Once upon a time, a game called Myst heralded a new era for gaming. The mysterious title (no pun intended) showed gamers what could be realized in the next generation of interactive entertainment — lush, immersive worlds, brought to life through painstakingly pre-rendered graphics, full-motion video, and studio-recorded sound. These are all design elements which, today, are either taken for granted or utterly obsolete, but to a world which had only just embraced the CD-ROM, they were unprecedented. Audiences had never seen a game like Myst, and it became an icon, bundled in with every CD drive, holding a record in sales for a decade.
Myst, originally designed to be played with a mouse interface, seemed like a natural adaptation for the Nintendo DS, and such a port has just been released by Empire Interactive. Sure, the graphics would need to be shrunk to fit a handheld screen, but with some new gameplay features included and a new world added that had not appeared in the original game, Myst DS seemed like a surefire way to immerse oneself in a nostalgic romp through a childhood favorite. This could not be further from the truth.
If you have any fond memories of Myst, do not play Myst DS, for it is an awful, awful port. There have been a number of discussions as to whether Myst and its often esoteric puzzles can stand the test of time 15 years later, and those discussions are, frankly, irrelevant to this review. Myst DS, through a series of stunningly bad design choices, will so thoroughly bury Myst’s puzzles and story beneath its frustrating UI, useless features, and poor visual quality, that any player familiar with the original Myst will simply pine for the original experience — while newcomers to Myst will be stupefied that this game could have ever been a best-seller.
Myst’s hallmark, in the original release, were its immersive, detailed graphics, the likes of which had never been seen in 1993. The DS version has carried over these exact graphics, kept just as they were in the original, albeit at a much lower resolution. This decision, while perhaps respectful, has made for some very, very dark visuals. Not dark as in “morbid” or “gothic,” but dark as in “extremely difficult to see.” Myst DS will need to be played with the brightness turned up as high as possible, and in some cases, this will still be inadequate. If you have an original “fat” DS with no brightness control, Myst is essentially unplayable. This is not a game that one will be able to play outside; even worse, the game’s interior environments are so dim that I was still squinting for detail even after carrying the DS into a pitch-black closet.
The parts of the game you can actually see aren’t much better. The once-great visuals, hailed for their immersive qualities, have been reduced so much as to eliminate any hint of texture or detail. Myst is a game that cries out to be played on a large screen which can display the mysterious beauty of its strange worlds. The Nintendo DS, while certainly an innovative and versatile system, is simply the wrong device for the job. Further, the details that are now absent are frequently crucial ones for certain exploration puzzles; a hidden switch or an out-of-place brick is now easily missed, leaving the only solution to advancement to be a frustrating, unintuitive pixel hunt. Myst DS is in desperate need of at least some graphical tweaking; as it is, the game’s visuals vary between plain and downright pointless.
Speaking of pixel hunting, Myst DS has somehow managed to botch the main appeal it ought to have had — the stylus-driven navigation and interaction. Originally designed for a point-and-click interface, the main activity one should expect in Myst is looking at the game world, and clicking — or, in this case, poking — where one would like to go. As is the case with nearly all games of this variety, whether the tool is a mouse or a stylus, interaction with the game is dependent on location and manipulation of the game’s “hotspots;” specific locations that, when activated, will permit a player to move around, pick up or use objects, and so on. The mark of a poorly-designed game, in this respect, is one where the hotspots are neither indicated nor obvious to the player, leaving them to simply poke at every pixel on the screen in the hopes of blindly stumbling across a clue or solution — to wit, the aforementioned “pixel hunt.” In the original game, this dilemma was solved by a changing cursor: hovering the mouse over an interactive area would transform the cursor into a symbol of what would happen when the space was clicked. Myst DS, obviously unable to alter the stylus in any way, seems like it might fall prey to insufficient hotspots. Stunningly enough, this is not true: Myst DS has managed to give players the opposite problem.
The truly irritating thing about Myst DS is its overabundance of hotspots — most of which trigger an action that the player does not want to do. There are countless situations where the player will have zoomed in on one of Myst’s curious devices, often times a panel with multiple buttons on it. Poking the stylus against the fiddly, overly picky hotspots on the buttons themselves will manipulate them; accidentally poking anywhere else on the screen will zoom back out from the device. Players can expect to grow increasingly frustrated as they zoom in and out of scenes, the game having decided they they must be done looking at an item because they poked just slightly to the left of an extremely tiny button. This problem also persists in attempts to navigate the game world. In the original game, moving the cursor over a road with multiple forks would show the player where to click in order to go slightly left or to go hard left. With no visual representation of where to poke in order to move around, players will find themselves going hard left when they want to go straight, going forward when they want to zoom in on something, and turning completely around for no apparent reason. In certain worlds where the game’s low visual detail makes all the scenery look alike, this will lead to players getting repeatedly lost in areas they have already explored.
