Mr. Eight-Three-One | Myst (Windows 95) Walkthrough @MrEightThreeOne | Uploaded 10 years ago | Updated 2 hours ago
Buy this game on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/63660
Or DRM-free on GOG: http://www.gog.com/game/myst_masterpiece_edition
A little change of pace from what I usually walkthrough. I wanted to make more use out of my AverMedia Game Broadcaster HD, so I decided to make a walkthrough using my good ol' HP laptop. I didn't know what to do though. I have been playing Riven lately, and since it was on my mind, I thought I'd do a walkthrough of Myst. Well, to be fair, there's a bit more backstory to that -- there are practically no walkthroughs of Myst on YouTube, which shocks me quite a bit. It's one of the most classic PC games ever made, and yet I've only found one or two walkthroughs with no commentary. Plus, of the walkthroughs I found, none of them were of the Windows version -- I found one of the Amiga version and one of the Mac version though. This is the original 256-color version, NOT the updated Masterpiece Edition with 24-bit color.

This is usually considered one of the most influential games of its time; it helped popularize the CD-ROM as a storage medium and it had very breathtaking graphics for its time (unfortunately, time hasn't been very kind on them). The game's premise is not exactly given to you when you start -- all you know is that you've fallen into a book and that's it. To spoil everything though (if you want to complain, well, you're the one watching this video), you learn Atrus has written about several "ages" that came to life via linking books. All inhabitants of the ages have disappeared though, and it seems like his sons just may be responsible for all of that.

I attempted to play the game using the standard course of action for solving the puzzles. Truth be told, the ending is there in front of you all along, but you're just not told how to get there until you've visited every age. I attempted to show as much as I could, and also showed each of the four possible endings. I first visited the Mechanical Age, then Channelwood, then Selenitic, and finally Stoneship.

I debated quite a bit whether to leave the game zoomed out or to take out the border; I eventually decided to go for the more nostalgic option since I was already playing this on an old machine. The load times are a bit slow since I played directly from the CD, but hey, that's the sacrifice you have to make. There were also a few glitches, particularly the background sound occasionally cutting out. For the most part it all went well though, and I am fairly satisfied with this walkthrough.

Now a little confession I have to make -- I don't like this game. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm going to get tomatoes pelted at me for this, but let me make this clear -- I like the plot and the ideas behind the game. The execution is what I don't like. I enjoyed solving the puzzles and I did want to know what was going to happen, but the game mechanics felt really unpolished. Movement is a lot more annoying than it needs to be, particularly when you can't tell if you've turned 90 degrees or 180. I also hate how everything looks the same (Channelwood and Selenitic are the worst offenders), which makes the control issue even worse. A few of the puzzles really ticked me off as well; I could go on for a whole rant about how much I hated the tone-matching (which takes pixel-perfect precision to a whole new level) and the mazerunner puzzles (one that is needlessly long and repetitive; it took me seven minutes to do this one in the walkthrough, and that was with minimal mistakes!). It also can't be ignored that it essentially helped cause the death of adventure games thanks to the onslaught of clones that forgot what Myst was trying to be in the first place. Still, I can't fault it for its ambition; I just don't know if it truly deserved to be the best-selling game ever and bundled with absolutely every piece of hardware at the time. I can certainly say I enjoyed it a lot more than Riven though (oh boy, here comes the hate mail).

With that said, enjoy the walkthrough. Hope you don't mind the fuzzy look of analog VGA :P

Myst is (C) Cyan Worlds. Please support these companies by buying their products!

Recorded with the AverMedia Game Broadcaster HD and an HP OmniBook 800CT laptop. Specs:
Intel Pentium 166 MHz
8x CD-ROM drive
48 MB of RAM
Windows 95B
NeoMagic MagicGraph 128ZV (1 MB of VRAM)
Sound Blaster Pro

One last note I want to leave before I finish -- I actually found this game complete in the box at a thrift store with the business cards and everything. The previous owner even had all of his notes written in the journal, and he actually put his phone number in it too! I totally should call that number one of these days...