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Myst

Featuring the most lavish Scenery Porn 1993 could buy.
Most games have a premise, dictating an objective which the player achieves through gameplay. Some games, however, have discovering the premise and the objective as part of the gameplay.

Myst was a puzzle-heavy first-person Adventure Game which sparked off a new sub-genre. Developed by the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller in 1993, the game became an unexpected hit, mainly due to its eerie, haunting atmosphere and, for the time, excellent graphics. It was swiftly followed by a host of imitators, most of which are decidedly inferior to the original.

Myst is famous for its mind-bending logic puzzles and lack of character interaction - most of the games feature only a handful of NPCs and very little dialogue. Unsurprisingly, adventure fans are heavily divided over the merits of the game, with most players falling firmly into the 'love' or 'hate' camps. It has even been accused of helping to hasten the 'death' of adventure games, even though many gamers were introduced to the genre by Myst and its sequels.

The late Douglas Adams, upon playing Myst, cheerfully declared the game to be a 'Beautiful Void' due to the lack of other characters or life of any kind. (He also created Starship Titanic, which was a game with a very similar premise IN SPACE, with snarky robots.)

It is also worth noting that characterisation of 'The Player' (Sometimes called 'The Stranger') is achieved after an interesting fashion in that the few NPC's that play a primary role, Atrus and his family, treat the main character with familiarity that develops as the series progresses. This leads to the player's becoming something akin to their family friend, and subtly integrating the player themself as a character into the world of the game by avoiding dictating the nature of the protagonist.

The Myst games deal with the D'ni civilization, a race of people (not humans) that lived in a cavern under the Earth until their civilization fell a few centuries ago. The D'ni had the ability to write about locations they imagined in special books that could then physically transport a person to the places they described. Atrus, the main non-player character in the games, is one of the last survivors of the D'ni (though he's three quarters human).

The Myst series has six games:
  • Myst: The player is transported to a strange, deserted island by reading a magical book. Once there, he/she discovers two brothers trapped inside similar books, each of whom blames the other for the murder of their father Atrus and the destruction of his library. With the help of various notes, journals and recorded messages left by Atrus and his sons, the player must piece together what happened and decide who to free. According to Word Of God, Myst is set in the early 19th century.
  • Riven: The Sequel to Myst: Atrus, after being freed by the player in the previous game, sends the player to Riven (an Age reached by linking book), where Atrus's father Gehn is holding Atrus's wife Catherine captive. The player must free Catherine, trap Gehn, and find a way to signal Atrus. In the end, the player is returned home (which is presumably on Earth). Considered by many Myst fans to be the best game in the franchise, and also the most difficult.
  • Myst III: Exile: Several years after the events of Riven, the player visits Atrus in the latter's new home Tomahna (which is in the desert of New Mexico). While there, a man called Saavedro steals a book linking to the Age of Releeshahn (which Atrus was writing as a new home for the D'ni survivors) to get revenge for the evil acts perpertrated against Saavedro by Atrus's sons Sirrus and Achenar. The player must follow Saavedro and get the book back, while finding out about what drives Saavedro.
  • Myst IV: Revelation: Around ten years after Exile, Sirrus and Achenar return to kidnap Atrus's daughter Yeesha (around 10 years old in this game). The player visits the prison Ages in which Sirrus and Achenar were trapped, as well as a third Age called Serenia, to discover their plans and to try to free Yeesha.
  • Uru: Ages Beyond Myst: Set in the present day (2003, the game's release date), Uru is a spin-off of the Myst series. In the 1980's, a group of people discovered the D'ni cavern, and formed the D'ni Restoration Council. The player (who is obviously not the same character as the previous games, since it's 200 years later) is drawn to go to the desert and follows a journey set out by Yeesha that leads the player to find out much about the history and downfall of the D'ni, and about creatures called the Bahro that were enslaved by the D'ni. Uru also includes a massively multiplayer online component, which has been launched, canceled, relaunched, canceled again, and relaunched again throughout its history. After Uru Live was canceled (for the first time), two expansion packs were released with the planned future content for Uru Live. The first, To D'ni, allows the player to explore the D'ni cavern and deals with the fate of the DRC. The second, Path of the Shell, is about a prophecy concerning someone called the Grower (who would bring D'ni back to life) and a D'ni guild master named Kadish who claimed to be the Grower. It currently exists, for free but with no promises of future content updates, in the form of Myst Online: Uru Live.
