There are some games that just will not die. One of them is “Myst”, which is coming up on being twenty years old (there are about a million people reading this, right now, who flinched at those words). In fact, it’s managed to outlive the companies that first distributed it: Broderbund has been dead for more than a decade, Psygnosis is little more than a shell of itself…and “Myst” is still going strong.
In fact, it’s actually in the process of coming to modern consoles. A port of the kinda terrible PSOne release has just hit the PlayStation Network for six bucks, and Myst is actually hitting the 3DS in July.
Not bad for a game made with, and we’re not kidding on this one, HyperCard.
“Myst” has definite flaws. The load times take forever, the music and sound is terrible, the acting is thankfully sparse, the graphics have quite a few visual cliches even for the time, the controls were even worse especially for the time, the pacing demands patience, and the story is hippy-dippy nonsense.
The gameplay, on the other hand, could actually stand to be imitated more often, regardless of genre.
#5) It Demands You Pay Attention
Basically, you’re not going to leave the Age you start the game stranded in unless you look around, take a few notes, and think about what the game’s showing you. The puzzles are heavily dependent on observing your surroundings, and applying what you see to puzzles you run into later.
True, some of the best games do this, or at least demand that you explore enough to make your life easier, but it’s rarely tightly integrated into the gameplay and more of a cookie offered to gamers who take their time.
#4) It Doesn’t Demand You Solve Puzzles In a Particular Order
Myst was the first game to anticipate the “hub” structure we see everywhere now: there was the central level that you poked around in and solved puzzles in to unlock new areas, and those areas could be accessed in any order. Way too many games make the hub a lot more regimented than it needs to be, and don’t really reward exploring the hub as much as they should.
#3) It Lets The Player Take the Lead
Just as importantly, the player figures out where to go and what to do first. Again, too often in modern games you’re pushed into one direction or the other, whether through overly linear level design, or just a refusal to think of how some gamers may want to solve a particular problem. It’s a little sad that a game from the SNES era made for a few thousand bucks is in some ways more dynamic and engaging than games that cost millions of dollars and have supercomputers behind them.
#2) The Challenge Is Generally In Figuring Out The Puzzle Mechanics, Not Actually Solving It
Stop and consider this for a minute: “Myst” is a game where the puzzles and their solutions are integrated directly into the environment. It’s not thrown at you, you don’t have to solve any puzzle to keep poking around an area, it’s just there, and you can solve it or not solve it as you need to. If you explore thoroughly, you’ll have everything you need to solve every puzzle in the game.
Most of the time, once you piece together how the puzzle works, the solution clicks into place pretty easily, bar a few times, like the infamous piano puzzle, where the Rand brothers just chucked it and told you the solution if you knew where to look.
So why don’t games do more of this? Have puzzles where the real challenge is realizing where the puzzle is and in fact that there’s a puzzle at all? True, there are games like “Fez”, but “Fez” is somewhat of a poor example because to really beat everything about that game, you’ll need an iron resolve and a B.S. in Mathematics.
#1) The Puzzles Have a Direct Sense of Reward And a Real Effect On The Environment
One thing that’s always baffling about modern games is the fact that, most of the time, puzzles are just basically a dynamic load screen or a breather moment in an action game to solve before you can advance. In some cases, figuring out a puzzle gives you some form of gameplay advantage you wouldn’t normally have. But that’s a poor form of feedback, especially if the reward stinks and the “puzzle” is timing a few jumps right.
It’s true that some developers enjoy working in fiendishly difficult puzzles you don’t have to solve to keep playing: for example, Rocksteady says that there are three or four secrets in “Batman: Arkham City” that gamers still haven’t found, and this was a game that hid an Easter Egg in an area it was nearly impossible to get to and had a radio frequency that was doubled encoded. But that’s just something mildly neat to read about on a blog for most people.
But it’s rare that solving a puzzle allows, say, a new path through the game, or a new way to confront an enemy. There’s not a strong sense of reward; you don’t get the feeling that you’re directly controlling the game environment.
Part of this is just the story of “Myst”; there are few cutscenes and most of the plot is contained in books that you don’t have to bother reading. On the other hand, there’s nothing quite like solving a puzzle and discovering a giant tree is moving up and down, or clicking on a painting and discovering a rotating tower. And this would seem to be something ideally suited to, say, FPS games and dungeon crawlers, where reading the environments is key to strategy in the first place, so why not layer in some more reward?
Your thoughts?
Image courtesy Cyan Worlds