Recent reviews by matthornb

This is a visually gorgeous remaster of a game from 1993.

The original version was an enormous success at the time and became the top selling PC game of '93, '94, '95, and '96 - only to be dethroned by its own sequel, Riven, the best selling PC game of 1997.
That success was indicative of the game's merits but its design has also generated a lot of backlash and criticism. Over the years what was a pop culture phenomenon has long divided players.

So my recommendation of Myst, or Riven, or the Myst series in any form, is conditional.
It's only a game or game series for the sort of player who has a longer attention span, likes puzzle games, is observant and persistent. This is an old adventure game, and as such its pace is glacially slow by modern gaming standards. Its design's barely changed since '93 even as graphics keep getting improved on.

The various remakes have often been a case of improving a handful of things but making a step backwards in some specific area. For this remake, the visuals and VR support are major steps forward, the step back was loss of a particular age, Rime, which with the recent free update Rime is added back in and improved on visually as much as any other part of the game. This is the most immersive version of Myst to date, the best version of it overall, and it can be played with or without VR. But it is still Myst.

Art direction and visual design always was a core strength of Cyan as a developer, even when the tech of all their older titles is now badly dated the style of it still typically is beautiful, and the music score and sound design underlying their games also still holds up well. This version includes both (somewhat janky) 3d for characters and an option of the original FMV (upscaled with AI) and neither holds up as well as the rest of the game.

That's a small fragment of it. Mostly your understanding of the game's story and setting is going to emerge as a result of exploring, examining, fiddling with a lot of mechanisms and things around you until something works. While unsolved, it's frustrating, sometimes feels arbitrary. Usually there is a trick or solution that puts a few things together and it clicks - some puzzles like the first in Channelwood are quite logical, others are confusingly designed in some way. Selenetic, for example - some players resorted to brute forcing the maze. The clues given often are not recognized unless players had been to Mechanical Age first. There are difficult and semi arbitrary puzzles scattered intermittently all over the Myst series in between ones that are better designed, making the experience a mixed bag even for those who LIKE puzzles.

So response will vary depending on tolerance for that. There are players who, without any hints or help, have beat Myst for the first time in anywhere from 4 to 16 hours. Usually it's around 10-12 for most, assuming you don't give up in frustration partway through stuck on something for well over an hour.

I came along at the right time to love the Myst games.
By the mid 2000s I was a legit fan of the series. I even made an old 2004 fangame (Sehv T'devokan) and a few years later established a fansite. That's rare. I think there are only about 20,000 really obsessive fans of the Myst series now. These gather in Myst Online, are active on Cyan's discord, dug in deep enough into this to really get fixated on Cyan's larger Myst story and mythology, which Myst is the most common first entry point to. But this is a game with four sequels, an MMO that flopped twice and then went freeware, and three novels filling in gaps in the canon. Of the Myst content that exists: modern versions of Myst, Riven, and Myst 3 [with upscale mod!] are generally good overall IF you like the genre, other games have more glaring flaws detracting from their stronger elements.

Myst's story is a 'what if' about the ability to travel interdimensionally to other worlds, and asking what the implications of such power would be, how it would affect both the travelers and the places traveled to. None of it is obvious initially, the sense of mystery that exists at the outset was central to Myst's early appeal - 'Myst' a truncation of MYSTERY while also a variation of MIST or fog, hazy atmosphere that obscures our ability to see. The game's concept is also partially derived from Jules Verne's 'Mysterious Island' - involving strange anomalies on an island that make sense by the end, a story format Myst builds upon in its own way.

As a gaming artifact, Myst hit big in '93 because it was an extremely imaginative and creative work at the time. It was visually artful and graphically impressive despite the constraints of early '90s 3d rendering, the sound felt cinematic and intriguingly subtle in a way few prior games did, the story more or less managed to work through primarily environmental storytelling, with some written text and FMV in scattered spots. Cursive reading may be an issue for today's players.

