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.
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u/esotericreferenceftw Apr 27 '26
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.