Assuming you can forgive these faults, and have decided to treat the needlessly daunting UI as one more grand puzzle, Myst DS is a game that seems determined not to let you enjoy it. The game’s new features — all supposedly engineered to enhance the play experience — are unanimously bad in their implementation. In some cases, the new features will actively hinder your enjoyment of the game (what little is left). These new features are as follows:
- The magnifying glass: This is less a “feature” than a vital addition to the game, used exclusively to read Myst’s many in-game books. The worlds of Myst are crawling with discarded literature, some of which contains vital puzzle solutions, but which has become entirely illegible on the DS’ tiny screen. Using the magnifying glass on a book will show it on the top screen at a readable size, though due to the aforementioned hotspot problem, often attempting to drag the magnifying glass over a page will either turn to the next page or close the book completely. Using the magnifying glass anywhere else — say, when searching for a hidden button in the scenery — will simply display the scenery at the same size, only a lot fuzzier.
- The notebook: In theory, this should be the best addition to the game. Myst’s puzzles are the kind you will want to take notes on, in order to remember a clue in one location which is required to solve a problem in another. Given that the game is now on a handheld system, it is a good idea to provide players a way to avoid having to set the DS down in order to take notes with pen and paper. Sadly, the actual notebook is not, as one might expect, a simple draw-with-the-stylus option, instead giving players a poke-in-the-letters typewriter interface. Even setting aside how much slower and more tedious this is, it bears mentioning that roughly 80% of Myst’s puzzles are purely visual. At the very beginning of the game, a puzzle appears in which players must look at various constellations in order to match them to diagrams in a book; a situation in which a typewriter is entirely useless. Finally, lord help you if you intend to try and take more than a few notes at a time; calling up the typewriter hides whatever you’re looking at. The DS has two screens. I demonstrated this problem to someone who had never seen a DS before, and they said, “Shouldn’t they just show it on the top screen? They’re not even using it right now.”
- The camera: This is Myst DS’ attempt to solve the problem of recording a visual clue, and while it is again an excellent idea on paper, it has been executed in a very unhelpful way. Calling up the camera will allow one to keep an image of whatever is on screen at the time, but only one such image. Recording a new picture will erase the first one, and when clues appear in disparate locations, each with only a fragment of the solution — which is invariably — ultimately, the player will have to record some clues with regular old pen and paper. Which, naturally, begs the question: Why not record every clue with pen and paper, thus making the clue-recording features utterly futile? Oh, and don’t try to take pictures of any clue that appears in a book; not only can you not use the camera and the magnifying glass at the same time, but attempting to use the camera will flip any book back to page one — which is never the page the clue happens to be on.
- The map: This is perhaps the worst thing about Myst DS. Providing players with a map isn’t an inherently bad thing, especially in situations where the scenery starts to blend together. The maps provided in Myst DS, however, should not be used by anyone hoping to glean any satisfaction out of the exploration and identification of the worlds’ mysteries. Each map, from the very beginning, is thoroughly labelled with puzzle locations and solutions, without so much as a spoiler warning. Calling up the map will present the player with pointers to locations like “Hidden Bridge,” “Podium with Code,” or “Stairway to Myst Book,” the latter of which is the ultimate goal of each game world. It’s as if someone actually included a map out of a hint book. If one intends to blast through Myst DS with an FAQ at their side, then the map will save you a trip to the internet. For anyone who wants to play Myst for its intended purpose, however — exploration and discovery — the map is an incredible slap in the face.
Even the new world that has been added to the DS version only serves to weaken the game. The game’s new “Rime Age” is inserted abruptly at the end of the game, actually preventing the player from viewing a small portion of the original ending, and concludes on a puzzle so horribly executed that one may not even be able to solve it with an FAQ. From there, the game just stops — no end credits, no signal that your journey has completed — the player is just dumped unceremoniously out to the main menu.
Ports of this caliber are insulting to players and damaging to the companies that release them. It’s difficult to see them as anything but someone’s naked attempt at quick, easy money, relying on a recognizable name in the absence of any apparent effort to deliver a quality product. In conclusion, do not buy Myst DS. If you receive Myst DS as a gift, check to see if your friend still has the receipt, and then check to see if that friend actually likes you. If you find Myst DS on the street, do not look directly at it; please dispose of it in an approved HazMat facility to prevent children or the elderly from accidentally contacting it. Should you happen to actually play Myst DS, contact poison control and a grief counselor, in that order.
Full disclosure: At time of publication, Empire Interactive was a client of TriplePoint PR, a firm managed by Richard Kain — owner of our parent company Pantheon Labs. A TriplePoint representative sent us the above game.
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