![]() I'm most impressed by just how effectively a handful of low-tech tricks adds more depth and realism. (A new way to describe this sub-genre has emerged and became popular as 'walking simulators') Gameplay consists of wandering the environments and playing with a large assortment of Rube-Goldberg like machines (sometimes organic) unlocking new areas and pieces of bigger puzzles. Now you feel much more within the scene rather than panning a fixed camera on a tripod around like you're on a Riven geological survey. The move to the 'POV spheres' over Myst/Riven's slide-show system increases immersion a great deal. it's very much like those 'virtual tours' on websites - the original game uses the same "QuickTime VR" rendering technology. Playing Myst III is very much like a modern-day VR-game (something that didn't exist in comparable form back in the day) you have a full spherical field of view and whilst you cannot move freely in any direction you instead 'step' from one POV to another, further along the scene. Myst III is the last of a generation of pre-rendered 'photo-realistic' adventure games and what this game achieves with such low-tech playback is nothing short of astounding to me, even in this age when there exists real-time photo-realistic VR. Myst III is often overlooked and under-appreciated because it broke no real ground compared to its forbears and the games market at the time had swung very heavily to fast-paced, real-time 3D games. Riven (the sequel) is one of the most beautiful and captivating games ever made, absolutely worth playing even if you will almost certainly have to resort to an FAQ/walkthrough to be able to tie all the loose ends up finally. There are modern remakes with full real-time 3D graphics available that make the experience more engaging and a lot less perceptually 'slow'. The first Myst is an okay game, notable as a touch-stone of the time and important for its historical context, but you wouldn't be missing a great deal if you skipped it. The final puzzle of the game is a complete curve-ball, requiring 'literally read our minds' level of lateral thinking - you'll want to use a guide for that. Some puzzles can be conceptually worked out quite quickly but then may take a long time to execute correctly and this is all the more painful if you have to traverse several screens back and forth between actions. The feeling of having worked a puzzle out from pure action and reaction is great, but it can be a two-edged sword, leaving you hopelessly lost and confused in other situations. Myst III's puzzles are not without their difficulties though: the complete lack of instruction on how a mechanism works - a mainstay and fundamental part of Myst - means that sometimes you either 'get it' or don't. order, colour, sound) and it is very difficult to brute-force these in the 'I give up, let's just try using everything on everything else' kind of way. Lateral thinking puzzles work not by rubbing your inventory items together (Myst games have almost no inventory to speak of) but by the configuring of state machines and automata based on perceptual clues (e.g. The need for walkthroughs for those games was legendary. I will sidestep plot for the moment to say first that Myst III is a great deal more 'solvable' than Myst or Riven (Myst II). ![]() You've got the 'rub everything on everything else' school dominated by LucasArts, the 'IQ test hidden in the form of a game' school which specialises in stand-out puzzles that exist more as distractions than plot items - the Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes series largely typifies this - and lastly you have the 'lateral thinking' school which is exemplified by the Myst series. There are at least three different 'schools' of adventure gaming with distinct styles centring around how they each handle puzzles. Just wanted to share this as I just wrote a reasonably lenghy review of Myst III.
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