  • Myst V: End of Ages: The final Myst game is also set in the present day and is more a sequel to Uru than Myst. The game doesn't state who the player is, but according to Word Of God it's Dr. Watson from the DRC (from Uru). The player is set a quest to release a Tablet, that controls/enslaves the Bahro. Both Yeesha and a D'ni survivor called Esher have attempted this quest but failed, and both will aid the player in their own way.

There are also several tie-in novels, authored by the Miller brothers themselves. Myst: The Book of Atrus tells the story of Atrus's early life with his grandmother Anna and his father Gehn. Myst: The Book of Ti'ana tells the story of the downfall of the D'ni (so this takes place before the Book of Atrus). And finally, Myst: The Book of D'ni tells of Atrus's attempts to find D'ni survivors and rebuild the D'ni civilization.

Recently, an independently produced (but still approved by the Miller brothers) Film of the Book (the Book of Ti'ana to be precise) has been announced. The scriptwriters keep a daily-updated blog about their progress, with some rather odd digressions about their personal lives in connection with the project.
This game provides examples of:
  • A God Am I: Gehn
  • Affably Evil: The Terahnee in general.
  • AFGNCAAP
  • Alphabet Soup Cans: Atrus installed them into Amateria and Voltaic, and Wrote them into Edanna. Justified in the fact that all 3 of the ages were (in-universe) meant to be learning experiences, first for Atrus' sons, then for Atrus himself (whom the player so conveniently goes in place of).
  • Arc Number: 5 in Riven.
    • And in the backstory as well, because 5 is an important number to the D'ni culture. Because Gehn was a D'ni with delusions of grandeur (and sadistic tendencies - see Nightmare Fuel below), he brought the 5 motif to Riven with him.
      • It turns out 25 is actually the number holding the most cultural significance to the D'ni, as their number system is in Base 25 as opposed to our Base 10. Additionally, 25^2 is 625, the number connected to the Grower. The reason Gehn used the number 5 so powerfully around the islands of Riven is because Gehn misremembered this culturally significant number as 5 and not 25 (he was fairly young when the D'ni civilization collapsed), so he wrote everything in the link to Riven around the number 5.
    • Gehn is, as far as most Myst fans are aware, the only (half) D'ni who has ever named his ages after numbers; all the ages the player discovers in Uru and Myst V: End of Ages have D'ni names (and that's not even counting Atrus' ages, which are also all named and not numbered). Gehn named his ages after numbers because those marked the order in which those ages were written - Riven is the fifth age, therefore Gehn refers to it as Age Five, Age 233 is appropriately his 233rd age, and so on.
    • The Ages that the player visits are littered with astronomical tools and mechanisms that depend on specific dates or numerical correspondances. Of course, this is usually because most of the ages visited in the series are written by Atrus, who simply has to know everything about every new age he writes a link to. The D'ni also had very advanced technology, and certain ages like Toldelmer were built specifically for scientific research (Astronomy, in this case). Additionally, Uru revealed that the center of D'ni technology as a whole appears to be connected to a large device known as "The Great Zero". Said device serves as a GPS in the D'ni cavern, and itself is located at coordinates (0,0,0). Overall, however, the D'ni actually seem to have been much more connected to writing than to the sciences, though science and mathematics were certainly a large part of their society.
  • And I Must Scream - The protagonist suffers this fate in two of the "bad" endings to the first game; ie, if you bring the last page to either brother.
