Genre : Adventure
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft
Release Date: September 28, 2004

Buy 'MYST IV: Revelation': PC

In a way, this game is everything Myst has been leading up to and promising for years.

First things first. You, over there, with the 'Stoneship Age' t-shirt. You just want to know what this one's like, right? Mostly Riven-style puzzles with a lot of footwork, some flaws that'll slow you down in puzzle design. Nothing that'll stop you from finishing the game, mind you, and some excellent cluing in the form of the pendant. It's also got a camera and scrapbook feature that'll make grabbing data far easier. Go buy it. You're excused. Nice shirt, too bad I just made them up.

Next up. You, third row, waving the "Puzzles Suck" sign. Not a Myst fan? Nothing here is going to change your mind. Myst IV hasn't suddenly become a mutant-blasting first person shooter, and Atrus' family disputes are unsolvable by plasma rifle fire. You can go too.

The rest of you will probably want some explaining, so here goes.

Myst, for better or for worse, has pretty well defined what adventure games are all about nowadays. First person perspective, pre-rendered graphics, a focus heavily on puzzles and away from NPC interaction. The original Myst was wildly, brain-bendingly popular, selling roughly 70 gazillion copies, making it into many people's "Favorite Game" lists, and just as many people's "Most Hated Title" list. Myst may be the only game series you can tell people there are novels about without getting a "Why?" in reply. (Halo is getting there, but I don't want to digress any more than I already have.)

Myst IV: Revelations might as well be a direct sequel to the very first Myst game. Atrus, the quietly brooding (the term that keeps poking my brain is "DaVinci-esqe") inventor and writer of magical Linking books, has invited you back over to his place to discuss family issues with you. It's been twenty years since he managed to trap his backstabbing sons Sirrus and Achenar in a pair of prison books, and he's thinking that maybe it's time to forgive and forget. His wife Catherine and their daughter, Yeesha, aren't getting any younger. It's time to see if the brothers are ready to come out and rejoin the family. Accordingly, Atrus sends for the guy who helped release him from his son's grasp in the first place: you.

It doesn't really go as planned, and after a good hard whack on the head, you're left to explore on your own, to root through the prison Ages, Atrus' home Age of Tomahna and, eventually and armed with knowledge, you make it to the endgame Age, which I will not spoil except to say, Holy crap, that's pretty.

Revelations is certainly the most story-based Myst so far, so if you're fond of plot in your adventure games... well, you're still playing a Myst title, so don't expect a The Longest Journey, unfortunately. However, aside from actual NPC interaction, there's also a pendant you collect early on that allows you to "get in touch with strong memories" at certain locations. You can hear the sounds of a location in the past and the strong thoughts of those who dwelled there, which not only gives you a unique way of getting clues for certain puzzles, but also gives an insight into the characters you can't get from diaries and letters. Mind you, the pendant also gives you voiceovers for all the diaries in the game, which is handy too if you're an audio-oriented sort of person.

Speaking of the audio, by the way, it's dead on. Jack Wall (composer for Myst III as well as for Unreal II, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, and the seriously underrated Mark of Kri) has composed music full of the sweeping wonder and ominous undertones that the assorted Ages deserve. I want to say a few things about sound effects in particular. Everything sounds like you'd expect; water splashing, ambient noises, the sound of your "fingers" touching things (more on that later) are all pretty perfect, and there's a LOT of them. Three-dimensional sound positioning works well here too. Early on, I kept hearing flute fade in and out of the background music, growing louder and quieter as I passed over certain spots. That drove me to really look around for a ladder, and what did I find in the basement? Yeesha practicing the flute. Nice touch there. There's also a contributed song by Peter Gabriel here, and it blends very well with the rest of the soundtrack (It's not as jarring or weirdly inserted as his contribution to Uru seemed). He also chips in some voice acting, and while I could tell "Whoa, that's Peter Gabriel," that's because I could tell Peter Gabriel reading his shopping list from anyone else. For most people, that bit will just be some particularly nice voice acting.

