YMMV / Myst

• Alternate Character Interpretation: In The Book of Ti'ana it's extremely easy to read Veovis's incredibly close friendship with Aitrus as his being in love with Aitrus and his actions within after said friendship turns septic over Catherine as an extremely dramatic act of If I Can't Have You… rather than straight Fantastic Racism. Note that Veovis is actually quite friendly with Catherine and complementary of her intellect and curiosity and his racism is of the paternalistic kind, right up until the exact moment that Aitrus confides in him that he's in love with her and plans to marry her, after which Veovis's overweening hatred of her drives him into the arms of the terrorist conspiracy. Through this lens, his death in his old friend's arms isn't just his Redemption Equals Death moment, but his Heel Realization, reconciling himself to Aitrus's Incompatible Orientation and recognizing that Catherine was never the problem, that he should have been happy with Aitrus's platonic love rather than jealously and enviously feeling entitled to his romantic love until it cost him everything.
• Angst? What Angst?: At the end of the first game, Atrus initially talks about the frustrations he has with his sons, but as soon as he destroys their book traps, he gets over it shockingly quick with almost no second thoughts. Until the series' numerous Retcons happened, we were as good to assume he just killed his own children, or at the very least he made them suffer a Fate Worse than Death. Sure, they caused tons of grief over the past twenty years for him, but he still seems to have a "the deed is done" attitude about it which is pretty jarring. It is justified by looking at the series overall, however, when you take into account that he is a bit preoccupied with trying to hold Riven together long enough to save his wife.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In most of the ages, the linking books are just sitting out in the open. In the Stoneship Age, it rises out of a table for no explainable reason. This is not foreshadowed at all, it seems somewhat magical even by the game's standards, and it's never spoken of again, or really at all. Of course, it could just be Rule of Cool in play, since it is a pretty nifty effect. The Unreal-Engine/VR updated version changes this so that it's hidden in a secret compartment that opens and lifts the book up once the power is turned on. Perhaps not as cool, but still Rule of Cool and possibly more in-line with Atrus' usual tinkering style.
• Breather Level: In contrast to the tedious pain-in-the-butt that is the Selenitic Age, the Stoneship Age is a refreshingly-short-but-sweet time, with some fun puzzles that hit the perfect sweet spot of challenging-yet-fair.
• Fanfic Fuel: In his journals, Atrus mentions a few Ages that we do not get to see, most prominently one called Everdunes. Fans have spent years speculating about these Ages and even created entire mythologies around them.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Depending on your perspective, Myst V and Uru, Myst IV, the novels, or even the first four games, largely due to the series' massive retcons and Direct Lines to the Author.
• First Installment Wins: The series had four official sequels and a spinoff that also was partly an MMO, but mention Myst to anyone and it's almost always the first game that comes to mind. The original game held the title of the best selling computer game for several years and none of its sequels ever topped it (though Riven came pretty close at 4.5 million copies vs. the 6 million of the original), and also has the advantage of heavy historical significance. However, Riven will usually be cited as the favorite among hardcore fans.
• It Was His Sled: Both Sirrus and Achenar are evil and the good ending is freeing Atrus. Atrus being alive is also this, as much of the first game's foreshadowing treats him as a Posthumous Character.
• Obvious Judas: Even without all of the loads of foreshadowing, it's not too hard to piece together that both of the brothers are evil, just in different ways, based on how they act. Oddly enough, some new players were actually led to believe one or the other would be revealed to be Good All Along because the otherwise logic-driven, counter-intuitive and obtuse game makes their evil nature so transparently obvious that it gives the impression that it's a trick to throw off newcomers.
• Paranoia Fuel: Linking Books. If you have one, you can go to that Age whenever you want. Whoever lives there will have no clue that you're coming, and unless they were Crazy-Prepared (for example, in Riven, when you link to the 233rd Age, you arrive inside a cage that only allows you to access what Gehn wants you to access), they're essentially at your mercy, because there's no wall or door that can stop you. However, it also works against you: books can't go with you, so once you link to an Age, anyone can follow you there, unless you destroy the book in the process (say, by linking over a fire).
  • The Stoneship age has a particularly notorious example of this in the compass room. After generating power to the room to activate the compass panel, you have a wide array of buttons to choose from but only one of which will actually allow you to progress. Any of the other buttons, when pressed, kill the power and lights in the room and activate a blaringly loud alarm that takes some time to stop. It's a jarring experience that can make some newer players feel as if someone has been actively alerted to their presence and is headed their way.