Myst's retrofuturist steampunk design was for most of the public the first example of the steampunk style they'd ever seen. And it fits - this sense lingers in Myst that the D'ni are a culture that's extremely advanced technologically to the point of it feeling like simply magic, from fusion power to holographic interfaces to interdimensional linking panels. Yet they're culturally incredibly conservative and stagnant, with aesthetics and social traditions that have been stuck in place for many centuries, refuse to change, from fixed religious beliefs in 'the Maker' to old clothing and intricate stonework, to entrenched guild structures, monarchic government, archaic social norms, colonialism, slavery, conquest, subjugation of weaker cultures across the 'Great Tree of Possibilities' (the metaverse which they describe as being like a branching tree with universes instead of leaves and a God at the root). And with Atrus's family we see how that ancient society all failed a long time ago and tore itself apart and *yet* even knowing that many of Atrus's family members including his father and two sons, are seduced by the 'glory' of their ancestry and heritage, even though it's pretty clearly toxic.

I think it's ironic that Myst, a warning about being stuck in broken traditionalism, stagnation, and nostalgia, in a groundbreaking (in its time) work that tried to warn us about the wrongs of empire and colonialist conquest, is now itself seen as a comforting nostalgic fixture.

Yet the Myst canon in its anti-authoritarian, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist messaging is still as timeless and relevant as ever.
Myst was brilliant in some ways, which is why anyone is still discussing it at all.

But now isn't '93. Aging puzzle design is not substantially updated or streamlined as it has been with the recent VR remake of Riven and feels even more uneven to modern gamers now with reduced attention spans. Cyan refuses to truly remake this game, weighed down a bit by its legacy as 'classic', choosing instead to place layer after layer of visual overhaul over it without any big additions or changes.
But it's still wonderful seeing Myst's ages look this good.

I keep rooting for Cyan. I'm almost alone in that.

Their fame predated VR, by decades, but it's faded away and now as they finally bring that vision into truly immersive form, and are doing their most breathtaking work ever with technology that finally matches the visual ambition they always had, almost nobody is still around to see it. The world moved on and forgot they existed just as they reached the potential to live up to their promise of realistically detailed yet wildly imaginative worlds players could get truly lost in.

The original Riven is a classic - it has long been considered one of the best titles in the genre, and it's the one that really hooked me on the Myst series as a whole, but looking back today it is a very technically dated game by modern standards and while its world and story were extraordinary, the difficulty was also legendary.

Now, over a quarter of a century later, the studio that made the original has remade it as a realtime 3d game.

And the basic look of the world and the story broadly are amazingly faithful to the original design, even though everything was rebuilt from scratch, it looks like you remember it yet with an entirely other leavel of detailing and dynamism that wasn't there before. In some sense, it is like seeing the place with full clarity for the first time. This Riven is faithful to almost every detail that matters, yet it's adding new areas and rearranging existing ones a bit in ways that here and there surprised, even delighted me. Places you only glimpsed but could not access are in many cases now possible to explore, and every added area feels somehow like it belongs and could have been there from the start.

The puzzle design is streamlined and flows a lot better. I found myself able to get through the challenges of Riven without help this time of any kind and cannot claim the same of the original - though at the time I was barely a teenager so needing a couple hints to reach the end at the time may have been due to the fact that I was about 13. Yet it isn't just because I know what I'm doing. The puzzle design here is so strongly altered that the process involved is massively different. If you think you played this in '97 you're wrong - not just due to new areas but major changes in the game design in numerous spots. It's visually identifiable as Riven but the puzzle logic is organized significantly differently, adding elements that were not present before. Many puzzles have added steps that make them more complex to chain together yet in other spots things are simplified significantly. This is not going to throw a ridiculous level of pixel hunting at you in the way the original did in certain spots.