  • Beautiful Void - Trope Namer.
  • Big Screwed Up Family
  • Big No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No!! Poor Saavedro.
  • Bittersweet Ending - All the games to some extent, but especially Riven and Revelation.
  • Cast As A Mask - Inverted and has some gender bending thrown in with Sirrus in Revelation
  • Chess Motifs: Yes Sirrus, Atrus made a Légal move.
  • Closed Circle
  • Complete Monster: Gehn, Sirrus, Esher, Nekisahloth
  • Crapsaccharine World: Terahnee
  • Creepy Child: Later part of Myst IV - Sirrus possesses Yeesha's body. He does a good job at impersonating her, but his language slips through. Comes to a head in the bad endings, in which she smiles sweetly as she shoots you with a crossbow.
  • Dis Continuity - depending on who in the fandom you ask, either Myst V and Uru, the novels, or even the first four games, largely due to the series' massive Ret Cons and Literary Agent Hypotheses
  • Distressed Damsel: Catherine and (later) Yeesha. It must run in the family.
  • Doom Magnet: Atrus.
  • Dramatic Landfall Shot - The opening shot of the first game.
    • Also Mechanical, Stoneship, J'nanin, Edanna, Haven, Teledahn... A good number of the Ages are islands, so they get to use this a lot.
  • Dr. Jerk - Jarl .
  • Drop The Hammer - another reason why you shouldn't anger Saavedro.
  • Drunk on the Dark Side
  • Evil Gloating - "My dear friend. You've done the right thing. You stupid fool! Hahaha!" - Sirrus.
  • Face Heel Turn - Veovis.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome
  • (soon to be, maybe) Film of the Book
  • Follow the Leader
  • Fungus Humongous - The age of Teledahn.
    • come to think of it, this whole series seems to have a thing for big plants and fungi in general...
  • Game Breaking Bug - The infamous Mechanical Age bug that prevented you from rotating the fortress, requiring the use of a game guide to find the solution to the age's last puzzle.
  • Gannon Banned - The D'ni were originally referred to as the "Dunny". The spelling change was probably due to the fact that "dunny" means "toilet" in several English dialects.
    • That's no accident- the story in the game was originally going to be a book called "Dunnyhut". The reason the dunny motif was dropped is not perplexing, however.
  • God Is Inept - Poorly written linking books result in this.
  • Guide Dang It - The animal puzzle in Riven.
  • Heel Face Turn - Veovis, ro'Eh ro'Dan, Achenar. Perhaps Shomat, as well.
  • Hey Its That Guy - Brad Dourif as Saavedro, in Exile.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel - Achenar's rooms and his Channelwood Temple certainly count, but his Cache in the Mechanical Age really takes the cake. Easily the most gruesome part of the game, and has some of the scariest music you'll ever hear.
  • Human Aliens - Well, the D'ni aren't space aliens, but they don't originate from this universe. Several of the D'ni-written worlds include effectively human—or rather, D'ni— inhabitants, though the D'ni largely didn't consider them equals to themselves. (And yes, Earth is an Age, with its own descriptive book and everything.)
  • I Did What I Had To Do - There are a few. Gehn in Riven, Escher in Myst V, Sirrus in Myst IV.
  • Insurmountable Waist Height Fence - Especially in Uru to block off unfinished areas, but examples of places that seem like they should be accessible but are not abound throughout the entire series. A notable exception is in Riven, where you can simply crawl under a locked gate.
  • It's Personal - Saavedro's motive
  • It's Up To You - five times so far in the original series alone. This really begins to stretch credibility in later games.
    • Whilst a fan, this troper has to cite the humorous way of looking at this in Myst IV - it's all up to the player because Atrus was out shopping. No, really.
      • Out shopping with a malfunctioning cellphone, to boot.
      • Gosh, and I thought it was just because I'm a horrible baby-sitter...
