Myst - Sega Saturn

ESRB Rating: KA (Kids to Adults), E (Everyone)
Release Date: 1995-09-01
Moby Score (1-10): 7
Player Score (1-5): 3.4
Genre(s): Adventure

Myst is a single-player first-person point-and-click adventure game.

The player controls an unnamed traveler who discovers an unusual book titled Myst. The book contains a detailed description of an island, and touching its final page transports the traveler into the place described within it. With no immediate explanation and no visible way home, the player begins on Myst Island and must explore its buildings, machines, and hidden chambers to understand where they are and what happened there.

Myst Island serves as the central hub of the game. The island appears almost deserted, but traces of its former inhabitants remain in journals, mechanical devices, messages, and linking books. In the library, the player encounters red and blue books containing fragmented video messages from Sirrus and Achenar, two trapped brothers who each ask for help. Their messages are incomplete at first, and the player must recover missing pages from other Ages to learn more about them and decide how to proceed.

The game is presented from a first-person viewpoint using a simple cursor interface. The player moves between fixed viewpoints by clicking paths, doors, stairs, ladders, and other visible destinations. Interaction is handled by clicking or dragging objects in the environment, such as switches, levers, wheels, buttons, drawers, pages, doors, and control panels. There are no enemies, combat sequences, health meters, or conventional death states. Progress depends on observation, note-taking, and understanding how the island’s mechanisms connect to one another.

Puzzles are based largely on logic, spatial reasoning, sound, symbols, numbers, and environmental clues. Rather than collecting a large inventory of objects and using them on other objects, the player studies journals, diagrams, map markers, sounds, machinery, and visual patterns to determine how devices work. Many puzzles require information found in one location to be applied elsewhere, such as matching constellations, tuning sounds, setting mechanical controls, restoring power, or interpreting notes left behind by the island’s inhabitants.

As the player solves major puzzles on Myst Island, additional linking books become accessible. These books transport the player to other Ages, self-contained worlds with their own locations, devices, and puzzle chains. The main Ages include the Mechanical Age, Stoneship Age, Channelwood Age, and Selenitic Age. Each Age contains red and blue pages that can be returned to the corresponding books in the Myst library. Each Age also contains its own route back to Myst Island, usually locked behind another puzzle or sequence of mechanisms.

Different releases of Myst preserve the same central structure of solitary exploration, linking books, and puzzle-solving, although interface and presentation details may vary between platforms. The original version is built around fixed screens and point-and-click navigation, while other editions and remakes may alter movement or visual presentation. In all forms, the core game remains focused on exploring an uninhabited island, deciphering its Ages, and resolving the mystery behind the trapped figures in the library.

*** Data by MobyGames.com ***

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