Myst URU: Complete Chronicles

This game was bad. In fact, it was exactly the worst amount of bad — bad mixed in with just enough good that I couldn’t just give up on it. Here’s what they did. They started with a classic Myst style, then carefully excised two of the things that made Myst great.

The first thing they excised was the interface. URU takes the well-loved Myst-style interface and replaces it with a 3-D world that you explore via a customizable avatar. Myst was far better as plain old Myst than as a bastard hybridization of Myst and Tomb Raider.

The second thing they excised was the puzzles. No, I’m not kidding. URU is Myst with no puzzles. Instead of solving puzzles, you just explore the Ages. You explore every inch of the Ages, because there are cleverly concealed swatches of cloth, and you must tag all of them before you can clear the level. Myst was far better as plain old Myst than as a bastard hybridization of Myst and Banjo-Kazooie.

That said, I haven’t been quite fair to URU. There are actually a few puzzles. There are some pretty cool ones in Kadish Tolesa, and the third third of the game, Path of the Shell, is fairly puzzleful. I can’t say that I agree with the game mechanic of making the player wait 15 real time minutes to solve a puzzle, but at least there were puzzles.

And of course, it’s beautiful. The D’ni ages are all kind of grey and brown buildings, but the other ages are very pretty, and the concept behind Ahnonay was especially cool. It’s too bad there weren’t really quite enough clues for the game to be self-contained. And no coherent ending — the game was a work in progress.

If, after reading this, you still want to play Myst URU, here are my suggestions for how to play it and actually make it an enjoyable experience. I’ll list them in order of importance.

1. Go in order. Play Ages Beyond Myst first (the leftmost clump of books, the ones inside the Relto sky island pedestals), then after you finish that, play To D’Ni (the three books with the A-frame symbol on them), then after you finish that, play Path of the Shell (the best of the three). That’s the one with the five books with the shell sign on them. I got overwhelmed because I hopped back and forth between what are largely three separate games.
2. When you get to the Egg Room with the five Linking Stones, go to the back-left Linking Stone first. That will save you a ton of wasted exploration and annoyance.
3. Use UHS or a walkthrough to find all the journey cloths and Great Zero Markers. It just isn’t fun to wander around the level over and over again looking for the random doodad you missed the first time around.
4. Make liberal use of UHS. There are a lot of puzzles that, in my opinion, don’t give enough clues to be figured out in a self-contained way. Remember now, I’ve played through all the Myst games and I didn’t need very many hints. But in URU, I needed quite a few hints just to keep myself from screaming in frustration.

Enjoy! Or not! Your choice. (:

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