When I chose to play Myst, I was excited. I love puzzle and narrative games! And this game has both? With easy point-and-click controls as well? This game sounded perfect, until I started to actually play it. Some of the puzzles in the game were cool, and it was fun to play a game which had a story, yet did not have a specific order you would need to take to complete it. However, the game was lacking in many ways.
The game involves puzzles in different “ages” in terms of the technology the environment and interactions are based around. For example, a rocket takes the player to the Selenitic age, the one meant to represent the most futuristic age. The player can visit any of the ages they want in whatever order they want to, however the game feels like it is structured to be completed in the orders of the ages themselves. One can find a set progression based off of the technological advances of those ages. This is then supported in how the map which provides hints to access these ages is also ordered in a clockwise rotation. This creates an unspoken order which the player is also allowed to break.
But why is this an issue? Normally, it would be fine to do this, however some of these puzzles create feedback from previous puzzles. For my example, I look to the infamous maze puzzle from the Selenitic age. The puzzle leads you through a maze, giving hints based on sound cues. The puzzle tries to lead you through the meaning of these sounds in the beginning by limiting the pathways the player can take, only leaving the “right” option open. However, this sort of system allows for the player to easily mash through the beginning and then get stuck in the middle without any sort of idea what to do. To fix this, typically in puzzle creation, one would provide some sort of feedback that the user is solving this puzzle in the right way. What does this puzzle do? The sound cues are based off of a previous region’s puzzle, which also used sound cues to signify direction. But the player can’t get this sort of feedback if they choose to do the Selenitic age first.
I believe that many of these small issues result in the development of the game. Most successful games of this time had the backing of large companies, which provide more resources, larger teams, and more testing for the game’s development. A company has more people to come up with better ideas and to check for these kinds of nuances. But those companies were focused on the “boy games” of that time, ones which were cool and violent instead of a story driven puzzle game. Myst was an outlier in the trend of the 1990s, and games like it did not have the backing which games like Doom had, which set it up to fail in this regard. (More reading on this trend can be found here)
While the game itself was no doubt innovative for numerous reasons, I also often found myself thinking that the puzzles were subpar or not enjoyable to solve. I had attributed this to the groundbreaking nature of the game (the first of anything will always make mistakes for future derivations to learn from), but your point about the game’s development being strained by the direction of the market is an interesting one. I did not play much of Doom, so I can’t answer this accurately myself: Is Doom generally considered to be more polished than Myst?
On a more hypothetical note, would the puzzle genre have been more successful (compared to FPS games) if Myst were somehow themed as more “masculine”? I imagine it would’ve massively changed the feel of the game at the very least, and probably for the worse.
I really like your analysis of the puzzle mechanics in the game and how they sometimes feel too open ended or lacking in clarity. I definitely agree with this sentiment. I feel like communication is such a big issue with old puzzle games — it seems like designers would often try to insert difficulty into a game by just not explaining the way that its mechanics work and leaving you to figure it out on your own. I think of Obra Dinn as a contrasting modern example to this point. The game is very clear about its mechanics and controls, stopping you in your tracks to explain how the book works and how to confirm fates as you start to need to do so. And yet, Obra Dinn still retains a high level of challenge despite its very open communication to the player about how the game is meant to function.
I think Eren has a really good point about this – I think I may have mentioned it in class, but it was a pretty common trend for older games to be much harder. This is most likely stemming from 2 places – one, a hard arcade game = more quarters, and that was an ethos that carried over to home video games for a while, even though that economic model was no longer at play. Two, the fact that the amount of data that could be stored was much more limited, so the actual amount of content within a game was a lot shorter, and therefore a way to elongate a playtime (and “value”) of a game was to just make it incredibly hard, so it was literally difficult for a player to progress / play through the entire game quickly. I wonder if the creators of Myst had this sort of mindset, as well; I had a really hard time progressing the game, because I found literally just FINDING how to progress the story was extremely obscure, which would have theoretically led to a much longer play time than if the developers made it easier to progress. Maybe these very difficult (even poorly designed) puzzles were also meant to do something similar? I also think we have to take into account that as a whole, our class is used to games being developed with a different mindset, one that makes a game more intuitive to players, even if the game itself is still considered very difficult (skill issue). I could imagine that when this game originally came out, people who played it would have been more willing to be patient with it, given its cutting-edge graphics, the fact that they were used to games being more obscure, and also the fact that they may not have had many other alternatives for playing a video game.
Pretty unrelated, but playing Myst, even the remastered version, made me realize how much I take accessibility options for granted nowadays….