Welcome to Myst
The following is a... "review" of sorts that I wrote about Myst shortly after finishing the game for the first time. It was written on February 8th, 2022.
Spoilers for Myst follow. Play the game first, it's good.
(I knew three things about Myst going in: 1 it's a point & click adventure game, 2 it's a very good or at least popular one, and 3 the "door" at the end is actually right at the beginning but you don't know how to open it until later)
so yeah myst is rad
if you poke around on the island, you quickly learn a couple of important things:
you see the note atrus left for catherine, which gives you both a quest (count the marker switches) and some information about some things on the island (there are marker switches, and also there's the holo pool thing)
you also learn that there are marker switches in front of things
oh hey notice I said marker switches a lot of times already
you pretty immediately know what a marker switch is because you can see one on the first screen, plus another one right up the stairs to the gears (which practically leap out of the screen when you get your flyover of myst)
it's a point and click so you're like "oh hey a lever, what happens if I click it" and the answer is "nothing lol, this will obviously be important later but right now it's nothing" so you remember it
if you see the door to the projector, you might have played around with it (doing so may also tell you what marker switches look like by name) and you'd know exactly what the note was sending you back to
it's possible that you wouldn't see it right away which would be unfortunate, because there's no switch by it and nothing else really draws you over there but it's fine
SO you head out on your quest to count levers on a tiny island which doesn't take long because you are counting switches on a tiny island and you get introduced very organically to the attractions of the island
you see a sunken ship that you can't do anything with
you see gears that you can't do anything with
you see a dentist's chair observatory with a panel that takes a date and a time of day and shows you stars
you see a library with lots of stuff in it, hoo boy let's take a break from exploring for a sec to explore
clockwise from the door, you see a map of the island with a button that says "tower rotation" so uh you can rotate the tower I guess (and if you've been flipping switches instead of just counting them you'll notice something else but we'll come back to that later), a red book with a red page and if you put the page in the book a guy in the book will say "who are you" but mostly static, a painting (you can click it if you want), a bookshelf with lots of books that no way you have time for right now, another painting (you can't click this one right now unless you clicked the other one), a blue book that is similar to the red one but this one says "Sirrus?", and a fireplace you can go in for no reason it's not important why do you ask.
okay yeah there's a button on the inside of the fireplace but I legit didn't notice that until the end of the game
so wow yeah there are a lot of things in here
if you click the left painting, you can get in the back to climb the tower but it's useless right now
you might read the books but when I played I felt like I needed to see the island before I started diving into lore so I came back for that later
okay moving on with the rest of the island
you see a rocketship with a power cable to it that you can't do anything with
you see a fountain with a sunken boat and a bunch of pillars with icons you can click but they don't seem to do anything
you see a bunker with a generator AND A SIGN THAT SAYS WHAT IT DOES this thing powers the rocketship but if you try to power it too much you blow a breaker and you have to fix it, but you don't know what "too much" is
(an aside, here's one of the things I really like about Myst puzzle design: you can brute force a lot of things, but due to animation times and general busywork, they punish that by making it not fun to do, thereby enticing you to solve the puzzles as intended. This happens all the time and I'll try to point it out when it happens)
you see a clock tower you can't reach with some wheels and a button outside it (you can mess with them but unless 2:40 is your favorite time you're unlikely to solve the puzzle, especially since it's not immediately obvious that the wheels even change the time on the clock at all)
you see a shed with a furnace and a wheel valve and a safe that you don't know the combination to
you might see a tree right behind that shed
but you've seen the whole island and a bunch of machines and stuff but you don't know what to do with any of them
you've seen like 8 puzzles, several of which are related, but you don't know how to do any of them even if you spend a while fiddling around with your new toys
but what you have done is count that there are 8 marker switches, so that's a puzzle you can solve
you go back to the projection pool thing and find the "secret" panel and type in "08" and get a message from Atrus who says "oh no bad things because lore, Achenar is an butt probably, remember the tower rotation, find the books"
whoa ok
well yeah the library was burnt, sounds like one of the sons is a jerk
hmm speaking of books I want to read them now
so you can go and read the books and get some cool stories but also you can get some hints about puzzles
a piano diagram with some keys numbered, a collection of constellations (with symbols you recognize!), and a couple of other things that don't seem immedately relevant
you have now done everything on the island that is immediately obvious to do upon inspection and must now solve a puzzle (okay yeah you solved the counting one but eh, that one was handed to you)
so this next puzzle is really the gatekeeper of the rest of the game, because it not only is the first real challenge but also gives all of the hints needed to progress in any direction at all: the tower rotation
so when Atrus tells Catherine about the tower rotation (and you so rudely eavesdropped), you already knew about it, but at least now you know that's the thing you need to do next
so you go back to the map and oops you didn't click on the switches, so you rotate the tower around blindly and climb it and repeat a couple times before ugh climbing this tower takes so long there must be a better way (hey look it's my favorite game design feature in this game whaddaya know)
here is the first time I looked up a hint because I had no idea: you need to flip marker switches on first. once you do that you can see the buildings on the map and align the tower with some of them
that part is a little arbitrary but very obvious once you've done it right. it doesn't help the fact that you're still getting used to the language of the game and don't know that generally the solutions to puzzles are obvious when they're right
anyway now you can align the tower with 4 things: the rocketship, the gears, the sunken ship, and the tree (wait what tree, oh it's over by the shed hmm maybe I need to look over there more carefully)[this is a cool ovservation that the game made me have]
and each time you do, you can climb the tower and see two things: first is a little hole in the tower so you can see the building and second is a little plaque with a clue on it really explicitly
so you see:
- 3 dates+times of days
- a 3 number sequence
- a number of volts
- a time of day and a sequence of 3 numbers
and you instantly know what 3 of those are for
and the other one is eh
so you run over to the observatory and plug in the times or wait maybe you think the volts are better or wait maybe you try the safe or maybe you're a savant and know to open the clock tower but we'll come back to that
the idea is that you have options now, and they're all very cool
suddenly the mysterious island is something you're pretty familiar with and you can start mastering its systems
so you plug in the times (making sure to turn the lights off first so you can see the faint lights clearly) and you get some star combinations, hmm maybe these match constellations from the book about the rocks
well yeah they obviously do, so find those three in the book and learn the three symbols, then go hit the matching symbols on the pillars by the fountain, oh hey what's that noise the ship in the fountain is now floating I wonder if the real ship is now floating OH HEY IT IS OH HEY-ER THERE'S A BOOK INSIDE
welcome to myst, I hope you enjoy your stay