Myst IV: Revelation

I just think this game is the best. Amazing OST which I've been listening for years and years. Amazing cinematography. Several levels of focus depending on where you have your eyes on on the 360 prerendered image had a really huge impact on game quality at the time. It was the same as Myst but this time you could turn around flawlessly. Sometimes it took a while to load each step you took, but it was worth it. Integrating real life shootings with the scenaries made it look even better. I can't recommend it more. Feels like a film. One of the first cinematic masterpieces at the time. Too early for its time.

I'm glad I finally got to play this after so many years, but it was definitely a flawed entry in the series. First and worst is the game-crashing bug that's triggered by, of all things, having wireless headphones connected. This is just bizarre and it took a lot of internet searching to find out what was going on. I had to play the whole game using earbuds, and even then it crashed once for no apparent reason. The puzzles are really mixed- some are what you'd expect from a Myst game, are fun to figure out and give you a real sense of accomplishment when you complete them. Others are just tedious and frustrating, like the monkey-shuffling one or the final two, and still others verge on pixel-hunting, forcing you to find tiny switches, hidden notes or chunks of rock that are hard to make out even if you're looking right at them. I had to use a guide a few times, and I never regretted it because the puzzles I was struggling with were genuinely not fun and solving them felt like a colossal waste of time. The control scheme, where you have to jerk around the mouse to do things like opening doors or flipping pages, is also a bit awkward. The ability to take photos and see flashbacks was useful, however. The story is fine for the most part, but the acting is rather forced, and the entire world of Serenia seems... off, somehow. The puzzles there are of lower quality, and while interacting with the people there brings a bit more life to the usually solitary, silent Myst experience, the presence of a group of mystical nuns and having to go on dream quests felt like a weird fit, as though it had been grafted on from a completely different game. The culmination of this is an out-of-nowhere new age music video sequence that, while certainly surprising and different, doesn't really feel like part of a Myst game. It's probably worth playing for fans of the series, but be prepared for a different experience and don't expect a masterpiece this time around.

This is not the best of Myst games (Exile is), but it's not the worst either. Ages are very interesting and beautiful. You have both tropical jungle and crystal flying islands. Music is immersive and varying. Once they even started singing in Polish! Clearly the best thing in game (this song too). Unfortunately, sometimes puzzles don't make much sense or can be solved by accident. Few of them require you to spend long time travelling around to see the results. It's not always obvious, what causes what and where. Some puzzles required arcade skills and timing to solve, which is not fun in games like those. The story gets quite illogical at times (let's solve in 5 minutes a puzzle that has been said to take 5 years to solve). Also, this is the first Myst where it is not perfectly obvious who is evil and who is not and you can even unwillingly make a wrong decision at the end. The game has built-in solution and I had to rely on it few times. You can take photos and make notes in-game so you *almost* don't need a piece of paper this time. And piece of paper is more fun. Still, this is Myst. Buy it, if you like such games and you want to collect whole series like me. I have nice memories and I don't regret purchase (but wait for discount, unless they include OST in purchase). I would solve the game myself if I had infinite time.

This is probably the worst Myst so far... First off, as others have mentionned there is a lot of lagging moving through the screens, it's pretty anoying playing like this for 8h... Second, the puzzles are horrible. There are two components to resolving a puzzle : 1. Understanding what the goal of the puzzle is. What are we trying to achieve ? 2. Understaning how to solve the puzzle to achieve that goal. Other myst games usually are pretty good at number 1. The level-design or the design of the puzzle will make you understand what the goal is. The how is the hard part, but you have clues to help you resolve it. However, here, it fails on both count. The "spider-chair puzzle" is the perfect example. You actually have zero clue what the goal is with that chair... You only understand what that chair does after you resolve the "puzzle". But resolving that puzzle is next to impossible with the clues you find in that level. They are so vague that you're not even sure to what "puzzle" they refer to. For example, you have no way of knowing that the clues for the "cable tension" actually refer to the cables at all. I don't think anyone can figure out that puzzle with only the info given in game. The UI for several puzzles is also very bad. For the "spider-chair", even if you figure out the clues, chances are you're gonna input the solution the wrong way. You might have the correct solution, but the interface is so terrible that you put the solution the wrong way. So even by poking around, you have no chance of figuring out what the goal of the puzzle is. Another good example, is the puzzle where you interact with "monkeys" using sounds - short or long. The interface is bad that most of the time you end up doing something you didn't want to do. That puzzle is not difficult to solve, but the interface with the sounds makes it very frustrating. Apply those principle all through the game, and this makes this game very frustrating instead of challenging and fun !