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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

I vividly recall playing Myst, headphones on, snow falling outside, in a time before cellphones and (for our family) high speed internet. Cliche as it is, I felt transported. At times I felt spooked. I also remember getting a hold of every magazine I could that went into the making of Myst, transfixed by the creators’ sketches and drawings. Few cultural artifacts — not limited to games — have had as lasting an impact as those days playing Myst in my bedroom in the mid 90s.

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For me, this is where memories of Myst are best left. At the time I loved it, but in the early 90s one was willing to forgive a game a great many short-comings in sympathy to the state of modern games technology. Myst was very much “state of the art of the possible at the time”. I’d argue that much of the appeal of 90s Myst for some was that such a world could be made at all, let alone be a reasonably competent adventure game to boot. It was also one of the first to give us an excuse to do something cool with our fancy new CD-ROM drives.

Timing was critical too for Myst too I think; it came at the point when many ‘ordinary’ (for want of a better word) families were buying their first home PCs. My experience was that Myst and Riven found fans among people not traditionally PC gamers, often via word of mouth that this was something interesting one could do on their relatively expensive new fangled PC investment.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think it holds up all that well as a ‘game’ in 2018, our expectations of video games are rightly so much greater. The standards of adventure games improved dramatically in subsequent decades. If you are looking for a Myst style puzzle world to lose one’s self in in 2018, Jonathan Blow’s game “The Witness” is arguably a strong modern spiritual successor.

+1 on The Witness, but there's an entire genre now of walksim games that follow on the pattern of puzzles, story, exploration and non-combat engagement:

https://www.slant.co/topics/6377/~walking-simulator-games-on...

And really this is just a continuation of the larger "adventure game" genre that Myst itself is a part of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game

That is a good list, even if some fall more on the “walking simulator” side more so than “puzzle game”.

Games like “What Remains of Edith Finch”, “Firewatch” and “Gone Home” etc I loved, but these aren’t really puzzle games in the way Myst was, although I do see a common thread in the idea of an intricately made world to slowly explore.

If you're looking for a mobile game that hits that aesthetic, try "Alto's Odyssey"

Altos Odyssey, really? That strikes me as a bizarre recommendation in the context of the games being discussed in this thread.

The developers of gone home have another game, Tacoma, that has the same walking simulator style. Excellent feel as well.

I would check out Quern. Quern is an excellent Myst style game and comes closest to Myst style puzzles. From what I've seen of the "The Witness" is looked to be the same maze puzzle but repeated throughout the game. I loved Johnathan Blow's "Braid" but I passed on the Witness after seeing some gameplay.

I rather enjoyed The Talos Principle, and bought The Witness hoping to love it.

I couldn't get into it. When I ran into a memorization "puzzle" I knew it wasn't the game for me :(

I don't recall the puzzle you're talking about, but there are a massive variety of types of puzzles in the Witness. Was it early on?

I loved Talos Principle also, and I genuinely think the Witness is one of the best games of the last decade. Hopefully you can give it another go :)

IIRC it may be one of the water reflection puzzles. You see the solution reflected in one half of the room, and have to repeat it on a panel in the other half. One of a small handful of puzzles I cheated - my short term memory is horrid.

You should have seen my camera roll on my phone while playing through some areas. It was an incredibly helpful tool for getting through the game.

The Witness is a fantastic game, and while all the puzzles are drawing a line on a screen, without getting into spoilers, they have a great deal more variety than you might think.

That said, unlike the magical-realism of Myst and Riven's lived-in locations, the island of The Witness is impressionistic: It's not supposed to feel like a real place, only a kind of 3-d painting filled with relaxing and thought-provoking details, and coincidences to notice. So it might not be your cup of tea.

I agree, Quern was great and much more Myst-like than the Witness.

The Eyes of Ara is another Myst-like I enjoyed.

I'm always looking for more.

The puzzles are pretty basic by modern standards, but realMyst is a pretty decent modern reimplementation of the original Myst. They have just recently updated it as part of their Myst 25th Anniversary Collection kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252280491/myst-25th-an...

I tried witness, but, just have up after a while. Too much running around and if you miss the hidden paths etc it can be totally frustrating. Just like that darn door in riven that started open and you had to close it once inside to find the hidden passage. I dunno, I just find that frustrating. Shadow puzzles when not really that clear, also frustrating, even when you know what you're supposed to be looking for. Myst on the other hand, loved it all.

Cyan also put out a game called Obduction a little over a year ago that's very much in the same vein as Myst (the Wikipedia article calls it a spiritual successor), only updated to fit the current times. It's really well done, and worth a look.

Obduction is fantastic. Very Myst-like but feels modern. I thought it started little slow but once you unlock some other areas it opens up and becomes really amazing. A lot of the puzzles revolve around a central theme that's both simple to understand but spatially challenging. And everything fits together real nice in a way that I wouldn't have guessed up front.

Weirdly, the games that felt to me the most like Myst were not of the same genre (instead, they were D2-ish), graphical detail (they were glorified board games with a few frames of animation) or mechanic (they were RPGs).

They were called the "Avernum" games. They started their life as flash games. They had bottomless writing and story behind the franchise, to compensate for their near-total lack of visual splendour (unless you're into map reveals) and graphics. I don't know why they felt like Myst to me, given their procedural and eminently surmountable nature, but still . . . they held, and still hold, that same sense of wonder and exploration.

I think there are a few other games from "humbler" (intra-WWW-revolution, drowned out by the Flash revolution noise) beginnings that are similarly excellent.

I think you've got something mixed up. The Avernum series was a set of RPGs, but they were a remake of the creator's earlier Exile series, not a Flash game. (Exile I: Escape from the Pit was released in 1996, long before Flash was viable for this sort of game.) They weren't procedural at all, either; the content was all handmade.

Exile was my jam. I could never quite get used to Avernum, much as I liked being able to see many more tiles on one screen.

Part of it was the controls: I preferred a proper top-down view over isometric, but the main reason was probably the fact that parties were smaller. In Exile, a party could be 7 characters (I think), and it made the combat feel much more tactical.

Still, both the Avernum and Exile series are amazing, and I can highly recommend them. If you're starting fresh, Avernum 3 is probably a good one to start (it's also the on iPad and decently playable).

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