    • Actually, the fifth game is set 180 years after Myst IV, and since the protagonist of the first four games is human, he can't be alive by then. According to Word Of God, the protagonist of Myst V is Dr. Watson of the DRC, not the stranger from the first four games.
      • Atrus was human too and he's still alive in the fifth game. Sure it was 180 years?
      • Atrus is only mostly human. (Apparently the longevity genes of the D'ni are all dominant)
  • Its A Wonderful Failure - Go to D'ni without the white page (a type of Unwinnable situation), bring all of the pages to either brother so you get trapped in the book yourself, forget to rescue Catherine (cue Downer Ending), open the fissure before trapping Gehn (Gehn escapes and kills you and Atrus), trap yourself in the prison book (if you do it in the Rebel Age, they burn the book), etc.
    • Don't forget what happens when you return to Tomahna without the book to Releeshahn. A Wonderful Failure indeed...
  • Killed off for Real - Sirrus. Even when they Never Found the Body.
  • La Resistance - The Moiety in Riven.
  • Last of His Kind - Atrus and his children appear to be the last of the D'ni race. This turns out not to be the case.
    • Saavedro thinks himself to be the last of the Narayani race due to a rather nasty civil war that occurred on his home planet. This is also not the case.
  • Late To The Party - Every single game in the entire series runs on this trope.
  • Lighthouse Point - One in the Stoneship Age.
  • Literary Agent Hypothesis - Used to explain not only the existence of the Uru series, but to account for all the Ret Cons in the Myst games.
    • One might even say that Uru is all one big Ret Con.
  • Lock And Key Puzzle: The central puzzle of a lot of the games (such the fireplace in Myst or the fire marbles in Riven) essentially boils down to an elaborate combination lock. The mechanism has so many possible states that you can't brute-force all the combinations, so the only way to solve it is to wander around solving sub-puzzles that will eventually reveal what the right combination is.
  • Made Of Nara - Your Uru avatar can fall four stories without linking and not be harmed.
  • Magic A Is Magic A - See the Rewriting Reality discussion below. Holds true for everyone except Yeesha.
  • Magnificent Bastard - A'Gaeris
  • The Messiah - Yeesha Subverted. She fails to fulfill the role due to her own pride.
  • Methuselah Syndrome - The Ronay can live more than three centuries; King Lanaren lived to be 396.
  • Minecart Madness - The Mazerunner in Selenetic.
  • Mobile Maze - from The Book of D'ni
  • Multiple Endings - all of the games give you a choice. Choose wisely.
    • Some of the times you do have a choice aren't entirely obvious, either. The ending in Exile requires you to undo one of the puzzles you just solved in order to achieve your basic victory condition - pulling a What The Hell Hero in the process. To get the best ending, you then have to undo a different puzzle before resetting the first, and forgetting something at any point gets you an immediate failure.
  • The Multiverse
  • Narrow Escape - The panic link in Uru often falls into this category, as it is often the only thing preventing one from going splat or incinerating.
  • Nightmare Fuel - All the games have their moments.
    • At age four, NOTHING gave this troper more nightmares than the opening of Myst.
      • You too, huh? Me, it was the sheer emptiness of the island.
    • At three or four, the only age I knew how to reach was the Mechanical Age... And I knew how to reach Achernars room... It's still mainly the sounds and the music that haunt me.
    • For this troper, the Nightmare Fuel moment (which doubles as a Crowning Moment of Awesome) is when he manages to get past the conical cage thing in Riven, and simultaneously realizes its intended purpose. This one is easy to miss, since you can get past the puzzle simply by pulling the right lever without understanding the mechanism's purpose. Understanding its purpose requires you to put several pieces together in your mind: the cage, the chair with levers that allows you to progress past the cage, and the apparently-unrelated game, in a children's classroom of all places, that teaches you Riven's numbering system. Putting these things together, and realizing who would be sitting in that chair and under what circumstances, made this troper exclaim, "Gehn is EVIL!".
      • Hints for this purpose can also be found in one of Gehn's journals.
