Play Mysty for Me

This game, produced by H +a,
was obviously meant to ride in the wake of the first-person graphic adventure
success created by the release of Myst. It did, however, appear to die
a quick death, slipping into obscurity right after release. It does have some
merit, although there are many design weaknesses that limit the gamer’s full enjoyment
of these, which fully explains its lack of longevity in the big book of adventure
games recorded somewhere in that big gamers sky. It is not unpleasant to play,
and it is a good lesson on what to include and what not to leave out when creating
a graphic adventure title.

The game begins with a mission briefing that
bears a similarity to Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time. This is the
only area of the game where there is the slightest voice acting, and this bit
definitely has the “talking in a tomato soup can” syndrome. You are
the fourth and final agent sent out to halt an unleashed computer virus named
Gord@k, which has begun to spread out on its own, creating its own world that
you must journey into to vanquish it. This is actually a clever premise and allows
some fun surreal graphics and landscapes.

The game itself uses Quicktime
VR technology, which I have always enjoyed, as I like the idea of the 360-degree
panning to explore the environment and look for hotspots, and this give the landscape,
which is stylishly designed, an interesting immersiveness. You start by finding
yourself in a garden, with trees cut into spirals and circles. The design is reminiscent
of Chaos or The Castle, or the early silent film The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari mixed with Dr. Seuss, which was one of my favorite things
about the game. The gameplay itself is great, the design is weird, my kind of
stuff.

The music is lilting and pleasurable, and despite looping, it does
not get redundant or tiring. There were points when the music cut out a bit, but
this was a minor complaint. The sound effects are extremely well-done, and there
are no points to the game where the player notices the omission of a sound that
should be naturally present, which is always something I am piqued about when
left out. In fact, this game has a feature that I have not seen elsewhere, which
I was actually delighted by and found myself laughing out loud over. When moving
along, down a path clicked on, the game makes the player run hard, with heavy
footfalls, and heavy panting as though it’s a bit of a strain for the armchair
commando you are. You get the feeling there’s someone back there whipping you
to go faster, and there’s the sensation that the designer isn’t interested in
making a meal out of getting to the next locale like so many other games, but
with the sound effects making it humorous, which I found very pleasurable. So
I jogged through the whole game panting like a madman.

There is actually
a nice mix of puzzles here–most are inventory-based, and there are three straight
puzzles that are well-designed, difficult but not unsolvable. Inventory is nicely
organized. Items are listed by name; when an item is scrolled to and selected,
it appears in the lower left of the screen. To use it, you simply click on a hot
spot, and if you are correct, you are rewarded with a small animation of it working.
No clicking and dragging, and I thought this was a much cleaner, smoother way
to accomplish interaction with inventory items. One problem is that there are
key inventory items collected right at the beginning that are a necessity, and
there are no hotspots for them. You must hold down the spacebar and click to get
them, and this is not covered in the game booklet but only in the fine print in
the documentation on the disk, so could easily be missed by the novice, making
the game a quick dead end for the newbie. The three straight puzzles actually
give the player the puzzle objective and directions in the lower right corner
of the interface, which I thought was a nice touch.

There is a maze. My
son, the shooter and strategy fan, had come in to watch a bit and cheer Mom on.
When I hit the maze, he tried to run out of the room. Apparently, there are no
types of gamers fond of mazes. The maze, however, is one of the best I’ve experienced.
It is small enough that you can just wander around in it and not get lost, it’s
easy to get back out, plus there are two hot spots where using an inventory magnifier
gives you a map, a great design feature.

There are unfortunately a large
number of serious design flaws. There is only one saved game slot. Want to keep
an extra saved game? Sure! Just start the game over from the beginning, buddy.
What were they thinking? This is particularly putrid at the very end, where you
are given the very first timed puzzle of the whole game, inexplicably, and instructions
you have no time to read, and it is designed so that if you fail the game and
Gord@k wins, it dumps your saved game and you have to start over from the beginning.
Almost an unbelievably bad design choice, just about the worst I’ve ever seen.
The only good thing about it at all is that the save feature is extremely easy
to use, and does not push you out of the environment to save. Because this feature
is built this way, it seems the game would be much more frustrating to a beginner,
someone who would not know what to look for and do, who would have to re-explore
or retrace steps.

It also dumped out on me after the lengthy mission briefing,
so I had to sit through that again after allocating more memory. There are tokens
to be used at the beginning, and if you use them incorrectly, the game unbelievably
dead ends and you have to start over. (Luckily, if this does occur, it’s near
the beginning of the game.) Volume control in the game wouldn’t work properly
and had to be run manually. Also, a zooming interface was buggy–it would zoom
in and not unzoom, which made it useless. I got a script error at one point that
made the game quit and erase my saved game. I tried it twice to check and both
times had the same response, but it only occurred when the spacebar was held and
the mouse clicked on that particular spot, so if that was not done, the game ran
fine. But where were the beta testers? This was a big and easy bug to find! Also,
any time you restart you must sit through the whole soup can mission briefing
again.

The final score has to be lowered considerably just because of the
overwhelming design flaws. One wonders if the designer ever played a graphic adventure
title herself because there are so many glaring omissions in the interface, etc.
I can recommend playing this only because it’s a very inexpensive diversion, and
if you’re experienced enough, you can work around the design flaws and still get
quite a bit of enjoyment from it.

Final Grade:
Novice gamer: C-

Intermediate gamer: C+
Expert gamer: B-

System
Requirements:

Mac:
System
7.5
Minimum Quadra, Power PC preferred
16 MB RAM
256 colors (thousands
preferred)
2X ROM drive

PC:
Win 3.1,
DOS 5.0
Pentium
16 MB RAM
256 colors (thousands preferred)
2X
ROM drive
8-bit SoundBlaster or compatible sound card