yea i hate puzzles in adventure games unless your named flower sun and rain or the silver case but myst makes u feel like a bit of a genius…i think its kinda overrated honestly but its very pretty! i played it as a kid and like me and my sister would spend time figuring shit out in that and jumpstart preschool LOL…i got help with a bunch of the puzzles and it didnt fuck up the vibe
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this is probably the best essay extant on The Witness. Braid isn’t very hard to read but nothing mainstream described its narrative correctly and, good luck with something as paradoxically self-involved & self-critical as this
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Myst is the best adventure game series ever made. Just trascendatly good (with the exception of 3 and 4 which weren’t by Cyan. 4 is still pretty solid though and 3 would be a fine game if it wasn’t Myst).
Everything in Myst is about figuring out the logic of how spaces work, rather than abstracted logic or what joke a designer wants you to work out.
While it’s a bit less prominent in the first game, the series has you working out the culture of fantastical civilizations through their art and architecture.
Cyan is vying with David Lynch for best thing to come out of Spokane Washington in my book.
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tbh i cringe at a few things i wrote in that article now, but i guess that’s how it is. but yeah the critical commentary around things like this game is mostly dire. just either mind-numbing fawning praise or people saying it’s garbage because they hate Jon Blow. so that was the intent of me writing that piece.
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i do think it’s interesting how the witness sort of uses myst as a foil to do its own thing (i haven’t played it personally but i’ve looked at it a fair bit), i don’t necessarily have any problem with the witness but i just really think so, so much is indebted to myst, it is really unbelievable to me, as a person who only saw 80-90% of what the game does just now
the other bit is i thought part of the point, the novelty of the witness was that it was “about” the puzzles. it’s interesting in that this uses the idea of myst as this more lore-driven, story-telling exercise adventure that includes puzzles as a foil for its “purer” puzzling. and thinking about puzzles as a reward for puzzles
but! in the ending to myst, atrus explicitly asks you if you expected some kind of reward, and he remarks that you are free to explore the books in his library lmao, like fucking everything is in this game and it is some seriously hot 1993 shit. i can’t get over how clean this thing is, it’s a real beauty
ETA: this rules Beating Myst by Playing its Soundtrack on a Piano! - YouTube
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see that sounds good! every western adventure game i’ve played i had no idea how anyone beat them without a guide
ok i will add this to the ridiculously long list
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like seriously what the fuck? how do people play any adventure game with puzzles 100x more annoying than like. danganronpa. when i was playing late 90s FMV games i couldnt believe how fucking stupid and frustrating the “gameplay” was, like bro i just want to see christopher walken sashimi his forehead with a trench knife
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it is like… eminently predictable that that shit more or less completely evaporated as a common design trope. i guess some people just grinded like and tried every possible combinations of objects and things to click on because they only owned a handful of games. i know there are some games from the 90’s that are not nearly as bad about this, but those seemed to be more the exception than anything else.
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i really cant ever forgive sierra or lucasarts for this honestly. im sure a bunch of those games are good but in my head it’s all the kings quest 5 town theme and ridiculously convoluted puzzles…i got stuck on the first puzzle in Ripper for an hour because its about reconstructing a coffee cup from a kind of fucked up perspective and it has to be pixel perfect for the game to count it
Myst rules, Witness is padded garbage, 600 puzzles and 400 of them are tutorials, two sets of which commit the most banal sins of puzzle design. And to top it all off, a spec ops the line secret ending calling the player a jackoff for even playing the game.
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Sierra was definitely much worse about this than lucasarts, which for the most part strove to make good puzzles and missed the mark instead of striving to make money on the sierra tipline.
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got to play VF with my GF
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Love 2 learn
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Trying to get through the Control DLC. Disappointed with this Alan Wake one so far. I have no idea why I am doing anything and none of it seems related to Alan Wake in any way. There are sometimes five collectable documents in a single room. And I still think the combat feels bad 
Edit: Finished the Awe DLC and will not be playing the Foundation one. It’s almost frustrating how much I want to like Control but how much I find it totally unsatisfying.
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I don’t rly have any particular interest in playing any of them but the Sierra games r appealing to me as this whole design lineage of these weird hyperspecific sort of cruel objects that expect u to follow or at least comprehend these rly odd and singular thought processes that can weave in and out of being extratextual as they wish.
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i always find the difference between phantamasgoria 1 and 2 really interesting because ones like a cruel piece of shit where a woman gets tortured and raped and sometimes CRAZY DON shows up to tell u that hes scalped an old lady or fucked a puppy or something, and the other is awesome and gay and hilarious with shit like the BDSM club line dancers, the door to john malkovichs head being at your workplace, and your horny, possibly demon co-worker who starts using a nazi doctor accent when she wants to fuck you at your cubicle. oh my god and the waiter who can never finish his receipts!!! FUCK FMV GAMES ARE THE BEST
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i took a deep breath im okay now
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the first game was written and designed by Roberta Williams, who is pretty conservative in many ways and is responsible for a lot of the worst moon logic puzzles in games, and the second was written and designed by Lorelei Shannon, who rules. adventure games from that era as a whole feel like a total mixed bag of either complete bullshit or surprisingly cool and bizarre cultural artifacts.
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Kind of had the same emotions about Control and The Foundation DLC was more interesting than AWE. I also wanted…more Wake.
But you probably shouldn’t bother!
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fun tegiminis fact: i worked at cyan worlds around the time of uru live cuz i grew up down the street.
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