Mini-review of Myst IV: Revelation
Murray Peterson
Mini-review of Myst IV: Revelation
Copyright October 30, 2004 by Murray Peterson
Introduction:
When I looked at the ads for Myst IV, I saw another entry in
the Myst universe, not written using the URU 3D engine, which
meant no more jumping and running. How could I not be
drooling over this game? I suppose that URU should have
given me a hint or two about the current directions in game
design for the Myst universe. I enjoyed the continuation
of the Myst story, but this game was a mixed experience
for both me and my wife.
Graphics (quality, animations, cut scenes):
This is an easy description. Myst IV has the best graphics
of any game I have ever played (or seen). The graphics are
stunning and realistic, and the entire game feels "alive".
Light levels change due to cloud movement, tree branches move
in the wind, birds and insects fly around you, and the
wildlife notices you and interacts with you (usually to run
away :-)
It really doesn't get any better than this.
Sound (music, voices, special effects)
Revelation took sound effects to a new level with this game.
Your cursor was a hand, and you could tap on any surface
within reach. Hot spots did hot spot things, but all other
surfaces would elicit a sound when tapped, and the sound was
always something that matched the material (crystals clinked,
wood thunked, metal clanked, and so on).
The music was good, although not up to the sheer wonder of
the original Myst game. They even included a vocal piece by
Peter Gabriel (he also did some of the voice work).
Voice acting was good throughout, with the only weak spot
being Yeesha. The girl's voice was rather monotone and under
acted, but I suppose it must be really hard to find a ten
year old that can act very well.
The only jarring note was the sound of your character's
footsteps. I really don't make that much noise when I walk,
and I really think they should have been eliminated or
reduced in volume.
Story (plot, theme, depth):
As usual, I will decline to describe much of the plot in the
game. The plot is more explicit than the original Myst, but
there are long stretches of the game where you learn about
the story from people's journals and personal belongings. I
found the story to be complex enough to keep me interested,
and complete enough to be satisfying. If nothing else, I
learned more about Yeesha when she was a child (she was weird
even when younger).
Characters (depth, development, interaction):
Your interaction with the various characters is minimal,
and anything you learn about the characters is through
reading their journals, rooting through their personal
belongings. listening to flashbacks, and watching them
in a few FMV sequences. I must sya that it all worked
for me; I may not have gotten to really know them, but
I at least learned enough for the purposes of the game.
Puzzles (difficulty, uniqueness, suitability, ugliness, linearity):
This is where the game went downhill in a hurry.
Myst 4 throws timed sequences at you in several places, and
some of them are darned hard -- hard enough that the
manufacturer felt obligated to slow one of them down when
they issued a patch. The timed sequences are truly pointless
and infuriating.
If timed puzzles weren't bad enough, the game designers did
what I can only call "cheating". Many clues and puzzles were
intentionally vague or misdirecting, which sometimes forced
me to try multiple possible solutions, even though I knew
exactly what I needed to do, and I had all of the relevant
information sitting in front of me. For example, one puzzle
involved crstal shapes, and the designers appeared to have
intentionally made two of the crystals look very much alike.
Identifying the correct crystal was an exercise in
frustration, when I felt it should have been an exercise in
brain power alone. The puzzles were difficult enough without
the intentional misdirection and vagueness inserted by the
game's designers.
I will also accuse the game of containing mazes. Not
because there were lots of passages that all looked alike,
but because several of the worlds visited had many, many
curved paths, all of them with very similar looking
surroundings. This was an easy game in which to get lost.
Most puzzles are well integrated with the story and the
environment, but there are some number of them that are just
dropped in place to block your progress; they have no
correlation or integration with the game in any way.
Controls (user interface, save/restore, sound/video adjustments):
First the good news; the game had a good set of options,
including gamma, brightness, and contrast controls. You
could also control screen resolution, as well as various
other settings that allowed you to run the game on a slower
machine and video card.
The cursor was an animated hand, and it would indicated hot
spots or possible close up views by changing shape. The
problem was with the speed of this animation; it was so slow
that I would see some cursor shape change when it was halfway
across the screen from the actual hot spot. This slow cursor
resulted in you slooowwwly moving your cursor around the
screen. Not a good design.
The control panel where you chose options, save game, load
gane, etc., was driven 100% by mystery meat navigation. What
you see is a disk with about 8 buttons on it, none of them
labelled. You had to hover your cursor over the button
before it would display what was hidden behind that button.
More poor design.
Bugs or problems:
There were no subtitles available. There was a menu option
to turn them on, but it indicated that only the Dutch
language was available. Even that was a lie -- you couldn't
turn the subtitles on, even in Dutch.
I had no other problems on my machine (XP Pro, ATI AIW 9600
video card, AMD cpu, 512 Mb RAM).
Install/Uninstall:
Make sure you have a lot of disk space available. The
package indicates that you will need three gigabytes of disk
space, but that is for the minimal installation only. I
recommend you choose the maximum installation option to
eliminate pauses and delays while the game loads a lot of
data from your DVD drive. The maximum install option will
require over eight gigabytes of free disk space, but the only
time it looks at the DVD is at game startup, when it does the
copy protection check.
