from uru: path of the shell. this was one of the most memorable ages any of the myst games i’ve played. it moves from past, present, to future timelines as it’s played through.
the past is an island world with a typical weird myst radar in the middle of it. this does something central to the level but i’ve already beaten it at this point. you can swim into the water but there’s strong currents to it, and in the distance there’s riven-like villages rising up out of the water.
the present is a blighted world where the water is gone and the villages have been destroyed. there’s dark clouds, lightning, and at the beginning there’s crystals all over the surface.
in the future, everything is gone and it’s left hovering in space.
reaching the end of one timeline will take you to the beginning of another. they loop endlessly until you figure out the secret of the level. the gist of it is that it gets more complicated and there ends up being more ways to travel in, around, and between the spaces of the timeline.
how the level is ultimately structured ends up being on a common symbol in the game’s world. it’s more fun to remember than to play, the trial and error can drag a lot on parts of it. anyway it rules
they’re good. they’re a lot of elementary in purgatory worlds, i mean i enjoyed them for that. i have a notebook with a bunch of little line maps and notes on it, still. ahnonay is exceptional there’s not much else like it in the series.
ah, i did not. i had the cyan worlds steam pack from years ago, so i played through all of those earlier this year. i don’t have the ubisoft ones, i’ve never played them, nor obduction.
yeahhh uru was a slow burn for me, but it ended up being probably my favorite in the series. garrison, kadish tolesa, eder kemo, to d’ni and etc could all have their own threads
i’ve only played offline, i played it like any other myst game. it’s long with the expansions, but i enjoyed it as much as myst or riven. my one caveat would be to look up where the journey cloths are in the starting area, it starts slow and i ended up stuck in the desert for too long.
i don’t know what the online really does because it didn’t seem to interact with the base game in any way. it was originally released with just the singleplayer, and there’s no puzzles that require other people or anything like that. in one of the expansions i guess there were supposed to be other people in the ruins, but it seemed like being the only one left would have added to the experience if anything. the online seems to be running again here https://mystonline.com/en/, but i’ve never tried it.
It is awesome online but sort of ahead of its time. The entire singleplayer game can be played co-op, which is its own fun experience. The early online potion was cool in its novelty but sort of dumb in practice. There is a central hub where everyone can hang out, but also each group of however many people (like 20 or 30 or something) is assigned a “neighborhood” private to them. For a long time there were just dumb little scavenger hunts to do in the hub area which is one reason why the online withered and died. Eventually they released some co-op specific puzzle ages, which sound amazing, but I was out of the game before those were released and I had a chance to try them out.
wow, i did not that know about the co-op, that would have been cool. i thought it was just those great zero hunts and w/e. if there’s online only ages i might check those out
Best part of online was the entire website and forums structured around role play and players divided between archaeologists and reconstructionists. What a lovely community and it allowed the game managers to run the entire thing like an active-managed ARG when they were waiting for level content.
