The Dord of Darien

Most Overrated Games #2

Myst (PC, 1995)

Oh God. I’m going to need to go back to therapy after writing this one. Why do you think I kept putting it off?

Seriously, fuck this game. Myst is the most obnoxious entry in the awful "multimedia CD-ROM game" genre that popped up about as soon as CD-ROM drives became cheap enough that everybody had one. This was a genre of games that consisted of nothing but FMV cutscenes interrupted periodically for stupid minigames. If that sounds a lot like every video game to you, well, now you understand the depth of loathing that I hold for the multimedia CD-ROM genre, since I consider it responsible for everything that’s awful about modern games.

This genre produced exactly one game that was any damn use at all, and it sure wasn’t fucking Myst (for reference, it was Trilobyte’s The 7th Guest, which wasn’t a masterpiece, but had some decent Layton-y brainteasers and cutscenes that were both acceptable quality and fairly short). Myst was quite possibly the worst of a bad lot. Nominally an adventure game — never a good sign — Myst actually turns into nothing so much as a whole lot of random clicking while you wait for something to happen. If that sounds like fun to you, consider that, when something does happen, all it means is that you get to watch a movie that makes no fucking sense at all and has no context.

Myst has no gameplay. None at all. You transition from static screen to static screen as you walk around the "islands," and periodically you find the correct pixel to click on to start a "puzzle." The puzzles are utterly inorganic and lacking in context, but, worse than that, they are frequently arbitrary and senseless, and you are generally given no guidance at all, so you end up stumbling around in circles until you hit on just the right sequence of actions to solve a puzzle. True story: the game is so heavily dependent on aimless wandering and confusion to pad out its length that you can actually complete the whole thing in ten minutes if you know the solutions to the puzzles. There’s that little substance here.

Plotwise, the game is about some damn thing. Who knows, really? It’s one of those fucking "arty" games that tries to make a big secret of what it’s actually about, but it’s so disjointed and boring that, by the time you find out, you don’t really care. You read this book called Myst, and it transports you to an island, where you bumble around looking for magic books. Then the game ends and you can go play something else, which is the best part.

For some reason, people went completely bullshit for this game. I can kind of understand it at the time — the popularity of games like Myst and The 7th Guest was rooted in the fact that, until the CD-ROM drive became a common item, game developers didn’t have enough storage space to tart up their games with hours of prerendered cutscenes and voice acting, and so, when those games finally started hitting the market, they were exciting mainly because they were something new, which I dig to an extent. But come on; when was the last time you thought about The 7th Guest? Phantasmagoria? Return to Zork? But some people apparently think there’s a reason to play Myst in the year 2010, since it’s just recently had a DS remake, and just today launched on fucking Steam. These people are bad and wrong, and nobody should ever go anywhere near this thing again. It’s not even worth the five dollars they want for it on Steam.

August 6th, 2010 Posted by Darien | Most Overrated Games Ever | 2 comments