Stunning world that can't deliver on the promise
Showing up on the pier and taking first steps, you see the world that has it's secrets. A foreign land with indecipherable puzzles and a mystery to resolve. Each click and movement makes it more familiar and you slowly think it may make scene after all.
World is beautiful... and absolutely empty. For something praised like Myst it's really unenjoyable. I tried to play Myst at least 5 times and that included different versions. From original PC release, through PlayStation, DS and finally even the realMyst masterpiece edition. I lost count of the re-releases I tried. After many, many attempts I just gave up and watched a let's play. Mainly to skip the unintuitive puzzles and try to enjoy the story.
Stockholm syndrome
Myst is surely product of it's time and remembering being able to be bored in 1993 - this would be a respite. Then, you didn't have any expectations and graphics looked stunning. Maybe you had few friends that came over and you would figure stuff out together - it was better than watching reruns on TV. Maybe you were a typical "dad" and took frantic notes, hating your day job you immersed yourself in this world. That sounds kind of cool, especially since people remember only good stuff from 90s - they weren't that great.
Source: https://lparchive.org/Myst/Update%2017/
Nothing but graphics
It was an eye candy back then, but even if you pretend that puzzles are good (they're not) story doesn't make any sense. Why am I doing all this? Why should I care about some characters talking at me instead of with me? It was supposed to be a story with a silent protagonist and not with a body without will. Worlds are contained and empty, while they don't really make sense how they were built - they feel designed. Puzzles seem to be beamed into the world and not a part of them. It really feels that world's were designed with a random theme and then someone thought about puzzles that would be a fit for the theme. Apart from the rooms of the two brothers, words are not lived in and ages-as-puzzles are funneling you into a single solution-conclusion. Top that off with a shoddy backstory with barely any context for you as a player. The demand to suspend the disbelief is very extreme as game is boiled down to just barren parts for the puzzles and story. That's why I think to enjoy Myst you only need to watch it like a movie, because it's the only "one way" video media that would make it more natural. By enjoy I mean endure. It's still a bit slow and feels like you're waiting for something interesting to finally happen.
Well, it didn't. There are four ending, of which just one is the "good" one. Obviously you don't want to help any of the wacko brothers, so that leaves one way to proceed, of which you just follow the orders correctly. If story would be intensive instead of puzzles it would make it fun, but short - instead we got long, but unsatisfying. It's extremely claustrophobic with just enough story to push you forward. Player doesn't have any context and it feels like there is no agency being funneled down a single "right" path, since when you actually playing - all the side paths are obviously wrong. I'm aware that this complaint can be said about most adventure game, but here the experience is so boiled down that you constantly are stuck on the next puzzle without any interesting things happening to take the edge off.
RealPyst the masterpiece
The pseudo-comedy Pyst game could at least make you feel something. Since jokes aren't great and significantly overdone, it's mostly feeling of cringe. One thing I appreciate is the fact they were honest with how they portrayed being on a vacation in a tourist trap. The idea is that you go to a shoddy Pyst island with weirdos coming from whole country to "enjoy" their vacations. Types of people you'll actually want to avoid on vacations, exactly like you would with Myst characters. I would still recommend same approach here: If you're curious, just watch a complete let's play. It tries to make fun of everything in any way it can, so if you approach it like a amateur standup, you may even chuckle. Come to this with low expectations, just like to Myst itself. There's even something resembling modern youtubers here. It also seems that making fun of nerds was always in fashion:
Watching the paint dry edition
I'm really underwhelmed with Myst considering you could be playing at the time adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle or even Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Those games had a story and characters that Myst really lacks.
The first moments of walking about the island and captivating ambience promised something it couldn't deliver. Understanding this now it was no wonder that I started playing so many times for an hour, never to return.
My recommendation? Forget about the game, but if you like the promise of enigmatic Myst, just enjoy some Myst ambience videos.
If you want to see a much more positive perspective on the game and enjoy it as a movie, I can recommend this video.
Post cover source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst#/media/File:MystCover.png
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