As mentioned in an earlier post about how epic Myst III still is, I was doing a semi-replay of the Myst series with the added intention of finally completing Revelation and End of Ages. Well stick a fork in two games on the never-ending backlog, as those are now done. Here are some quick thoughts on the experiences of both Myst IV and V.
All-in-all I enjoyed exploring the Ages and appreciated the narrative closure.
Myst IV: Revelation for me started strong, the pre-rendered visuals felt less static than previous games in the series, as the game incorporated a lot more motion into the environments with trees swaying in the wind and unique particle effects like dust drifting through light rays. This made the various locations feel more alive and added to the sense of immersion, taking away some of the ‘slide-show’ feel of locations. I say started strong, as I felt that the story got a little off track in the latter half of the experience. I also found that there were no real stand-out puzzle moments for me, where other titles had one or two puzzles that really had me like wow, awesome, none of the Revelation ones gave me that. I could also see this in my scribbled notes for the games, where Exile and End of Ages had pages of littles notes or diagrams on elements in the games, my Revelation journal was just a few odd numbers and drawings. Not to say the game was bad, not at all, just comparatively I may have enjoyed it a little less than the others.
This is where Myst V: End of Ages was a lot of fun for me, puzzles provided that great feeling of putting together various clues in my pages of notes and coming up with what you think is a solution, to getting the payoff of seeing it work. Graphically the game had adopted the same real-time approach used in URU, so exploring environments was a little more freeform, but because of the change in technology the locations do feel a little sparce by comparison to what they could achieve with the pre-rendered visuals. Real-time however does mean they get to dynamically shift aspects of the world, so introduce time of day or weather changes. All-in-all I enjoyed exploring the Ages and appreciated the narrative closure of this final game in the series, plus I can now tick these two games off the backlog.
