“Still, the question of whose hands might one day hold the book of Myst bothers me. I know that my apprehensions may never be assuaged, and that is why I end by realizing that, perhaps, the ending has not yet been written.”
It’s 1995, and I’m nine years old, out at the now-defunct Future Shop on Place Fleur de Lys with my dad. The goal: to acquire the first-person shooter Marathon from Bungie. Due to a good report card, I received a temporary exemption from the family moratorium on violent games. But once there, it was a game without a gun that ended up catching my attention. An exploration game shrouded in mystery and fantasy. We came home with Mystthe legendary point-and-click by Cyan, released two years earlier in 1993. I have never regretted this decision nor played Marathon.
For those who have never had the pleasure of playing this classic title: Myst was a first-person exploration and puzzle game. In the opening sequence, an unknown man falls through a crack in the stars, a heavy book in his hands. After touching a page of the book, the man vanishes, leaving only the book behind, falling through the void, and ending up at our protagonist’s feet. Upon touching the first page of the connecting book, our character finds himself transported to the island of Myst, and embroiled in a sinister conflict between two warring brothers.
Return to Myst
Almost thirty years later, it is a completely rebuilt version of Myst which I had the pleasure of downloading onto my Quest 2 headset. Launched in 2020 by Cyan, the VR version of Myst is completely revamped. Static images are replaced with full 3D environments. The artistic design, although faithful to the original title, has been completely revised. The actors in the full-length video sequences were replaced with animated 3D characters, but the original recordings were retained.
To say that setting foot on the island of Myst in virtual reality is a strong nostalgia trigger would be the understatement of all understatements. The experience Myst VR is the culmination of a childhood dream and all those playtimes spent pretending to visit the ages of D’ni. The cultural importance of the universe of Myst no longer needs to be justified. Cyan’s game spawned four sequels, a mass multiplayer game, and a tabletop role-playing game. Revisiting the starting point of this universe with today’s technology is a pleasure that should not be shunned.
But the magic of nostalgia comes up against the mundane limits of virtual reality and modern expectations of video games. Myst offers two movement modes, a free mode which allows you to use the joystick levers as in most modern games, which will instantly cause nausea in the most sensitive (like me). The other mode offers a certain form of teleportation, a little counterintuitive at first, but easier on the stomach. On the other hand, this unnatural mode of movement breaks the immersion a little.
A fantastic aspect is the diverse interaction with the environment. Where as a child I clicked controllers to activate mechanisms and puzzles, now I have to grip the levers and pull them all the way. This aspect of the game, however, lacks polish and in a few places, the user experience is not completely polished, which creates moments of clumsiness and strange bugs. While it’s fantastic to climb the legendary library tower by climbing each rung one by one, you quickly tire of the experience and wish you could just click to climb like in the original.
Another limitation of virtual reality that quickly becomes apparent is the difficulty of taking notes. When I unpacked my CD-ROM Myst in the mid-90s, there was also a notebook in the box titled The Journal of Myst.
On the first page, there was the transcription of the initial narration of the game. The rest of the pages were lined, the message being clear: you will have to take notes to solve the puzzles of Myst. The VR version offers a shuffle mode to shuffle the solutions to the puzzles, for people like me who still remember all the passwords, but this option is hardly practical if you constantly have to remove the virtual reality headset to doodle in a notebook.
From our modern point of view, we will quickly become sad at the speed at which we go around everything there is to explore. In 1993, the universe of Myst and its connected parallel worlds formed a rich and vast universe. With our modern eyes, we realize quite quickly that the island of Myst is made up only of four small puzzles (a rocket, a gear, a tree and a boat) which lead to each of the four linked ages, which offer themselves a puzzle or two before bringing you back to Myst. For someone who is quite quick-witted, you can go around the game in a long afternoon, even for a first exploration, which can quickly leave you wanting more.
However, it would be ungrateful to complain on a full stomach. The pleasure of revisiting Myst is real, and even for those who have not played the original, the pleasure of discovering a classic in an immersive environment is not to be neglected.
Now, will you choose the blue pages, or the pink pages? Sirius or Achenar? Violence or greed?
There is only one way to find out: open the book and immerse yourself in the mists of Myst.
Myst (VR)
Developer and publisher: Cyan Worlds
Platform: MacOS, Windows, Virtual Reality (tbeen on Meta Quest 2)
39,99$