      • There is also a very hard to spot (because it's blue-on-blue) drawing in a cave showing Gehn holding two villagers over two hungry Wharks.
      • In The Book of Atrus Catherine explains that this happened to one of her friends.
    • On the Jungle Island in Riven, there are these bizarre-looking guard towers that can be very hard to spot. When you enter a scene that reveals one of the towers, it will suddenly go into a video clip of the guard operator turning a crank, causing some strange-looking doohickeys on the top of it to spin and product an ear-vibrating, ghostly droning sound. There are 2 towers total, and at least three different ways to approach either of them, which are often accidental and leave you going "wait why aren't I moving forwar...oh crap it's that damn guard tower!"
      • Doesn't help that the windows at the top look like eyes.
    • For this anonymous troper, it was half of Exile, almost all of Riven, and a few very shudder-worthy points in Myst and Revelation.
    • At a tender age I had to sleep with the light on because of Achenar's rooms - especially in the Mechanical Age! Brrr...
    • This troper failed the ending of Myst IV Revelation because of Achenar's rooms in the various Ages of the first game. She understood something fishy was going on, but she stubbornly refused to trust him and think that Yeesha was lying because she remembered vividly THAT cage and THAT rose, and also because she liked very much Yeesha. Complete horror ensued when she saw the bad ending...
    • For this troper it's the Memory Chamber flashback on Serenia which shows Yeesha strapped to a chair and screaming.
    • As a kid, the theme music for the Stoneship age creeped me out. When I rediscovered the games and bought the soundtrack, I popped it in at night to sleep too, and once the Stoneship music came up, I couldn't sleep the rest of the night.
    • The temple in the Channelwood age, which actually serves no purpose in gameplay. Creepy music, a ghostly hologram of Achenar, creepy masks, and an altar that "eats" sacrifices.
    • The electric cage in Achenar's room in Mechanical Age. And the ribcage lamp in Achenar's room in Stoneship.
    • For this troper, the most terrifying moment in game actually came from a bug, rather than something intended to be there. In the slave chambers of Teledahn, there are bones. It is possible to kick the skull so that it doesn't stop rattling(likely a physics collision). Rekicking the skull will do nothing to stop it. The rattling can be heard throughout all of Teledahn, and is still there if you link away and come back This event prompted a long in-game journal entry, which was subsequently deleted because it was more vivid than the actual memory. * shudders*
    • Did no one else discover the chest with the decaying corpse in it in the Mechanical Age?
      • Most of us spent months in therapy specifically trying to FORGET that...
    • The death of Willow 'Wheely' Engberg in URU Live. She crawls into a hole which was unveiled by an earthquake with her best friend, gets trapped there, spends several days without her Relto to escape to, and eventually gets murdered by a Bahro screaming "Noloben"...while her father listens and pleads.
      • Exactly what happened to Wheely was never publicized. All that's known is that the first Restoration Engineer lowered into the cavern where she'd been trapped started screaming to be pulled out. All he'd ever say was that "you don't want to see it."
  • Nostalgia Level - Atrus' study in Myst IV: Revelation, the Myst library, and K'veer in Path of the Shell. The Cleft might count, although it had only ever appeared in novels before. Also, the ruins of the original Myst in the bad ending of Myst V. It's worth getting the bad ending just to see it.
  • Novelization
  • Offing the Offspring - In Backstory and story-story, including villainous and Shoot The Dog versions.
  • Omnicidal Maniac - Veovis and A'Gaeris.
  • The Other Darrin - Katran was played by Sheila Goold and voiced by Rengin Altay in Riven. She was played by Maria Galante in Exile.
    • At least Goold and Galante SOMEWHAT resemble each other when in wardrobe and make-up. The actors who played Sirrus and Achenar in Revelation look and sound NOTHING like the Miller Brothers other than basic body types.
