[GarageGothic]

I'll just let John Walker's Myst retrospective over at Eurogamer do the talking.

Good grief, I hate stinking Myst. And I hate anyone who likes it. I hate you, and your ghastly taste. If this was good enough – if this was what you wanted from gaming – then I hope the litany of miserable clone games that destroyed the joy of adventuring has made you very happy. Every time I receive a game to review that requires me to read its entire plot from a digital pile of horribly written “books”, I turn and look at you with such piteous contempt that your mothers want to disown you.

Seriously, this is the game that made it okay for developers to think, “Nah, screw telling a story, let’s just make the player pick it all up from our handwriting-font-printed virtual novels. It’ll be much easier to excuse a collection of meaningless, unconnected puzzles if there’s a book about flying cats or something. And a diary. No, wait, 18 diaries. 18 diaries filled with pages and pages of our purplest prose, in which one paragraph of information somewhat relates to a puzzle 15 locations away. That’s narrative.”