Myst
May 25,2008 - The Nintendo DS has been a fountain of youth for point-and-click adventure games. Titles such as Ace Attorney and Hotel Dusk: Room 215 have been major hits with hardcore gamers while retaining a simplistic old-school feel. With that in mind, Hoplite Research with the help of Empire Interactive has decided to port the wildly popular Myst to the DS, with improved graphics, sound, and some extra footage. Unfortunately, it should’ve stayed on the Mac where it belongs.

For those unfamiliar about what Myst actually is, it’s a point-and-click game that really defined the genre. The game is about a guy who became immersed with book of the same name, and he soon ends up on the island of Myst, where everything in the book now lies on the island. As you progress through the game, you gain more of an idea of what’s going on and what happened to the main character. The game’s difficulty revolves around the player’s ability to discover pieces of the environments that are out of the ordinary, and when things sound peculiar in certain places. From there, you continue to investigate and explore the island, finding out that things really aren’t as simple as they seem.

On the Mac, it was simple because your cursor indicated which parts of the screen were interactive. On the DS, pointing at any place causes you to take a closer look at something, and eventually, if you keep on pointing, you progress further and further, causing a mess of confusion for the player. This could’ve been easily fixed by allowing the player to use the buttons to backtrack, instead the buttons are unusable and the only way to backtrack is to turn at a 180-degree angle, and even then everything looks totally different.

The developers have claimed to “improve” the graphics, but given the resolution of the DS’s screens, that doesn’t really matter. Everything obviously looks cleaner on a small screen, but once you start zooming in, you really get to see the choppiness. The game is essentially a bunch of backgrounds and images you’d see in a chapter book, and while they look nice, it doesn’t say much about the game’s visual style as none of the backdrops are interactive at all.

The sound is a little better, but considering a lot of the progress players make in the game is through listening for peculiar sounds, the game does a horrible job at allowing the players to differentiate. There isn’t all that much music in the game, there probably isn’t any—and all you really hear is the ocean crashing into island. Even with headphones, Myst isn’t worth listening to.

On the Macintosh, Myst was a love-hit-or-hate-it kind of game. It is a masterpiece to those who loved it. On the DS, it is a bland and nearly unplayable “game” that you’ll probably hate so much that you’d forget what love was. Even if you get used to the controls, there’s no guarantee you’ll have the desire to finish it unless you’re a dedicated Myst fan, but the DS version of Myst is so horribly made that even Myst fans will wonder why the hell they bought this game.

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