As some of you may have seen recently, in honor of the 25th anniversary of MYST, I finally stopped over-preparing for, and actually did my play-through live on twitch the other day.
It was not a blind, nor semi-blind play-through. I’ve played this game multiple times, in multiple versions, through the years. While I don’t have every key memorized, I know how to get through it. My aim in the stream was to move purposefully through the game and its puzzles in a way that viewers could follow along with.
NB from the future: originally this post also included links to the edited-for-YouTube version of this playthrough, but I've privated those videos in the last few years for various reasons. The rest of this post has been written in place of that since I'd like to talk a bit more about why this game is so important to me and why I wanted to do a live play-through.
My first time playing MYST was shortly after it first came out, which would have made me around 12 or 13. I remember watching my Dad play it and offering ideas as he struggled to understand the puzzles. It really was quite a different experience than anything that had existed up to that point and, in retrospect, really defined the genre.
I think the first breakthrough I ever had was figuring out the Tower Rotation, and from there managed to make my way to Selenetic Age. I finshed playing through the game at some point before graduating high school and a hint guide was definitely involved. The pattern I memorized for the generators is still the one that was in that guide.
As I got older, I found that many people talked about MYST as this wholly confusing, pretentious game, dismissing it out of hand or making fun of it. There were a couple parodies (PYST among them) made that seemed to revel in taking revenge on a video game they didn’t like as if the game had deeply insulted them by merely existing.
Others would say they never finished it, or only got through it with the use of a hint guide and felt that detracted from the experience. I agreed somewhat – sure a good hint guide would let you know how to progress through the game, but sometimes at the cost of “why” a puzzle was solved in a certain way. Even now, I sometimes wonder if the people who do these hint guides and walkthroughs really know.
Over the last 25 years, I’ve learned and figured out a lot of the “why” in my favorite puzzle games, MYST among them, and found that learning it made the experience of playing them so much richer, expanding my “puzzle vocabulary” allowing me to succeed at newer puzzle games. So my goal with the MYST playthrough was to share the “why” so that people could maybe see what I have always seen in it.
MYST is hard. It takes you out of a comfort-zone of linear, predictable gameplay where you inhabit a world as a player character, playing out their prescribed story. Instead, it makes you, personally, the main character, left to your wits to discover the point of the game and find your way through it.
Maybe my view of MYST is colored by nostalgia (and from reading all three of the novels that were released as part of the official mythos) but I think a lot of it is colored by how it taught me to notice things, to make connections between the seemingly unconnectable.
Of course, it could also be that I loved puzzles and codes as a kid, and still do today.