The acting here is pretty good. It's become somewhat passé over the last few years to bring in actual live actors and record them to place in front of pre-rendered backgrounds, but that just aids in giving Myst IV a rather distinctive look. Yeesha passes nicely as a petulant and slightly-too-bright ten year old girl, while the brothers themselves embody their traits (and I wish to spoil as little as possible) rather well, aside from occasionally going over the top. They aren't played by the original actors, but you're not going to care. Atrus manages to pull off the portrayal of the "lost dreamer" inventor, and all the bit parts are, well, bit parts. They come and say their lines and go away again, having made their point. (About Atrus, the man is holding up well. When we saw him in the first Myst, he was pulling off a sort of doughy Barcalounger look, very harried and tired seeming. Now he's thin and fit and frankly, the man's never looked better. Progression in that order over twenty years is fairly rare. Just a side thought.) The pre-rendered visuals are, well, Myst. There would not be over thirty screenshots of an ugly game surrounding this review. Myst has always been towards the forefront of the elusive "make things look incredibly pretty" technology. What a lot of Myst's imitators don't get is that Myst uses that technology to further the game experience, instead of just being more to look at.

Riven, the sequel to Myst, introduced animations that would play as you entered areas, and you could watch them from afar, but you weren't allowed to get close and interact with them very often. Exile got better about this, as well as adding in the ability to pan the camera view around (really, it was about time). Uru was... well, third person and thus too weird to discuss for our purposes. Revelation now adds considerably more detailed animations that happen around you all the time: lightning flashes, things move, insects and birds fly by, the grass blows in the wind, and you can splash around in the water a little, and the ripples curve and distort reflections in real-time. Because the game world moves like this, you can expect more details, which translate into more richly detailed puzzles. You can also reach out and take a hold of things and swing them around. You don't just point and click; you reach out, take a lever, and pull it downward firmly. You reach out and take a hold of the cabinet door and yank it open. You flip pages on a notebook. You actually manipulate the environment instead of pointing and clicking. Even when nothing important is under your cursor, you can touch things. The wood gives hollow thumps and the paper dull rustling sounds and the wildlife gets perturbed and flutters away. Every material surface in the game has at least four or five subtly different sound cues. This is immersion, a bunch of very small things that build up. I sat and twiddled my virtual fingers in a pool of water for entire minutes in fascination, but I'm easily amused sometimes.

I mentioned puzzles back there, and Myst is built on puzzles. Without them, you'd have, well, a very nice collection of someone's incredibly surreal vacation photos and recordings, complete with family drama built into the middle of them.

For most of the game, you'll be working on "type A" puzzles, where "type A" is a term I just made up and will now explain.

Type A puzzles are made up of a lot of smaller, type B puzzles. As you work through an age, you'll find these small puzzles and, upon solving them, will make a little progress and also get some kind of clue for the larger, type A puzzle. Each Age is a big puzzle in and of itself, and as you solve your way through the smaller puzzles, it'll gradually become clearer through the information gathering process how you should proceed. The problem there - if you call it a problem - is that there's a hell of a lot of information to sort through. The camera they give you helps a lot; you can just snap a photo of a weird symbol instead of writing down what the symbol looks like. This is still the kind of game where sketching things, or drawing out a map, is handy. When did you last draw a map for a game?

A lot of the type B puzzles are well-clued, but I have a problem with some of them, where the developers gave no clues at all. You're expected (as I found when I looked at the in-game hint system, assuming I'd missed something major) to just sit and fiddle with them until they give up their secrets and you work out the rules behind them. I don't think it's too much to ask for some consistency in puzzle design here, though. After finding clues for every puzzle up to that point, I was positive I'd simply walked past another cue. Even went back and started down a completely different path of puzzles, on the off chance there were prerequisites. As it happened, I was just expected to muddle through it. This just didn't feel fair. When the developer starts playing loose with what they've established as the norm, the player loses faith in them. I was much quicker to go to a walkthrough after finding that the wall I hit was because I was being led to expect something that wasn't there.

What else, what else... Ah. I have a press release here that got bundled in with my copy of the game that claims that various storyline options up to and including the ending are affected by the player. I'm sorry, no they aren't. True, there's a place in the game you can walk right on past if you don't feel like doing it, and it's all right. Maybe this is what they mean. There's only one ending to Myst IV (as opposed to Riven's three or more) unless you count being killed as an ending, which, I suppose, it technically is. If another "true" ending pops up later on, I will eat those words without gravy and enjoy doing it.

Myst IV is still Myst. It still contains brain-damaging amounts of puzzles, all of which are designed to make you cry if you don't have a large beefy brain. Heck, some of 'em may make you sob even if you do have a big beefy brain. The basic gameplay hasn't changed, but it's been refined to near perfection, and now that they have that out of the way, they're starting to focus on telling stories within that framework, which is something I greatly approve of. This isn't for everyone, but people who haven't played Myst since the original will be surprised at how familiar it all feels while being better in every way. If they can just get the puzzles to a consistent quality, I'll start calling in those people who hate the series to show them what they're missing.

Score: 9.1/10