The Poor Man's Exploitation of the Multiverse for Personal Use
July 14, 2021 8:04 PM   Subscribe

With Myst, the most enduring product of the great 90's multimedia kick, having recently been re-re-re-remade, why not go in the other direction and play the officially tolerated Apple II demake (demaker's Twitter)? You'll need this in-browser emulator. This is Myst so of course there's tips and notes below the fold.

Gameplay tips:

Looking up hints or a walkthrough is always an option, but this version has some quirks of its own:

Whenever Atrus (the bearded guy) is talking, wait for his dialog to progress.

Currently, the hint text in the Myst Island clock tower doesn't appear, so here's the hint: repeatedly clicking the bottom of a lever has a different effect to repeatedly clicking the top of it.

When facing the generator building on Myst Island, there is a 'hidden' path to its right. If you overload the generator, you may have to flip both circuit breakers.

These beautiful maps may help - especially for the hard-to-navigate Channelwood and Selenitic Ages. And since part of the information needed to make it much easier is missing, you're gonna want to use one of these unsurprisingly plentiful Selenitic maze maps. (It could have been worse.)

Notes:

The 'Why do you call it Mist and why do the sublevels have odd nearly-correct names?' question on the demake's website's FAQ is obsolete; the names have since been fixed because Cyan is not Nintendo.

Here are the demaker's notes mapping out all of Myst and its puzzles.
posted by BiggerJ (11 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
For me, Myst was one of those games that looked really nice and had an interesting story but just wasn't that fun to play. It ended up being a rare case where the spinoff books were more fun than the game itself.
posted by wierdo at 11:08 PM on July 14, 2021 [3 favorites]


Next up: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on cassette for the Timex Sinclair 1000.
posted by fairmettle at 12:18 AM on July 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


That's just plain evil, fairmettle, and I know evil!
posted by evilDoug at 6:01 AM on July 15, 2021


I played Myst circa 1995(?) on a brand new Win95 system that I beta tested. It was really beautiful and different and lured me into playing Riven when it came out.

Steam tagged me with Exile recently, so I thought I would take a nostalgic look for $12. I shouldn't have looked. High res is not kind to these products.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 8:29 AM on July 15, 2021


My WiFi network is called Myst4ever for a reason. This post is right up my alley!
posted by Gadgetenvy at 9:58 AM on July 15, 2021


I bought Myst and, in a fit of unjustified enthusiasm, Riven back in the mid-late 90's. I couldn't manage to get anywhere in the first one; never even broke the seal on the second. Thus I learned that I suck at video games, and I found other hobbies instead. But it sure looked cool, I was sad that I wasn't able to participate in it.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:40 AM on July 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


I agree, GregAce. I think Myst is beautiful but I am just too dumb to be able to play it. I wish I wasn't so stupid, but I am.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:03 PM on July 15, 2021


People would have been excited to play this 40 x 48 16-color game back in the day. Hey, it's got to have better puzzles than Time Zone, right?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:27 PM on July 15, 2021


I thought Myst was beautiful and it really sucked me in, but not gonna lie, we cheated pretty much the whole way through it (back in the day). I recently saw that it was released as an app, so I bought it, got a few scenes in and realized I was going to have to cheat the whole way through it again if I wanted to complete it, and never opened it again.

But if you’ve never experienced Myst, it’s still gorgeous and worth your time to give it a go. Especially if you’re smarter and/or more patient than me.
posted by Mchelly at 1:59 PM on July 15, 2021


I quite like puzzles, so I got through it eventually. Mostly I just used to wander around in it, though. As I'd not seen so much rendered 3d-modelled graphics I think I experienced it rather intensely. I occasionally find myself missing Myst Island as though it was a real place I've been to.

Isn't an 8-bit version missing the point of it, somehow?
posted by Grangousier at 3:20 PM on July 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


Just wanted to jump in and agree that I too found Myst to be gorgeous, immersive, groundbreaking and also much too difficult and wonky. I would gather a sizeable amount of those who played it never left the first island. I sure didn't, but I still found the experience impressive and inspiring. A first-person game with places that looked pleasant!

If it looked like something that would interest you, but you bounced off of it for having incomprehensible puzzles and unclear guidance, I would suggest trying some modern games inspired by it, such as The Room and House of DaVinci series. They feature real-time rendering, physical manipulation of puzzles, less aimless wandering and backtracking, and built-in hint systems.

Myst was the perfect game to showcase what was possible with CD-ROM technology and pre-rendered FMV, but as this de-make illustrates, it leaned a great deal on its presentation.
posted by subocoyne at 5:14 PM on July 15, 2021


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