The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst

249 points72 commentsa day ago
anon84873628

For those, like me, wondering how to play it today. It seems the original studio has released a modernized version available on many platforms (including VR):

https://cyan.com/games/myst/

I missed out on Myst in its heyday, but have always wanted to check it out after hearing so many great things.

Curious if any superfans think it would be better experienced as the original in an emulator or similar.

show comments
deater

when making the Apple II version of Myst I more or less generated graphs like this by hand based on playing through the game (in order to hook up the data structures for the custom 6502-assembly language engine) I wonder if it would have been easier to automate it like this.

show comments
hoten

I made a similar thing but for Silent Hill 2: https://connorjclark.github.io/sh2-graph/

It's much more linear.

source: https://github.com/connorjclark/sh2-graph

gwbas1c

> owing to the relative freedom it affords players

That's really not "true". The 3D games at the time let you go anywhere, view anything. Myst only let you move to predefined locations.

The difference is that you didn't have enemies trying to kill you all the time, or extremely difficult bosses to defeat in order to advance to other levels. Instead, Myst let you generally explore most of the game as you wished. You could explore quite far without technically "advancing" because you could ignore the puzzles. This made the game quite fun if all you wanted to do was look around.

It's kind of similar to the actual freedom in Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom, where you don't need to advance in the game to explore the world.

show comments
gcanyon

The second article: https://glthr.com/myst-graph-2

guerrilla

Would even better if it was an interactive graph (with zoom) using the actual scene images somehow.

show comments
doublerabbit

Also going to throw this interesting article where someone debugged and eliminated the loading times of Myst 4.

https://medium.com/@tomysshadow/fixing-the-loading-in-myst-i...

NBJack

Is the graph file available as raw data? This looks like fun.

show comments
immibis

The last sentence in the Directions section is reversed. in Part 2, Visual Indicators, the icons are not as described and are also reversed.

show comments
alex1138

Please, engineers, invent actual linking books that work

tantalor

[flagged]

show comments