On XP, Myst 4 installs a Safedisc device driver on your
machine, and does not uninstall the damn thing. Uninstalling
it from the device manager doesn't work -- it just reinstalls
itself the next time you boot.
To see if you have been "infected":
Right click My Computer and select properties
Select Hardware tab
Click on Device Manager button
Select View Hidden Devices from the View menu
Expand Non-Lug and Play Drivers section
Look for secdrv device driver
To remove:
Right click secdrv device driver and select uninstall
Do NOT reboot when asked
Delete the file WINDOWS\system32\drivers\SECDRV.SYS
Now you can reboot
It took me a while to find my saved games (not in the game
folder, but under My Documents)
Pros:
Outstanding graphics, animations, and video sequences
Great sound effects and music
Cons:
Safedisc copy protection driver not uninstalled
Timed sequences
Intentional misdirection and vague clues
Mystery meat navigation
Cursor animation was far too slow
No subtitles
Conclusion:
Myst IV: Revelation is a game that I will recommend, but with
warnings attached. It's immersive, graphically stunning, has
a good story, and some really good puzzles. But (and it's a
big but), it can be a damned frustrating game at times,
sometimes to the point of completely ruining your gaming
experience.
--
Murray Peterson
Email: murray.s...@shaw.ca
URL: http://members.shaw.ca/murraypeterson/
Tom McEwan
that, as Myst and Riven are arguably the two greatest adventure games ever
made, and certainly among the best computer games overall. It starts out
with great promise and a couple of good puzzles, but just falls apart. It's
sad, because sometimes fragments of something better shine through and you
can see how awesome it could have been if done properly and consistently -
the second half of Haven (after you've lowered the bridge) is probably the
closest the game comes to, say, Riven quality in terms of puzzles, writing
and overall design, though some parts of Tomahna are also excellent (the
D'ni language puzzle actually could match Riven, and the sine-wave/imager
and power generation puzzles were quite nicely done too).
I felt the dream sequences were a serious misudgement, and should never have
been included - it's hard to say exactly why, but they just felt dead wrong.
The atmosphere and story of the first three games were grounded in reason
and scientific thought, even extending to the apparent magic of the linking
books themselves. There was absolutely no reference of any kind to the
psychic mumbo-jumbo found in Serenia, and that made the age especially hard
to take seriously. The writing was also rather flakey when it came to
prophesies and things. Having a tune with lyrics in it also seemed totally
inappropriate to this series of games. Ambient music is supposed to support
a scene, not dominate it, and lyrics are a serious distraction.
The rest of the game has some really painful design. There are a number of
howlers in the writing, for example - phrases such as "cool", "slice n'
dice" and "This is SO not good!" à la April Ryan have absolutely no place in
a Myst game if you ask me. If memory serves (I could be wrong about this
one), the game is supposed to take place a good hundred years or so ago
anyway, when such phrases hadn't even surfaced in human society, let alone
D'ni. Two crucial plot elements of the first two games are totally
disregarded - the prison books operate in a completely different way, and
you now seem able to visit Atrus with ease when previously getting home was
a major challenge. Personally I feel that this alone is enough to condemn
the game as a hopeless failure of a sequel. The game also brings up the
subject of the burning of the books, but just as quickly drops it without
any explanation.
Several puzzles simply defy reason in their design, and their interfaces are
ridiculously implausible in terms of believability - no one would ever build
electrical machines with an awkward sliding switch like the control panels
in spire, for example. Various physical laws such as those of
electromagnetics and electrostatics, while admittedly bent or quietly
skirted around in other games, are blatantly violated in this one,
unforgivable in this case because it would be quite possible to make just as
good a puzzle without completely breaking the rules (in fact, if they'd done
a proper inverse-square-law magnetic field, I feel the puzzle would have
been enhanced quite a bit - straightforward linear interpolation puzzles are
almost as clichéd as the dreaded newspaper-pipecleaner-keyhole puzzle).
Some of the worst examples of implausible design were the sluice-gate
control mechanisms in Serenia - they are overly complex without any
justification, and completely ludicrous when you consider the sluices are
small enough to be raised or lowered by hand! Also, even though they're
open-framed mechanical devices, it's often impossible to get a good look at
the mechanism and actually work out how it operates - you have to figure it
out by trial and error. This simply shouldn't happen, especially in a Myst
game. Similarly on the two occasions when you need to make a map of a large
area the enormous distances between "navigation points" as you walk around
the ages make this an almost impossible task. I never did manage to make a
map of the canal system and had to resort to hints, simply because the
various camera locations made it impossible to see even the general
direction the canals went in in many areas. I can't help but feel that in a
"real" Myst game you'd not only be able to stand in the middle of the
bridges and see straight down the canals, but also climb into the dry canals
and figure out where they go by walking along them. The "rope" puzzle made
no sense at all - an inanimate rope can suddenly turn into a living snake?
I honestly thought I was hallucinating the first time I saw that!
