Great for newbies to the Myst series. Pretty, but doesn't have the substance of Riven.

User Rating: 7.7 | Myst III: Exile PC
I started Myst III: Exile earlier today and I've finished it already. While I am, certainly, good at this sort of thing, I did have the advantage of having played this one before. When it was a much newer title, I stole liberated stole this game so that I could try it out. I was much less certain about how I felt about the series then, since my only real experience with it had been watching [info]meekay play it back in the day. He wasn't fond. So I tried it out and I really got sucked into it. It wasn't until I was watching very late game plot sequences that I said to myself, "Hmm, maybe I should stop playing, since I am only testing this out." And so I did. Having played through it today, it occurs to me that I did all of it except the very last couple of actions back then. Not that it matters much. Somehow, I was missing a crucial cinematic, since it was causing a system freeze consistently; I wouldn't have realized what to do anyway. Of the three, Exile certainly has the most visual and usability polish, but that's not without its drawbacks. As I mentioned earlier, I prefer the 360° navigation mode. However, that makes getting through the age of Edanna a pain. Edanna is a nature-based Age, and so its paths are very twisty and wild. It's very easy to lose your bearing, even when you've crossed over a pathway five of six times already. Edanna is definitely my least favourite Age in the game for exactly this reason. On the other hand Amateria is my favourite Age in the game because the entire Age is a gigantic marble track, which you will eventually ride yourself. This one is absolutely the easiest title that I've played, to boot. If you're curious about the Myst series and want to get your feet wet without plunging into the deep end, this is a good place to start. It wasn't produced by the Miller brothers. It was produced by Presto Studios and published by Ubi Soft. They did a decent job, but even without knowing this background information, you can get the sense that it's not crafted by the same hands. You can see it just by looking at my notes for this game. I have three pages in my notebook of symbols, mathematics, and markings. My Riven notes are mostly text with the occasional cryptological analysis and map cross-referencing. The depth of research one has to put into Riven is just much deeper.