[Intrepid Homoludens]

realMyst


Left - You don't click and get another static image, you 'WALK' forward and mouselook, as in QuakeIII. Right - Art for our sake.

Streaming trailer

It's only a dusty old book you say, no different from any other you've happened upon before. Perhaps it is a bit more mysterious than the others, so to satisfy your passing curiosity you decide to open it to the first page. There is a little picture on that page, of a gorgeous, if lonely, island peppered with tall redwoods, much like the coast of Washington State on the Pacific Northwest. But wait...was it your imagination, or did the picture just -- it moved!!! The water surrounding the island is rippling, there are birds flying, and even the weather itself is shifting! This is no ordinary book, and you touch the picture as it's the most natural thing to verify... Suddenly you feel a tugging in your stomach, and you're swiftly plunged into an explicable state of vertigo combined with the sense of falling, as everything you're familiar with fades, and blackness and light alternately swirl around you. Then you look around in ultimate disbelief. You are now standing on that island which, seconds before, was only an flat impression you held in your hands. That was no ordinary book...

The Miller brothers, Rand and Robyn, originally envisioned a staggeringly beautiful 3D world which lucky explorers can traverse to their heart's content, taking their sweet time, and without even an ounce of worry about dying or dealing with any kind of threat at all. Unfortunately they dreamt of this world during the early 90s, when the technology, at least for the casual computer gamer, was in itself only a dream. But they forged on anyway, using a graphics software for their Macintosh Apple that was, if not at all capable of rendering in 3D was at least able to present their dream in a stunning glorified slideshow, and from their fertile imagination came what would become the greatest selling computer game in history, Myst.

Flash forward to the year 2000. The 3D graphics accelerator card is not only commonplace, it is also practically essential to most computer gamers. The Miller brothers were now in the green to do what they had always wanted, and so they took their original game to Sunsoft, collaborated on the development of a proprietary 3D engine, and produced what should have been the godmother of all adventure games, realMYST.

If you've played the orginal Myst, realMYST is just the exact same thing. It's the exact same game you remember. Is it? Well, it is and it isn't. You see, in the original Myst you clicked your mouse and the screen changed. Period. In realMYST you click your mouse....and you walk into the gameworld. The difference is night and day. Alright, a rather strained analogy. Pick one scenario: 1.You receive a postcard from a friend on holiday on Easter Island, and she's telling you how spectacular it all is. 2. You are given a plane ticket to go to Easter Island.

As its name suggests, realMYST is about as real as an adventure game gets, graphically speaking, that is. The worlds, or Ages as they're called, are jawdroppingly beautiful. How they're rendered is as detailed (if not more so) as any fast paced FPS, like Quake III or Clive Barker's Undying. However, unlike those games, realMYST is an adventure, which means you can walk around and enjoy the stunning scenes and gasp at the lushness without the hazards of being fragged. The textures are rendered in 32 bit colour, meaning that you can almost reach out and touch the tree trunks, the damp underground walls, the arid grounds of the Selenitic Age. The world is alive and breathing with birds, butterflies, frogs, whales, and various marine life. The skies shift and change (albeit too quickly) in real time to reflect morning, midday, late afternoon, and night, a spectacular sight if you simply stand and watch. Even the sounds have been upgraded (digitally remastered music). A trip to the Channelwood Age is as much an aural smorgasbord as it is a visual feast. I'll also mention that this game possesses the most beautiful and lifelike reproduction of water I've ever seen in any computer game, most apparent in the Stoneship Age (my personal favourite), with its perpetual rainstorm and violently churning sea.

But as you're rightly thinking now, all this beauty comes at a high price. The system spec asks for a minimum of 64MB RAM and a 16MB graphics card. Don't even get this game if you meet these requirements, as you'll receive a painfully slow performance (at times so slow that you'll think your computer has locked up). On my 64MB GeForce 2 it looked fantastic, but there still were times when it coughed going from indoor spaces to outdoor environments. One major mistake of this game is that, although it's clearly meant for adventure traditionalists, the requirements are aimed toward hardcore 3D gamers. Another mistake is that the settings are permanent, that is, you cannot adjust the detail levels or even turn the 32 bit colour down to 16 bit for smoother frame rates. Knowing that many adventure gamers don't update their systems as scrupulously as action gamers, this is a noticeable wrinkle for realMYST. If I'm not mistaken, this game demands the highest system specs out of any adventure title produced thus far.

Yet another criticism is that besides being able to 'walk' around the gameworld, you really don't have much else to do. The only time you can interact with the environment is when you're working on the puzzles. Really, nothing more was added to the game to further its immersiveness. It's as if the Miller brothers thought the original game was good enough in 3D and left it at that, never mind the possibilities beyond what they orginally envisioned, such as object physics, lightmaps, and particle effects.

There is a bonus age included in the game, called Rime. You may access it after completing the game proper, and part of its inclusion is to further clue you in on the story, which it barely succeeds in doing. But most importantly, Rime is stupifyingly beautiful, an arctic wasteland such as you've never seen on your monitor. I just stood there watching the individual snowflakes cascade down, and gazed at the bellowing gigantic whales swimming just below the surface of the ice cold sea. This is as visceral as a virtual world gets. Rime was, for me, movingly haunting.

I'm left with the impression that realMYST was the next logical step for the Miller brothers, a full 3D adventure, what they've always wanted for the adventure genre but couldn't do at the time of conception. My final thought on realMYST is this: How would the adventure game as a genre been affected if the 3D technology had already been available in 1993, and Rand and Robyn immediately took advantage of it?

Scoring:

Gameplay - 8/10
Graphics - 10/10
Sound - 9/10
Originality - 7/10
Overall - 8/10

Final word: realMYST is what the graphic adventure genre's benchmark could have been if the technology had been available in the early 90s. Today, in the world of 3D cards and fast paced 3D gaming it seems to be a case of too much of the same too late. Perhaps it would have been better if the Miller brothers created an entirely new adventure in the tradition of Myst but used the new engine to do so. If you've never played the original Myst and you have a high end system realMYST is worth experiencing. If you're a Myst fan you may want to add it to your collection just for the hell of it -- the Rime Age alone (not available in the original '2Dslideshow' Myst) is worth experiencing.

NOTE: This review was originally written in 2001.

[BacardiJim]

I just want to add that as with some other games of this type, realMyst gave my girlfriend (and 2 other people I have spoken with) violent motion sickness.

[Intrepid Homoludens]

Not me. I was fine. Sometimes the framerate affects people, so it's important that this kind of game runs smoothly on your system.

[ragnar]

Originally Posted by BacardiJim

I just want to add that as with some other games of this type, realMyst gave my girlfriend (and 2 other people I have spoken with) violent motion sickness.

I can often too get motion sickness when playing 3d games where the camera goes round very much. I can also get motion sickness while I'm going by car, but that doesn't make me stop going by car. I don't stop playing 3d games either. I think it is important to know that you don't have to play the game 8 hours in row. If you limit yourself to one or two hours of gameplay and remember to take frequent pauses, it should get much better.

And to Intrepids review. It's good, although I lack some information on what Myst really is. It's good to know that realMyst is a much better version than Myst, but if I don't know what Myst originally was, then what does it matter?

[Intrepid Homoludens]

I originally left out most of the back story on Myst because the review was geared more towards those relatively familiar with computer gaming and therefore have some fundamental knowledge of what Myst was.

[Intrepid Homoludens]

Mi scuse. Just needed to bump this for someone.

[Owskie]

meeeeeeeee?

[Intrepid Homoludens]