  • Paranoia Fuel - Riven, full stop. The intro actually has a too-fast-to-see frame of Gehn looking at you as a subliminal message to give you the feeling someone's watching. Also, there's a door on the island you start off on. It's locked, but you can crawl underneath it. What's behind it? Nothing, except a small peephole into the temple.
  • Porting Disaster - Porting the original game to the Nintendo DS did not go so well, given the DS's lower resolution and lack of a context-sensitive mouse cursor.
    • It's worth noting that, other than very minor issues with the smaller screen, the port to the PSP is actually quite good.
  • Player Punch - This Troper would like to highlight the final part of Sirrus' memory sequence on spire. We begin seeing Sirrus raging against his imprisonment, then deciding to escape and discovering he can't get down to where the linking book must be, and deciding maybe if he can get to another of the structures he can see, he might be able to climb down from there. We see Sirrus' working on a way to get across and beginning to wish so much he could show his father what he was achieving. We see him beginning to miss his family, and grow closer, and closer and closer to repentance, making images to remind him of happy times in his youth or thinking about what his family might be thinking or doing. Then we see him complete his efforts, get below the cloud layer, and discover nothingness below. ...And then we see him snap.
    • There's also the moment in Riven where you read one of Gehn's journals. He's crying about his deceased wife, Keta, and unlike the neat and ordered previous pages, the pages on this one are stained with tears. The worst part is is that you have to trap him before you can learn about this.
      • Just incase you didn't know how much he misses her, there is also a photograph of her and a short video message where she promises always to love him "to the greatest extent".
      • Saavedro's journal in Myst III: Exile. It starts off as a straightforward journal about the details of his revenge, but as you collect pages for it (which are scattered around various ages), more of Saavedro's backstory forms - he's clearly suffering severe mental trauma from his ordeal, was essentially tortured by Sirrus and Achenar, and once trusted Atrus before his sons ruined everything. It's quite tragic to read the whole thing once you have all the pages.
  • Portal Picture
  • Press X To Die - Using the Trap Book from your inventory at any point in Riven nets you a bad ending. There is one point where you do have to use it, but then it's being offered to you by Gehn and isn't in your possession. Using the Tohmana Linking Book anywhere that Savedro can physically reach it at the end of Exile has a similar result.
  • Pulverized Pedestal: Atrus admired Gehn at first.
  • Quicksand Box - Riven definitely frustrates people.
    • Arguably, Uru: Complete Chronicles does this, as it gives you the base game plus two expansion packs worth of content all at once but doesn't even hint that they are separate plot-wise.
      • The current release of Uru Live has most of the same stuff from Complete Chronicles, but at least you have other people to help you along.
  • Recursive Canon - The Uru series accepts the Literary Agent Hypothesis in regard to the early games in the Myst series.
  • Redemption Equals Death - Veovis, Achenar, ro'Eh ro'Dan.
  • Ret Con - several, but the transformation of 'Trap Books' into 'Prison Ages' is probably the most obvious.
    • Don't forget the placement of the Cleft. The novels heavily imply the Cleft to be located in the Middle East, while Uru moves it to New Mexico.
    • According to Word Of God (Richard A. Watson, the end-all authority on all things D'ni), the cleft was always in New Mexico, the novels got it wrong. He also states that trap books as shown in Myst and Riven don't exist; the brothers were always trapped in prison Ages (as shown in Myst IV), and that the trap books were simply a simplification made by Cyan for gameplay purposes. It should be noted that he wrote about this as early as 1998, so it wasn't something that was changed for Myst IV.
  • Reality Warper - the Bahro, and to an extent Yeesha.
  • Red Oni Blue Oni - Sirrus (Blue Oni) and Achenar (Red Oni), though the Books they're trapped in have the opposite colors.
  • Reptiles Are Abhorrent - The Bahro fear the snakes of Noloben.
  • Rewriting Reality - The explanation for how the Art (of linking to other universes) works. With the proper ink, paper, and language, of course. What do you think this is, magic or something?