The worst thing about the puzzles, though, is that they're all actually
REALLY EASY at their core (with a few honourable exceptions, such as the
language puzzle and the animal-call puzzle, which are just right). Their
difficulty lies not in the puzzle itself, but in the awkward interface and
in figuring out what it is you're actually supposed to be doing. Guesswork
does not make a good puzzle. Take the gate bolt puzzle in Haven, for
example - the puzzle works well enough, except that it's impossible to see
how the mechanism physically operates, even when you actually see it moving.
It's not at all apparent that the bolts will slide when the hammer is in the
hole but outside the slider, so you have no idea what you're actually trying
to do, and must simply slide the various parts around in the hope that
something will happen.
The camera/projector system was a complete waste of time, and again rather
implausible. It is implied that the camera is "real", which is why it
cannot be used in the dream sequences (where you NEED it on one occasion!),
and yet it's portrayed as a photographic paper camera, whose pictures can
somehow a) be developed instantly wihout chemicals or darkroom and b) be
converted to celluloid film to go in the massive projector you're somehow
carrying with you, which also makes a sound like a cinema projector even
though it only shows still images. These are pifflingly small points, I
suppose, but they all add up, and the whole system seemed rather pointless
anyway. There are also several puzzles where it should help, but the fact
that you can only have one picture on screen at a time forces you to resort
to pen and paper anyway, thus defeating the entire point of the thing,
unless you're really into holiday snaps (but again, why allow the user to
take and navigate through static image photos in a game that essentially IS
just navigating through static images?). I've also not really understood
why the game forces you to take a picture at the start - a better design
team might have used the picture to help with the "memory puzzle" at the
end, but then again, a better team would never have included that
brain-swapping B-movie crap in the first place. The trapping of Atrus in
the Rime age also had a horribly contrived, artificial feel to it. In
Riven, it's perfectly acceptable why he can't go with you - he's the only
person who can write linking books, so he must stay behind to keep writing
and hold the Riven age together. Here, the electrical storm which somehow
traps him seems far too convenient a "random" occurrence. I don't think
Catherine's absence is ever explained either - considering she is probably
the most emotionally involved in the story, judging from journals and
letters, you'd think they'd at least show you her reaction to the actions
and eventual tragic fates of her sons at the end!
All in all, the game simply didn't *feel* like a true Myst game, and during
play I rapidly became convinced that few if any members of the original
Myst/Riven team had worked on the game - sure enough, I wasn't at all
surprised when watching the credits to find out that this was true.
Andrew Plotkin
I agree with many of your points, and Riven is still my favorite of
the series.
*But* I really think you're comparing the best possible memory of Myst
and Riven with the faults of Myst 4. There was plenty of
technologically implausible gibberish in the first two games -- as
well as confusing maze-areas, silly machine interfaces, and so on.
Although I also understand how irritations can mount up during a game,
each one throwing you farther out of the game and making it harder to
accept the next. That's been my experience in many games. It wasn't my
experience in Myst 4, though. The ending was weak, but I didn't hate
it.
> Having a tune with lyrics in it also seemed totally
> inappropriate to this series of games.
Okay, I can't argue with that.
> Two crucial plot elements of the first two games are totally
> disregarded - the prison books operate in a completely different way
True.
> and you now seem able to visit Atrus with ease when previously
> getting home was a major challenge.
Myst 3, which you seem to be discounting, implies that you've become
closer to Atrus's family and can visit them at will. And in 4, you've
got this whole favorite-uncle/aunt relationship implied with Yeesha.
This progression is one of the things I like about the recent
(non-Cyan) Myst games.
> I've also not really understood
> why the game forces you to take a picture at the start
I figured it was just basic interactivity. A long cut-scene
introduction is always weaker than an introduction that pulls you in
and gets you to interact. Plus it introduces the photo interface
in-story.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
I'm still thinking about what to put in this space.
Murray Peterson
news:9LednYs2NKa...@pipex.net:
> [snip]
> All in all, the game simply didn't *feel* like a true Myst game, and
> during play I rapidly became convinced that few if any members of the
> original Myst/Riven team had worked on the game - sure enough, I
> wasn't at all surprised when watching the credits to find out that
> this was true.
I wasn't that bothered by the inconsistencies in the physics and the story;
I guess my willingness to suspecd my disbelief was a bit higher. I was
much more bothered by the puzzle designs, since they had a direct and
visceral effect on my enjoyment of the game.
I was beginning to wonder if anyone had even read my review -- yours is the
first post in response.
Jenny100
> I was beginning to wonder if anyone had even read my review -- yours is the
> first post in response.
>
Yes I read it. And I was sorry to read some of what you said.
But since I haven't played the game I don't have much to say
about it. I do remember asking about the timed puzzles in
Myst IV in another thread, where it was established that
they were significantly worse than the tree elevator in Myst.
Tom McEwan
compulsive urge to repeatedly tap anything and everything in sight to see
what it sounds like since playing this game? ;-)
Nick
"Tom McEwan" <captain...@ONAYAMSPAYuk2.co.uk> wrote in message
news:bOqdnXbcXsN...@pipex.net...
> Something else I've noticed - has anyone else developed an uncontrollable,
> compulsive urge to repeatedly tap anything and everything in sight to see
> what it sounds like since playing this game? ;-)
>
>