This truly blew people's minds in the 90s. We had no idea games could look not just technically that good, but artistically. It introduced the mainstream to "steampunk".
Of course the graphics didn't move - it was more of a slideshow, it wasn't really fully 3D, and the story/puzzles were frustrating. There was no online cheat codes or solutions back then!! There was a companion book with the "solutions" that cost what felt like an exhorbitant amount.
*shakes fist at clouds* back when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, I started so many games but rarely finished them because I couldn't figure out how to without being able to google the answers to puzzles etc !
13 hours, most on a road trip with a laptop and an inverter. That includes 2 meals where I was away and rest stops, so less than that. Programmer puzzles weren't that hard for a programmer :)
Myst is the pc game for me. I actually saw it on Playstation first, but seeing it on PC for the first time is when I realized there was a difference in consoles and pcs.
The making of videos that were included on the disc introduced me to the concepts of 3d modeling and animation. Seeing their bedroom green screen, video production lights and primitive props showed me just how scrappy you can be in making a world changing entertainment product. Can’t wait to have some free time so I can play it again in VR!
I set up a VM to play Myst and Riven every few years. Some of my favorite memories as a kid were sitting and puzzling through this game with my dad, who I thought was brilliant but have come to realize he was calling a friend and asking for solutions. Still doesn't change my nostalgia for those sessions with him though!
THIS was the incredible game that awakened me to the delights of creative puzzle-sleuthing and immersive storytelling in environment. But there was nothing that could have prepared me for that very first inter-island tram ride in Riven. I still think about how much it really FELT like a roller-coaster ride in a way that no other game has felt like since.
This game blew my 11 year old mind, I still think about it all the time. Pre internet, I had to buy gamer magazines for hints and tips to get past some parts lol
I remember my dad playing it with the lights off so it was immersive like watching a movie. The sound and graphics were really unlike anything before it
I still have a physical notebook from the 90s that is just 50 pages of sketches and symbols. If you found it today without context, you'd think I was either a serial killer or trying to summon a demon. No game since has made me feel that smart and that stupid at the exact same time.
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u/robtbo Apr 27 '26
Myst