    • Well, technically, it's not rewriting reality, and a whole section of a couple of the stories is dedicated to making this clear, thanks to a few characters who started to think they were gods. As stated above, it's linking - writing a linking book simply creates a door to a world that already exists somewhere, if the theory of infinite possibilities is to be believed. It also points out that writers have to be ruddy careful, as the link is established to a moment when the world is exactly as it is described in the linking book. It doesn't matter if the linked world destabilizes into a hellish inferno after that moment - the book will still link there. Thus the existence of a guild dedicated to approving books as safe to use.
      • However, there have been times, like with the Age of Stoneship, where Atrus uses the Art to change the contents of a world. Word Of God states it's sort of a quantum-uncertainty thing; you can't change things, but you can specify things which could have been there all along (but just haven't been noticed). For example, the dagger-from-the-sky from Riven: You can't write that a dagger falls from the sky. You can write that there was a dagger in orbit all along that's just about to fall, however. Even before you wrote it, there was a potential that the dagger was there, it just collapsed into a certainty when you put it to paper. If you write in a change that's incompatible with the existing world, then the link changes to a new world which matches all the facts...breaking the link to the original world permanently. Yes, this has resulted in at least one Shoot The Dog.
  • Scenery Porn - Sufficient, said many critics at the time, to solely justify the first game's record-smashing sales. You can probably buy the first three sequels with that excuse, too. (They also have Soundtrack Porn).
    • The Garden Ages, the Kadish Gallery and Ahnonay in Uru. This troper spent hours on end looking around and listening to the music and/or sounds.
    • Taken to the extent that your reward for completing a stage of particular games - individual islands in Riven, complete Ages in Exile and Revelation - is a ride around the area you just finished in what might easily be called Scenery Porn Fan Service. (Amateria in particular makes no pretensions of being anything other than Ending Ride.)
  • Schizo Tech
  • Myst Is Unpretty
  • Sequel Hook - The "right" ending of the original Myst contains several blatant ones for Riven.
  • Shout Out - The never-seen Osmoian Age is a nod to Cyan's earlier game Cosmic Osmo, which was set in the Osmoian solar system.
  • Sick Sad World - Terahnee, although it appeared awesome at first.
    • Come to that, what about Spire? Sure, it's awesome for a visit, but imagine living there alone for twenty years....
    • Teledahn qualifies as it was used as a secret base for slave trafficking, as does Noloben, where Esher performed gruesome experiments on the Bahro.
  • Smug Snake: Sirrus
  • Socialization Bonus - Several puzzles in Uru Live require multiple players to complete- Eder Tsogal, Eder Delin, the pellets in Er'cana, and Ahnonay.
  • Solve The Soup Cans - The justification comes in the form of paranoid characters throwing deliberately contrived obstacles in each other's paths.
  • Squee - Saavedro hunted them.
  • Steam Punk - Big machines rife with pipes, gears, and valves often serve as primary puzzle elements in ages, especially Riven. Atrus especially seemed able to crank out huge volumes of wacky machinery using nineteenth-century parts and a little Sufficiently Advanced Technology.
    • What always confused This Troper is how Sirrus in Myst IV managed to crank out similarly huge amounts of machinery, despite being by himself, having no access to the Art or resources outside Spire, no machining tools, or even an obvious means to extract metals from the surrounding rock (unless he had a smelting facility hidden in an area the player can't access). He even managed to make circuit boards!
    • This Troper assumed that he just carved it out of the surrounding rock - he does mention "harvesting" crystals, and he had fifteen years in which to create the circuits. The metal walkways, on the other hand, I don't know about.
    • The upper part of the central tower in J'nanin appears to be fixed in place with bed-sized screws.
  • Take A Third Option - The solution to the first game. Do you trust the brother without the more obviously 'mad' and 'evil' attributes, or assume it's some sort of misleading trick and trust that one? The answer is to trust neither.
  • Tag Line - Myst III: Exile went with "The Perfect Place to Plan Revenge".