• Polished Port: Other than very minor issues inherent to a smaller screen, the port to the PSP is actually quite good, particularly knowing about the later-mentioned DS port.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The version for the Sega Saturn looks pretty and runs well, but you'd better have a 6 to 8 hour chunk of time to play: unlike later games and remakes, there is no way to save and must play the whole game in one go.
  • 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.
  • The 3DS version isn't much better than the DS version. It uses a cursor at least, but it doesn't use the 3D functions, nor does it use the touch screen for anything important. The cursor is controlled by the Circle Pad, and it re-centers whenever the Circle Pad is released, making it a real pain to control. What makes it worse is the blatant false advertising of the promotional materials, which claim that it displays in 3D, when it doesn't. Even worse, the game used low-res screenshots of realMyst for most of the locations (with others being inconsistent shoved-in slides and videos from the original 1993 game), with animations and videos being very poorly integrated, or even running too fast for the audio to match. Furthermore, it was obvious that the in-game day-night cycle from realMyst was not accounted for, as the sky gradually changes from still-frame-to-still-frame in some areas to a pinkish hue representing the sunset, and back again when one returns to previous locations!
  • Many of the early ports could also be considered this, since they were often put on consoles that had lower resolution than the PC versions allowed. They also had clunky controls and Loads and Loads of Loading, which especially got bad in Riven where you had to make really long treks.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: A lot of people find the atmosphere and surreal visuals of the game relaxing.
• That One Level: The infamous Selenitic Age is a pain in the butt just to get into, requiring the player to walk back and forth between a keyboard and a soundboard to painstakingly move several finicky switches to juuuust the right pitch, with only their ears as a guide. (Or counting the tones from left to right on the piano, then counting the correct number on the slider panel for each slider, itself a lengthy process that isn't terribly intuitive.) The world itself is somewhat interesting from a spectacle perspective, with lots of strange, ethereal scenery and sounds, but it suffers from the general dated nature of the technology on display and, unlike the other Ages, has no real storyline hints about the brothers, since it was an uninhabited world, save perhaps getting an impression of their softer sides from the locations of their pages. And getting out is bastard hard, especially if the player didn't do the Mechanical Age first to learn the auditory cues for the underground maze.
• That One Puzzle: The underground maze in the Selenitic Age. Very few players caught onto the fact you're supposed to use the sounds as clues for what direction to take and just mapped the whole thing out. A particularly nightmarish task, as the developers specifically designed the puzzle so it would be impractical to brute-force your way through. Even if you know how to navigate, it takes way too long to make it through the whole thing thanks to annoyingly long scene transitions with no way of skipping them. And if you want both the red and blue pages, you have to do it twice. The puzzle is theoretically designed to be solvable without brute-forcing it even if the Selenitic Age is the first one you reach, as Kikoskia demonstrates. This still relies on two things: first, that the player catches on to the noises that occur at each intersection along the correct route, and second, that the player is not deaf. Kikoskia, during the demonstration, notes that "if you couldn't hear, you wouldn't be able to solve this puzzle at all". Every Updated Re-release would remove some of the guesswork by showing what sounds were playing to make it more obvious that the player needs to pay attention to that, but it's still a headache even if you know what you're doing.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The 2021 remaster redid Atrus, Sirrus and Achenar in 3D polygons, and they all look more like audioanimatronics straight out of Disneyland. Luckily the game still allows you to use the original live-action film capture if you so choose.
• Vindicated by History: Despite being mocked by some gaming publications (and many adventure gamers angry about the decline of their favorite genre) as everything that was wrong with gaming in the '90s, Myst is still one of the top-selling adventure games on GOG.com. The visuals and the intriguing (literal) world-building still hold up quite well today. A lot of gamers find the Beautiful Void experience relaxing and/or memorably and engagingly creepy.
• The Woobie: Atrus has had it quite rough, to say the least. The poor guy has had to live with his own two sons growing deranged to the point of destructiveness erasing almost all of his previous book work and only leaving four worlds left as ghost towns, his wife being held hostage by his own father that has turned into a complete tyrant, has to put up with the after effects of the first game by receiving blame for the destruction his sons have caused, and even has to deal with the concerns of his own daughter getting kidnapped. It's a wonder he's as mellow as he is!

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