What is it?
Myst is one of the most successful games of all times, and one of the most influential as well as controversial ones. It has been hailed as a revival of the adventure genre and accused of having hastened its demise. There have been two sequels and many clones, which is one of the main reason of Myst's slightly tainted reputation. These clones rarely matched Myst in quality. One game out of a renowned series that was heavily influenced by Myst is Zork Nemesis. Not a typical Zork title, it is nevertheless a very good game, dark and often disturbing.
Myst was ported to the Amiga in 1997, by the same team of Belgrade programmers that had created Capital Punishment.
I started playing MYST when I was 11 going on 12. My Mom got the game for Christmas in 1994 and we finished it in Febuary 1995 (without the guide book). Ever since, I've been a total MYST fan. I'm not saying that I think about MYST every day but I do love the game and all the novels and stuff like that.
It's a game for players who appreciate solemn, solitary exploration and interpreting everything seen and heard in the gameworld, rather than (or as well as) running around and collecting items and chatting to game characters as in a traditional inventory-based game. It's a controversial game in that it has many, many admirers, but also a lot of detractors who prefer the latter type of adventure. Whatever you hear about it, the best advice I can offer is to try it for yourself and make up your own mind.
You'll have to dig deep into the fossil record to find evidence of an era when the adventure game was more popular than the first-person shooter is today. Just as scientists believe that dinosaurs died out due to a cataclysmic meteor strike that caused catastrophic shifts to the weather, many people point to a game called Myst as the event whose impact proved fatal to the adventure genre.
Myst is not the greatest graphical adventure of all time, but it was the first great one. Even granting its flaws, it does many things right, and touches a few notes that were too brilliant or too subtle for many of its (many) imitators. RealMyst, for its part, is a fine new version, which captures everything that was Myst and then improves on a few rough corners.
Unfortunately, the benefits of the new engine are limited to the visuals. The control interface borrows from first-person shooters - you use either the arrow keys or the mouse to move. But there are two real problems with this: Trying to manipulate objects in the world using your mouse often makes you move instead, and there's no way to change the options so that control is limited to just the arrow keys. And turning is a nightmare - you just hurtle around with little precision.
