User Rating: 3 | Myst (1995) PC
Myst is the game that killed the adventure genre, and for that, I can never forgive it. In the early days of Windows and CD-ROM, a homebrew game was launched that altered the face of gaming for good. Myst wowed people with incredibly detailed graphics, and took adventuring into the first-person. The game sold millions, and sold millions of CD-ROM drives, just like 7th Guest before it. Myst became the most successful computer game of all time. Pretty soon, everyone was playing adventures, and Myst clones cropped up in batches each week. And that was the end of adventure gaming. Pretty soon, adventure games became not concerned with characters or with interaction, but with exploration of pretty landscapes. Graphically, Myst was a huge leap forward. People wondering if their SVGA cards were ever going to be good for anything more than Links golf games were treated with the finest graphics ever seen on the screen at the time. Myst proved that it was possible to create photorealistic renderings of distant worlds. In this respect, Myst was a triumph. But, what Myst had in technical wonder, it lacked in gameplay. Essentially, Myst was a slideshow, with little narrative, and very little interaction with anything besides machines and levers. Instead of offering story or interaction, the point was that you were to figure out what to do in this silent world by trial-and-error. People saw this as a strong point, but when you get down to it, it basically freed designers from having to craft a narrative. But wait, you say, Myst had a story. True, but it came in the form of what would become one of the most annoying features of modern adventures: the story was laid out in books. Volumes and volumes of text... Why create characters or dialogue, when you can hammer out all the details in a book? It was a horrible standard that unfortunately was emulated too many times. In the end, Myst was not a great game, but Joe Public didn't seem to know. And so the adventure game was transformed, and Myst-style gameplay became synonymous with adventure. But, once the fascination with graphics eroded, people realized that there wasn't much to modern adventures, and the genre was all but abandoned. I give this low score for two reasons: The first and the most valid is that Myst is a terrible adventure game. Secondly, each category gets a one-point deduction for this game killing the adventure genre.
