The Awakened Remastered is available here in GOG, in fact the majority of Frogwares Holmes games are here,
It is different to Nemesis, so It is worth the try. Use to be the favourite for a lot of people, The Lovecraftian Theme is attractive and fits very well with the genre and ambiance.

About Shadowgate: I had bought it upon release because I had the original on the NES and never got to complete it back then. It is a unique game, but beware that behind the great new visuals it keeps the old school mechanics. This means you can die and also reach dead end situations. Also there's magic moon logic. The atmosphere is great but I definitely needed a walkthrough occasionally. The navigation is also unconventional, in that for each "room" you only see a predefined view of it, no turning left or right.

I had the GBC port of the NES port of Shadowgate. I did finish it with a walkthrough as a child, and yes it definitely has moon logic. I think the devs probably designed the puzzles by drawing the names of objects from a hat. That "one view per room" thing was the norm before Myst as far as I can tell. The cult horror adventure Last Half of Darkness worked like this too.

Now that's a game I never got to play!

It's clunky as hell, but I have great nostalgia for it. It's arguably my first exposure to point and click adventures, on my older sister's DOS laptop (with a burned out screen so it had to be used with a CRT monitor). I wasn't really doing much of the playing myself because I was too young, but it predates even my formative experiences with Myst!

The original games seem to be considered abandonware by the developer (I emailed asking if I could informally buy them from him, i.e. paypal in exchange for being emailed a zip file) and all but linked me to an abandonware site.

I'm proud to say the Myst marathon came to an end yesterday, as we finished Myst 5.

In general it was a nice game, with some nice puzzles but admittedly somewhat short in terms of length.

There are two main differences with the rest of the series*:

-This one is rendered in real time. Well, I didn't like that :) The visuals cannot compare to the prerendered ones of e.g. Riven. I know it is technically "heavy" to render such photorealistic graphics in real time, but graphics in Myst 5 looked so generic to me that I couldn't get absorbed by it.

-The stone tablet mechanic. This can be hit or miss. Sometimes it is used cleverly, other times it is just there for a specific purpose (which I will not spoil). My main gripe is that there is small tolerance in what you draw on the tablet compared to what has to be drawn. On occasion, this led to getting stuck because we had e.g. a line extruded more than needed, or a shape being wider. On a very specific case, we had to draw something more than 5 times in a row to "get it right" and be able to progress.

Getting these out of the way, I have to say this game was much easier than e.g. Myst 4 (which I still think is the most irritating one in the series). It's not that all puzzles are super easy, but they are more intuitive.

Also, I'm thankful the game has the option to play in "Classic" mode where navigation is classic node-based point and click. What was good in that mode is that you don't get teleported immediately to the next node, but the camera moves in real time towards it so you don't get disoriented.

Just a warning for others who easily get motion-sick like me: mouse sensitivity is big here so the camera instantly moves with the mouse. There is an option to reduce it, but then camera movement is untolerably slow. We had to get frequent breaks while playing because of getting nauseus :/ I wish there was some smoothing to the camera movement, like in Myst 3 or 4, which is very easy to implement.

Now, I will only refer to a specific puzzle which left us stuck the most but in an "unfair" way, because a specific mechanic is not revealed or at least hinted at any point.


***BEGIN SPOILERS***


In the Noloben Age, the one with the islands and the snakes, there is a specific door which can be opened only when someone stands on a specific spot far away. This can be seen through a lens which is in front of that spot. So we immediately thought "OK, we can't be in 2 places at one time, so we have to get a Bahro to stand here while we're over there to enter the door when it opens". Well, if you try to just leave the slate down and then run to the door a Bahro does appear to get the slate, but of course the time is so limited that you cannot get to the door fast enough.

Next, we thought that -according to Esher's words- we should draw a snake symbol so that the Bahro get scared and stand on spot without picking up the slate. We then got to the door as fast as we could, but the result was the same. Bahro appears, Bahro disappears and then we reach the door.

Well, actually, that is the correct solution. It's just that you have to wait in front of the door for about almost a minute after leaving the slate and then magically the Bahro reappears to get the slate and stands on the spot again, this time reopening the door and you can enter.

This is the only thing that frustrated us in this game, as there is no mention anywhere that the Bahro will appear a second time to retrieve the slate after it has been scared off by the snake symbol in the first place.

And to make things worse, I actually though of doing it another way first. I drew the "rain" symbol, dropped the slate and started running for the door. I knew that then it would return to get the slate. But, the Bahro got there, it started raining, and before I reached the door the Bahro had already appeared a second time and got the slate.

TL;DR: there is not explanation that the snake symbol will specifically increase the delay for the Bahro to re-appear to retrieve the slate. Aaaaargh!


***END SPOILERS***


(* I am deliberately excluding Uru from the main series, as I always thought it is an outsider and never really appealed to me in Myst terms.)

Has anyone brought up Neyyah yet?

https://www.facebook.com/DefyRealityEntertainment/

You're right, the story in Myst 5 seems disconnected right from the start. Adding that to the whole gameplay / rendering transition from previous titles, it makes more sense to be a part of the Uru branch. At least it gives a "closure" to the general Myst story, so it is not something completely out of place.

By the way, before starting it we were looking online for anything related to the story in Uru so that at least we could get some insight on what events took place. Unfortunately we could not find any good source, everything we got was very generic and not insightful.


***BEGIN HUGE SPOILER***

For example, we only concluded from Yeesha's words that Catherine had actually died in the meantime!

Also, we never learned what happened to Achenar (for Sirrus, well, we know what happened thanks to Myst 4).

Another thing that felt strange was the almost complete absence of Atrus, excluding the spoken intro and the cameo in the good ending. Atrus was the main person in the series so far, the driving force if I may say so.

***END HUGE SPOILER***
What?! That game looks AMAZING :O

Yeah! It's a one-man passion project so it'll probably be ages before it's finished. But what's there already looks absolutely amazing - it's on par with Riven aesthetically.

Oh, wow! I'd definitely want to dive into that world!

Really, it's absolutely stunning! I can't stop staring, it has that Riven effect alright!
I wouldn't be surprised if it was called something like "ReRiven" or "Riven Again" or even a reverse name like "Nevir".
Also...

I like your unintentional pun ;)

Ohohoho!

Boom!

The very recently released RHEM III SE is now available on Fireflower Games.

Excellent news! Thanks for sharing.

So it seems very possible that RHEM IV SE will also appear on FireFlower very soon. On that day I will create an account myself and get the whole bundle.

Again, @GOG, it's your loss.