Thank god for guides.
I managed to get through Spire and powered through Serenia. Myst IV’s final world is a lot more straightforward and is comparatively simple despite so many characters running around the place. You have to get either a fire-, water-, or plant-aspected spirit guide to aid you in traversing the dreamscape which felt like a Luc Besson adaptation of the Pokémon starter choice. Serenia has a mirror world in a non-material dreamscape called (shockingly enough) Dream. The Dream dream sequence plays over a licensed track from Peter Gabriel which came as I was getting frustrated with the puzzles again. It had an oddly soothing effect on me as dated and strange as it is for the tone of a Myst game.
I get to the very final puzzle and… the run is dead. This final section has a lot of cutscene triggers that are required for progress, and I must’ve missed one because the final Archimedes principle water puzzle has not opened the door it should open. I reset the water flow, I went everywhere, the game is just hard locked. Time to watch the end on Youtube.
Well, Sirrus the dream-brainflea tries to bodyhop into Yeesha. You kill him and Achenar helps by sacrificing himself in the process. It is an odd feeling for the series to end with Achenar’s redemption (sort of, he helped put Yeesha in a nearly fatal position) and Sirrus as irredeemably evil. It feels like Achenar is given a primal revelation and respect for life through hunting in his prison world but if your defining character trait is you are intelligent like Sirrus then you are surely a mad scientist and want only to break out of prison to enact world conquest.
It at least throws ambiguity on Atrus’ reformation through imprisonment. It sort of worked but also completely failed. To such an extent his young daughter was nearly killed. Maybe don’t keep the linking books to prison worlds in the house? Maybe have several ages establish a firebreak between you and the prisons? Anyway, Atrus shows up to say to the player for a fourth time how bad he feels about how everything went. His young daughter now seriously traumatised and both his sons dead.
I’m not sure whether to continue with Myst/Uru. I hear good things about Uru but I’d miss the lack of FMV. It seems like the series had a bit of a Kingdom Hearts moment spreading itself across too much media that you have to hoover it all up to be able to understand a not so satisfying resolution to it all. I’ll set it aside for now and maybe pick up where I left off while dusting the [Steam] shelves one day.