Riven in its original form was a graphical showcase and a world you could get truly lost in, and it's more true now than ever, whether on a big PC monitor or in PC connected VR, and certain moments here left me genuinely floored and surprised at how much had changed and yet how fascinating those added elements were. This is a visually stunning game and it sounds as good as it ever did, it is somewhat more accessible in difficulty than the original but still tricky, and it shakes up the design so well that there were times I felt genuinely if temporarily stumped. I felt lost in this world in a very good way once again and couldn't be happier.

Downsides are few: While many places are opened up, some young people I showed this to were briefly confused by the absence of jump or crouch, and thought some spots might be traversable that simply were not. Key rebinding still needs to be added, but fortunately both arrow keys and WASD do work for walking so that at least is viable on both sides of a keyboard. Character animation and graphics don't hit the sheer believability of everything else but they also are only a small fraction of the game. Every other aspect aside from that is noticeably better looking than it once appeared, and even if the characters cannot match FMV of actual people in credibility, they are still competently handled and look far better than the cartoonishness seen in the last remaster of Myst. In several spots streamlined puzzles strain credibility a little bit within the world and its story, and in others the changes add depth and actually make more sense, and in all it is mostly for the best as the broad range of alterations make an old design feel fresh and unknown once again to an extent I did not expect.

In the end, it's a phenomenal modern reimagining of a classic game that hits nearly all the right notes so much so that it borders on miraculous that Cyan pulled it off this well, especially as expectations were lowered after they launched the (rather flawed) side project Firmament. This is a true comeback and it left me impressed with the near flawless balancing act they pulled off between substantially innovating and expanding this and yet also still holding true to what this game has meant and felt like to so many players. It isn't the Riven of 1997 - that game in retrospect is an archaic relic of a gaming landscape that has shifted massively since - but it feels like that game felt when you first played it 27 years ago. It captures that magic and wow factor today just as the original enchanted us in its time. That is no small feat.

Viewfinder is an amazing, mind-bending puzzler with a really cool central mechanic.
I played it all the way through along with various optional and collectibles, then showed it to and played it through with various family and friends, and pretty much everyone I showed it to thought it was great.

Upsides:
-Sheer creativity, and imagination and an occasionally great quirky sense of humor.
-An amazing puzzle mechanic that doesn't get boring after the five-hour playtime because the game keeps introducing more and more twists on it. Unlike Superliminal, you do get the sense that there are plenty more possible puzzle combinations that have yet to be explored in the game when the game ends - which means there's plenty of room for future DLC to explore new ideas and new mixes of existing ones.
-Art direction is colorful, appealing, and fun
-Technically astonishing. I'm not sure how they pulled off some of this, must have been really tricky.
-Sound design is pretty chill mostly and pleasant.
-Worthwhile message in the story - there's no singular big magic bullet to solving a big problem such as climate change but a lot of smaller, imperfect solutions can maybe someday work when added together, as they do in many of the game's puzzles.
-CAIT is a cute AI cat character. You can pet CAIT. This serves no real purpose, but it's adorable and I ended up doing it anyway quite a few times.
-The characters who've been in these spaces have personality and some interesting traits, which is nice.

Downsides:
-The story does not quite fit with the gameplay and feels like something added partway through development.
-While voice actors do fine, a bit of the dialogue could have used improvement. One goofy line in particular has become a meme that discourages people from playing the game, and that's a shame because mostly this game's great!
-You get the sense that while the devs care about solving problems, and believe scientists on climate change, they aren't the sort of people who actually understand the problem that well. There's a blackboard with a really rudimentary equation that feels like it's something a student would be looking at, not someone with the expertise to actually invent anything. It's very much an environment artist's take on math they don't really grasp. And the verbal aside about sound traveling faster than light? Oof. That's so obviously wrong in any normal situation that it's embarrassing. It's also hard to understand how this collaborative VR world they've built is actually practical for testing physics, and not... well, just interacting socially and solving puzzles as a group. So yeah, lots of nitpicks from a narrative POV.

