Myst - Reception

Reception

Myst was commercially successful on release. Along with The 7th Guest, it was widely regarded as a killer application that accelerated the sales of CD-ROM drives. The game's success also led to a number of games which sought to copy Myst's success, referred to as "Myst clones". Myst was the bestselling PC game throughout the 1990s, until The Sims exceeded its sales in 2002. The PC version of Myst holds an average score of 90% at GameRankings based on six reviews, although the subsequent remakes of the game and the console ports have generally received lower average scores. Myst's success baffled some who wondered how a game some saw as "little more than 'an interactive slide show'" turned out to be a hit.

Myst was generally praised by critics. Wired and The New York Times suggested that Myst was evidence that video games could in fact evolve into an art form. Entertainment Weekly reported that some players considered Myst's "virtual morality" a religious experience. Aarhus University professor Søren Pold pointed to Myst as an excellent example of how stories can be told using objects rather than people. Laura Evenson, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, pointed to adult-oriented games like Myst as evidence the video game industry was emerging from its "adolescent" phase.

GameSpot's Jeff Sengstack wrote that "Myst is an immersive experience that draws you in and won't let you go." Writing about Myst's reception, Greg M. Smith noted that Myst had become a hit and was regarded as incredibly immersive despite most closely resembling "the hoary technology of the slideshow (with accompanying music and effects)". Smith concluded that "Myst's primary brilliance lies in the way it provides narrative justification for the very things that are most annoying" about the technological constraints imposed on the game; for instance, Macworld praised Myst's designers for overcoming the occasionally debilitating slowness of CD drives to deliver a consistent experience throughout the game. The publication went on to declare Myst the best game of 1994, stating that Myst removed the "most annoying parts of adventure games — vocabularies that don't understand, people you can't talk to, wrong moves that get you killed and make you start over. You try to unravel the enigma of the island by exploring the island, but there's no time pressure to distract you, no arbitrary punishments put in your way".

Some aspects of the game still received criticism. Several publications did not agree with the positive reception of the story; Jeremy Parrish of 1UP.com noted that while Myst's lack of interaction and continual plot suited the game, it helped usher in the death of the adventure game genre. Edge stated the main flaw with the game was that the game engine was nowhere near as sophisticated as the graphics. Heidi Fournier of Adventure Gamers noted a few critics complained about the difficulty and lack of context of the puzzles, while others believed these elements added to the gameplay. Similarly, critics were split on whether the lack of a plot the player could actually change was a good or bad element. In a 2000 retrospective review, IGN declared that Myst had not aged well and that playing it "was like watching hit TV shows from the 70s. 'People watched that?,' you wonder in horror."