Myst III: Exile

The puzzles are harder and more intertwined, the endings are dramatic, the visual effects and navigation are still the best, and there are several great surprises. I can't wait for MYST IV

I just finished Exile about a day ago and I am still impressed just thinking about the game. Everything, including sound, graphics, music, story and acting all came together to create this masterpiece.

I could talk about all the technical aspects of the game, but I'll focus more on the movie aspects, namely story and acting. Like Myst and Riven, you explore predominantly empty worlds, with the occasional actor to keep you company. The story is told by finding messages and journal pages left behind by the villain of the game. The story is not complicated, but it is enough to keep the player motivated until the end of the game.

As for the acting, everybody holds their weight. You see characters only rarely. Atrus, played by Rand Miller, appears mainly at the beginning of the game. He is used to playing Atrus, having done so in Myst and Riven. Maria Galante takes the role of Catherine. Though a small role, she carries her weight as does Miller.

The real star, though, is Academy Award Nominee Brad Dourif (Best known for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). I don't want to give anything away, but he has the power to make the player's heart beat with fear, especially when holding his giant hammer. He does a great job.

Overall, I highly recommend this game! It is not overly difficult, a problem with Riven, and it is extremely rewarding. So go out and buy it!

The original Myst created a genre all its own. It's sequel Riven took things to a new level by creating an incredible interconnected set of islands with puzzles weaved through them all. Exile takes the best of both those worlds and mends incredible puzzles with an engaging environment.

This was always one of my favorite installments in the Myst franchise because it really simplified things after the often-agonizing Riven. The environments are still lush and interesting, but this time a bit more contained. No taking a trolley from one island to another over and over again just to pull a single level. Instead, you just solve one puzzle in one basic location and move on to the next one.

The storyline still moves on in this one too, as it focuses on Saavedro, a man looking for revenge on Atrus based on the earlier actions of Sirius & Achenar (Atrus' sons).

Finally, one new addition to the interface is the ability to look 360 degrees around you. It is no longer a true "point-and-click" game, in this aspect, but it allows much more range of motion. No more clicking like a madman trying to find the right angle to solve a puzzle, or missing a key detail because the angle isn't quite right.

Overall, Exile is a great third chapter in the Myst saga. It takes the foundation of the original, mixes it with the landscapes of Riven, and creates the best overall game in the franchise to that date.

Game sound is very important to me. I wear headphones, so if a game has good stereo sound, I almost feel as if I am there. Good music can also add emotion to a game. This game has all that (as did the original Myst), wonderful raytraced graphics, and seamless Quicktime overlays. For me, it held up very well, even though it was released three years ago.

Effects. Not only are sound effects panned correctly when you turn around, they were recorded well in stereo, so sound great. Wind chimes, wind, ocean water, river water, creaking bridges, clanking machines. Effect sounds are imperceptibly looped. They get muffled when you enter a tunnel. I sometimes leave the windchimes running while I'm reading or doing paperwork; the quality is that good.

Music. Each level/section has its own theme music. Segments are played at random intervals, to add ambiance, without getting tedious. The Options menu has a "Music frequency" control, so you can control how often music is played. When not playing the game, load the M3Data subdirectory into your MP3 player, to hear all the pretty themes again (1.5 hours of mp3's!). Occasional choral accompaniment adds even more emotion. Music themes are often heavily panned -- I suppose to make you feel that the theme is all around, or following you around. And also to spook you. If you really like the music, there is a Jack Wall soundtrack CD, though it is currently out of print.

Graphics. Myst depends heavily on realistic graphics to increase immersion. While 3d graphic cards keep improving, raytracing still looks better. The large storage capacity of CD media allows the Myst games to avoid the downside of raytracing: rendering speed. Exile adds the ability to "turn around" at each location -- the render is for an entire sphere, rather than just the rectangle of the monitor screen. Quicktime movies allow playing back video recordings left by characters in the game. But they also permit animation of gadgets, machines, or even an alien squirrel. The transitions between the raytraced images and the animations are almost imperceptible.

Puzzles. I always have trouble with them, though I can usually solve one or two in an evening. Any harder though, and I would probably have gotten tired of seeing the same level for too long.

Media. The "anniversary" edition of the Myst trilogy is on a DVD-ROM (at about what I paid for Exile alone). This would remove the need to switch between the four CD's, or give up 2 GB of my hard drive space for the "full" install. If I had it to do over, I would have bought the DVD version. I think that all versions require a non-copyable key disk to be in the CD drive, or they refuse to start up. My CD version certainly did.

Crashing during the movies/animations? My marginal laptop CD drive (Samsung 308B) corrupted about two data files per CD, during the "full" install. After spending about 5 hours -- upgrading my video and sound card firmware and drivers, trying multiple versions of DirectX, updating Quicktime, and banging my head, I thought to diff files. It was the CD drive. Fortunately, the "full" install copies the CD's verbatim to the hard drive. To fix, I just copied the CD "Data" directories across the network, from a computer with a better CD drive.

Game trailer / advertisement. Search apple.com for "myst exile".

Summary. I love the Myst games, because I feel like I have spent the evening outside, in beautiful natural settings. Even if you don't like puzzles, this is still a place you should visit. Cheat your way through the game, if needed, just so you can see all the beautiful worlds. Go for the journey, not the goal.

For an even more immersive experience, try RealMyst. It is a remake of Myst, with interactive (ala Quake) graphics. Search apple.com for the Mac demo, and gamesdomain.com for the PC demo. (Many sites have bad links to the PC demo, so keep looking.)

Jan '05 update: Official site (myst3.com) is gone. Use a web search to find trailer: myst3_480.mov

I've had Myst III for almost 4 years. Yes, it's taken me that long to finish it. But it sure is a wonderful game. In terms of graphics, Riven was a simple step up from Myst. But Myst III adds a whole new level of realism to the franchise.

The main new feature is that you can look anywhere you want in any direction withing the photo-realistic worlds when before you could only look at a limited amount of certain things. These worlds are empty but beautiful to look at and have an eerie, ghostly atmosphere to them. The graphics are so convincing that the roller-coaster ride in the middle of the game will make you feel like you're really there. Not only do the graphics stand out but sound effects pan across the sound-field when you spin around and wind whistles between the rocks.

The story involves the maniacal sons of Atrus (that would be Sirrus and Achenar) continuing to wreak havoc through-out the ages. They have destroyed a world known as Narayan and left sole-survivor in exile on the island of J'Nanin. This man is Saavedro (Brad Dourif), who ultimately blames Atrus for his sons going off the deep end.

Atrus (played by Rand Miller as always) calls upon you to go to J'Nanin and find Saavedro, who has stolen Atrus new age Raleeshan. Saavedro traps you into going through many different worlds, unlocking secrets, finding clues and seeing for yourself what Sirrus and Achenar did to Narayan. Each world has a different look from the last but still retains that spooky feeling no matter if your in a swamp, caverns, beach or mountaintop.

But still, the most impressive thing about Myst III is Jack Wall's brilliant score, which is simultaneously haunting, beautiful, dark and Gothic. He seamlessly blends magical with choral and gives us a highly thematic score with surpasses that of most big-budget movies. Definitely the best score a video-game has ever known. And that's a pretty big statement.

I got the Limited Collector's Edition of this game which comes with the score CD (now very hard to find and very expensive) a 'making of' CD, the Prima Official Strategy Guide and lots of other inserts. The game (at the time of this certain publishing) was spread over 4 discs and it became very annoying switching between them all. I minor quibble though.

Overall, I highly recommend Myst III, it's not just a game, it's a journey.