And yet, these momentary irksome defects don't do much to detract from the experience as a whole. The puzzle design's outstanding and it's built on an outstanding and innovative mechanic. The feel of the spaces in terms of sound and visuals is chill and conducive to puzzle solving, and that general sense of wow, this sis so cool, is always there from start to finish. Many of the puzzles are easy, but there are some genuine challenges by the end.

And ultimately, the game just does something other games to date haven't - and that in itself is worth experiencing.

This is an outstanding game.

I've played it and have showed it to a bunch of family members including my nephews/niece and they actually played it themselves and enjoyed doing so even if the youngest [niece] made essentially zero progress in the story and said many absurdly dumb things like:
'The sun wants me to fly into it!' (That's just gravity, Evelyn, and you've already flown into the sun and restarted this, six times in a row) and
'I'm the first one to ever land on this moon!' (Not really, there's a whole obviously not naturally occurring structure built right here, but your enthusiasm's amusing)
and 'I'm gonna spacewalk without a space suit!' (Have fun dying and forcing me to restart this YET AGAIN, Evelyn)

Absolutely enchanting though in its mysteries, both in the base game and in the expansion 'Echoes of the Eye'.

I won't go into many specifics, as this is a title that's diminished by spoilers.
It's a game where what you learn and understand about the gameworld and acting on those realizations, is essentially your progression through the game. Putting the pieces of what's going on together is a lot of the appeal here. But also exploring and overcoming the inevitable obstacles in space exploration. [like, running out of oxygen, etc]

Suffice it to say that you're a young alien humanoid in a space program, and you're going to explore your star system in a little lander and unravel a set of interconnected mysteries that are genuinely interesting and imaginative, and well thought out generally.

The core of the game is partly exploration + puzzles, so in that sense a very elegantly structured Myst-like, but with some tricky platforming and spaceflight challenges scattered all over that just fit well into the natural process of exploring, when combined with the story, give it a sense of dynamism and danger and make it feel more alive than what's ever been done in 'adventure games' thus far. So to some degree it's a genre mashup that's very well-balanced.

To the first-impressions people who gripe going in with minimal info, usually there are two concerns about Outer Wilds to those starting out.

One is that the graphics aren't amazing. I'd counter that they're at least good, and the sound design/music, game design and storytelling are so outstanding that the experience is compelling regardless. Aside from that, the game was apparently basically made by ten people and STILL won the BAFTA for best video game of the year, among numerous other GOTY wins and nominations, which is a rather astonishing accomplishment for a little studio to have pulled off.

I also have heard queries about the scale of things being a turn-off. Yes, the planets and star are too small - the entire star system is measured in the tens of kilometers across - but this is not our universe. It has a much stronger gravitational constant, and some of its own creative rules. So if you're worried that 'that planet shouldn't have an atmosphere at that size' or 'that star shouldn't be able to reach fusion' you kind of just need to get past that. Almost - not every, but nearly every - question raised in this game actually has a convincing answer so even if it seems nonsensical at the outset, it mostly fits together well and the answers are usually at least sort of plausible, and often have emotional and dramatic weight behind them even when they do at times stretch credulity in the process of being just plain fascinatingly imaginative and occasionally even evoking a sense of awe and wonder.

So the reviews perhaps don't seem to make sense on the face of it, but the stellar ratings are the way they are for a reason, and the game is absolutely worth playing. Give it a shot.

This is - as of late 2021 - still the definitive city-building game. It succeeds as an outstanding modern SimCity successor where Maxis stumbled in the genre due to EA's meddling.

It looks beautiful, it's feature rich, and very open to modding and customization to take it beyond even the massive number of features and extensions the developers have made available to begin with.

Great, thriving user community too.

Amazing game. Story is very strong even if there are a few holes in its twist-ending logic, the atmosphere, art style, and the gameworld in general are absolutely breathtaking. The game's quite substantial, lots to do, lots of levels to explore, it may be lighter aesthetically than the first two Bioshocks set in Rapture, but the game deserves credit for not doing the same thing all over again. When it does return to Rapture, BTW, in the 'Burial at Sea' addons, it does so when Rapture is at its bustling peak and that's a fresh experience as well, compared to seeing the place in ruins.

