Recently my youngest daughter and I finished the video game Myst IV: Revelation. One more Myst title remains (End of Ages), and we will have finished the entire Myst cycle. We just began this last title, but have stalled somewhat, and I wonder if we will ever finish our five-volume journey. We both enjoy playing games and especially enjoyed the first three in the Myst series. The fault, I’m afraid, lies with the games themselves, and I worry already that the final one has “jumped the shark”.

The original Myst, the one I first played, the one that spawned a host of copycats, was merely a color Hypercard stack. The plot and the puzzles were designed around the limitations of the medium, but were compelling and accessible. Later, Cyan released a Myst Masterpiece Edition that left the game play the same but cranked up the color and sound depth. The final iteration was something called realMyst, using a 3-D game engine to render the existing models, adding dynamically changing backgrounds and smooth motion. I played each of them, and it was wonderful to experience and compare each “retelling”.

realMyst is the game that I started playing with my daughter. I’d let her drive the mouse and I would ride shotgun, helping her solve puzzles by asking the right questions when she got stuck. We loved it, and she was excited to find out that there were sequels—four of them, in fact.

Next was Riven, which was done using the original approach: statically rendered scenes with occasional video overlays. One of the virtues of this approach is that the authors, like magicians, can control the presentation and attention of the player so that one tends not to notice where it breaks down. In realMyst, the player’s power to approach and gaze upon any feature of the virtual world means that one can also see where the texture mapping breaks down into a smear, or a nominally circular wheel reveals itself as the polygon it truly is. My daughter loved Riven, and in fact it remains her favorite of the series. In terms of the craftsmanship of the whole package—story, pacing, atmosphere, and puzzles—I’m inclined to agree.

With Myst III: Exile, the original Miller brothers handed over the creative reins to Ubisoft, and it begins to show. This version used Quicktime VR to allow smooth “looking” in every direction, but movement was still quantized as in Riven. The art direction and scene quality was excellent, but there’s a change in the storytelling. There’s an attempt to drive the action cinematically in places, to create the kind of tension that exists in an action movie. The effect on the game is that it suddenly “grabs the wheel” for what feels like a long time, or else the action stalls oddly, the dramatic music looping, waiting for you to make an choice. Finally, each level in the game finishes with a puzzle so difficult that I was forced to reach for the hint book each time.

My daughter and I moved through these first three titles eagerly, and started on the fourth, Revelation. Done in the same style as Exile, the production values were higher than ever. But the attempt to expand the mythology of Myst led to some thematically disjoint elements. As my daughter put it, “Myst is supposed to be about levers and trapdoors and secret codes, not spirit guides and ghosts and dream worlds.” Right on.

Worse, the puzzles became so inscrutable, so dense and unguessable, that we gave up trying to “experience” it and finally just slogged through with the hint book open all the time, finishing more out of a sense of duty than adventure. By the time we got to the final scene it was so anticlimactic that she doesn’t even remember it well.

So it was with some trepidation that we installed and fired up End of Ages. With this title, Ubisoft returned to the 3-D game engine of realMyst, and it showed, badly. Game engines produce images that look like mock-ups compared to what off-line rendering can deliver. As we started to navigate, we were dismayed to find the computer locking up repeatedly. When video cards are overwhelmed, they don’t error out nicely. Finally, after turning down the rendering quality further so that we could proceed, we made it through the next stage and met our first revolting animated characters.

“These…are…Sims,” said my daughter, horrified. It was true. In realMyst, where you never encounter another living soul, this gruesome shortcoming was never an issue. In Riven, Exile, and Revelation, all characters were played by real human actors and composited into the virtual backgrounds. But in End of Ages, these once-human characters are now zombified marionettes with video faces uncannily spray-painted onto their polygonal visages.

My daughter has not asked to play the game since. The icon languishes on my desktop. I don’t know when we’ll play again.

Maybe, in these kinds of games, the setting is all that matters, and characters are an unwelcome distraction. They aren’t movies. I have a suspicion that as computer simulation keeps improving, one of the benchmarks they return to will be a rendering of Myst, the original one, timeless and unpeopled. If so, I look forward to the day when my daughter and I can return to the latest incarnation of Myst Island, and walk along its beach, climb its trees, and race through its secret passages.