Myst was captivating. Visually so "immersive" with just enough graphics to really stimulate what "might" be around the corner. I truly could sense that I was somewhere else, another planet or whatever, abandoned, with me to explore.
As TFA says, a lot of people blame Myst for the death of the adventure game, but it was already trending that way in '93 as graphics improved. Most of the random actions that you could take to interact with the world in the Sierra games resulted in a fairly generic animation and a wall of text. This meant anything the designer anticipated could be interacted with, because the cost of writing that text was low (particularly with Sierra's near lack of editing and playtesting).
Once a generic animation and a wall of text was no longer acceptable from a production-value stance, these games were stripped of their charm, and all you were left with were charmless puzzle games with some window-dressing. Myst got there first and did it better than everyone else, so it gets the blame for something that was inevitable.
I wouldn't have built Myst because to me it seems pointless, why not just make a movie about this? Or a picture book? But clearly lots of people enjoyed it. Still, back then I could safely assume anything that looked that good had nothing behind the facade, today it's harder to guess.
It reminds me of a phenomenon which is broadly disliked in tabletop Role Playing. Some GMs like to plot out everything in great detail which necessarily means you can't go off piste, they need you to go into the tunnels under the castle with the torch because they've worked out exactly what will happen when you do. If their players try to instead simply leave the castle because it's boring, or divert a river into the tunnels and flood them to drive anything down there out the GM will either be angry and demand the players reconsider or will try to railroad the players into proceeding with the plan as they envisioned. Either way this is an unsatisfying experience for everybody.
It was a puzzle game. The puzzles were pretty basic, but the market for basic puzzle games is significant. Especially if the puzzle is also attractive enough that the next batch of visuals feels like a decent reward for having solved the puzzle.
Such a game won't attract people who want more interaction from their games -- though you do have to remember that at the time even a game like Doom was a huge advance in interactivity. Myst was relaxing rather than exciting, almost the way a game of solitaire or a crossword puzzle is.
2. Many of the deaths had animations and a bit of text, but see all the non-death things you could do that KQ1 had[1] and it did not have anywhere near the most.