Combat is still typical Bioshock, for the most part, and it's generally a good thing even if a few of the game mechanics [powers] feel slightly weakly developed stacked up against the best powers of Bioshock 2. But I accept the tradeoff, insofar as the devs clearly were pushing boundaries creatively in other areas with the new art direction and the storyline. The magnetic grip element is fun and interesting as a supplement to the rest of the game design too. Combat in this game is still very fun.

I know some friends who found the ending annoying but I've seen enough in other media that I sort of anticipated the gist of it early on in the game and was kind of expecting it, at least in a rough sense. It went, for the most part, exactly where I thought it'd go, with a few odd wrinkles I didn't expect.

Overall compelling anyway, and the lively nature of Columbia's airborne setting made it all the better. Between Columbia and its denizens (Elizabeth particularly) and the Burial at Sea version of Rapture, it's clear that this game pushed the number and behavior of its NPCs further than had been done in previous Bioshock games. At the best points, these places feel alive, and they feel lived in, authentic. Very immersive at times. These are cities you can believe might exist in some reality somewhere.

All told, I loved this game. It's not flawless, but it's pretty fantastic.

I'm coming into this as someone who is a Myst fan and has a familiarity with Cyan and the Myst series. But I was not sure if Obduction would be as good as the better Myst games were. I backed the project a bit on the Kickstarter but was uncertain whether they'd get this right, especially with the absence of specifics in the Kickstarter campaign. In 2014, they gave us a vague introduction to the project and a few pieces of concept art. (No playable demo) And while it was intriguing, it was at the time a bit unclear whether the final game would turn out to be great or merely mediocre.

In the end though, I'm very glad I backed this.

PROS: Amazing visuals, beautiful and surreal. Great ambient soundtrack and atmospheric sound design in general. Really big sense of mystery and a feeling of 'not knowing anything about what is going on' that hasn't been seen in the later Myst games because they already had so much established canon. Puzzle design is sometimes tough and complex towards the end, but always fair and pretty consistently logical. The puzzles do get harder as the game progresses, of course, and some of the later ones will leave you stumped for a while until you try a few things and then realize what's going on. The game overall is fairly large and detailed - very impressive near-AAA work, doubly amazing when you realize they had about an eighth the budget, half the time, and a fourth the staff they had when developing Uru (Myst Online). Yet this is in many ways far better than Uru, as it has no puzzles that stand out as horribly bad (like that miserable basket puzzle in Eder Gira) and the graphics are more detailed and outright pretty here, taking advantage of modern computers' capabilities and the potential of the Unreal 4 engine.

CONS: This game is occasionally glitchy. I noticed imperfect collision meshes twice, once where a vehicle briefly overlapped a section of rock by almost a foot, and once where I was physically stuck in a tunnel and unable to walk in any direction. I thought I'd have to reload my last save, but it turned out the best workaround was to switch from 'Free Roam' to 'Point and Click' - which shifted my player position to the nearest point-and-click node point. Then I switched back to Free Roam. Problem solved, but I shouldn't have gotten stuck there in the first place. There's also a fairly long loading transition between worlds, which is a creative transition concept that's way more creative and interesting than most conventional loading screens, but still slow, and a bit tedious to wait through in certain puzzles where there's a fair bit of backtracking. Also, the FMV is a decidly retro touch and as someone who has done compositing in After Effects, I did notice a bit of green around edges in these sequences that was not keyed out that well. It was at points distracting to me but maybe others wouldn't notice it the way I did. Finally, another downside is that there is no Mac release yet as that version is apparently having more serious bugs than the Windows release. All of these glitches need to be patched, but none of them is a major gripe for me.

The overall impression I have of this game remains strongly positive. It has really beautiful, compelling gameworlds, an interesting mystery to untangle, and puzzles that generally scale well and make sense once solved. I would recommend it, especially once the bugs are patched.