MYST IV REVELATION YEESHA ZIP

MYST IV REVELATION YEESHA ZIP

Revelation’s zip mode does mitigate the problem, since it lets you instantly teleport to any important location in an age, but it’s simply not enough. Exploration should be as hassle-free as possible so you can spend time thinking about the bigger picture – the puzzles.

Myst is supposed to be known for its simple interface. Exile’s movement was a bit slow too, but Revelation’s is much worse. It might be the 360° spheres or the 3D cursor, but moving around in Revelation is long and tedious. In Riven, you could move as fast as your hand could point at the next hotspot. Even worse: transitions between stills are slooow.

To top it off, that 3D hand just looks ugly. It sounds minor, but it’s tiresome in the long run. This is a switch you can do at any time by pressing the right mouse button, but the game decides to do this by itself any time you drag an object. The problem with that is that doing such an action changes the camera from being centered on the cursor to only panning when the cursor reaches the edges of the screen. You also need to open doors and operate levers by holding the left mouse button and dragging the object. One problem is that the hand reverts too slowly to its original position, giving you the impression that there are hotspots everywhere if you move the cursor briskly across the screen. This new cursor reacts when in front of a hotspot, telling you what can be examined and what locations you can travel to. While Revelation has kept the spherical stills from Exile, it has replaced the hyper-simple pixellated hand cursor for a fancy, animated 3D one. The upside to all this acting is that every journal can also be read to you by its author, book on tape style. The “best” is the girl that has a hard time wrestling with the idea that she could take spare parts from one machine to fix another machine of the same type. Anyway, nothing is as bad as all the priestesses that show up later in the game, all of them pointless and annoying. The little girl portraying her is adorable, but she does have a French-Canadian accent, which some may find annoying. Yeesha has grown up from the baby in Exile and is now a young girl. Isn’t he supposed to be the impulsive, aggressive brother? He does pick up the slack near the end, though. While Sirrus is mostly okay, despite being guilty of chewing the scenery once in a while, Achenar sounds really unconvincing and unconvinced. Sirrus and Achenar are no longer played by Rand and Robyn Miller, but by completely different people.

There’s a bit more live-action this time around, it’s just too bad the acting is not that great. At least Revelation lets you choose your resolution up to 1024×768. However, every area afterwards seems a bit less impressive, to the point where there are moments where it’s hard to be sure if there was step up from the third game in terms of graphics. The first area, Atrus’ home in Tohmana (the same place where Exile begins), is also very well done. Sadly, after those first few shots, the graphics never reach that same level again. The music hits the right notes as Yeesha tells you a little bit about her family and gives you the chance to take a picture of their very photogenic house. The first moments of the game are absolutely gorgeous – a classic Myst ride on a monorail, this time through a sunny canyon over a river. They still kept Jack Wall’s over-the-top orchestral music, though, as he returns to work on Revelation as well. That’s probably because they are important characters this time around, or maybe they noticed the drawings were a little weird in Exile. Interestingly enough, the drawings of his two sons on the desk are now actual photo portraits. The opening video once again shows Atrus pondering about the past on his writing table. You are introduced to their kid sister Yeesha at the beginning of the game, but she gets kidnapped very early on, so you’ll have to save her as well. (Forced exile and family troubles are really recurrent themes here, aren’t they?) You can probably guess that your task is to explore these prison ages and see what happened to the two brothers. The game thus takes place 20 years after the first Myst.

Not only are their books no longer destroyed, but they are also full-fledged ages without an exit door, instead of one-man prisons. The storyline undergoes a retconning in the fourth game, as Atrus’ two sons, Sirrus and Achenar, are no longer lost forever after their prison books were burned in the original Myst. The fourth installment of the Myst franchise was once again handed out to a third party studio, this time to Ubisoft Montréal.

Myst iv revelation yeesha