  • Tastes Like Diabetes - Serenia, in the opinions of some fans (though it still had a couple of Nightmare Fuel moments).
  • Themed Cursor - Your hand.
  • Town With A Dark Secret - Terahnee is a country with a dark secret. Atrus and company find this out almost too late.
  • Tree Top Town - Part of the Channelwood Age in the first game.
    • Narayan in the third game is made of treetop towns.
    • As is the hidden village of the Moiety.
  • Un Canceled - The multi-player component of Uru was canceled before it came out of beta, but brought back to life a few years later by Game Tap as Myst Online. Then, after little over a year, it was canceled again. Then plans were announced for a version of the game using fan-made content... which was canceled. Cyan then decided to release the whole thing as open-source, and to just let the fans deal with it (as of this writing, the open source release of Myst Online is still pending, although there are a number of fan-run servers known as 'shards' up and running if you know where to look for them).
    • And now it's been Un Canceled yet another time, and for free, to boot.
  • Unobtainium - Nara and deretheni, among other stones.
    • Firemarbles and powermarbles.
  • Videogame Caring Potential
  • Villainous Breakdown - "No, you fool! My performance was perfect!"
  • Villains Out Shopping - The supplemental booklet for the Riven soundtrack contain extra pages from Gehn's journal where he discusses some of his hobbies.
  • Wham Episode - The death of Willow "Wheely" Engberg in Uru Live, i.e. the slaughter of a teenaged girl, was roleplayed out over chat.
    • Not to mention the actual death of the player behind the character Pepsi in Uru Live. Years later, in the D'ni Games (a fan-created Olympics-styled event) of Until Uru, the Pepsi Memorial Marathon was named in honor of her.
  • What Happened To The Squee: You don't hear from Gehn after he is imprisoned. Does he mend? Does he die unreformed? Is he lost in the library fire?
    • I seriously thought that Revelation would have a twist ending where BOTH Sirrus and Achenar had reformed and the real villain was actually Gehn all along. What Could Have Been, indeed
  • What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made On Drugs?: Hi there, Teledahn - world of giant mushrooms.
    • And also novels-only Torus, as mentioned below.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic? Yeesha = Yeshua/Jesus.
  • What The Hell Player - At the end of Exile, you have the option of leaving Saavedro trapped. If you do this, Atrus calls you on it in the epilogue.
  • The Woobie - Saavedro, and possibly Achenar in Revelation.
  • Word Of God - possibly the most frustrating instance in any fandom ever, as Myst's Word Of God specifically contradicts onscreen canon.
  • World Of Chaos - The worlds created in-universe, rather than the universe itself.
    • Some of the worlds created in-universe. One of the underlying principles of the Functional Magic is that perfectly habitable worlds can be very, very different from each other; it's just that some of them have trees that grow inside-out (Edanna, Exile), or aquatic microbes that avoid heat and take the water with them (Riven), or wooden ships that are sticking out of the side of an island (Stoneship, Myst).
      • And that last one's arguably a mistake, as per Atrus's journal.
    • Taking this to its logical extent is Torus, which is perfectly habitable despite that everything Atrus knows about the Art says it shouldn't be - a two-sided disc, one light and one dark, the latter of which contains kitten-like flowers, air-swimming fish, and dividing snakes; Rain falls on the light side into a giant lake centered on a whirlpool through which pours through to the dark side, where it arcs up in an enormous fountain and evaporates before circling the perimeter and precipitating again.
      • Catherine seems to have a special talent for "breaking the rules" as it were: floating rocks in Serenia anybody?
      • Floating rocks? She wrote an age with magic in it! Spirits, memory jars, etc. This Troper is reminded of the line from Wrath of Khan, "Can I cook, or can't I?"
      • Floating rocks crop up a lot in the games. Exile features them as part of Voltaic's puzzle (levitated, as the Age's name suggests, by magnetism), and Spire in Revelation is made entirely out of them.

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