![]() You enter the rocket ship, solve the puzzle, click the image of another world, the screen fades out to black, and when the screen fades in again you’re in an identical looking rocket ship on another planet. The rocket ship on Myst Island that takes you to Selenitic Age sort of inverts this trope. I’ve seen this a bunch of times in film and video games and even picture books/comic books (I just can’t seem to think of other examples). The idea is that you traveled there, but that sequence just wasn’t animated. You pay the siltstrider rider for passage, screen fades out to black, and when the screen fades in again you, the rider, and the siltstrider are in a different city in Morrowind. I’m having trouble coming up with a real good example, but a decent example is the Siltstriders in Morrowind. Although you don’t see it, the implication is that your character rode that vehicle to the destination you’re currently at. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s when the character starts next to a vehicle or doorway or something, then we jump cut to that same character and vehicle, but in a new location. There’s a trope in film and video games that is subverted by the spaceship that takes you to Selenitic Age. I don’t know if this was deliberate, but it certainly is fun. The books in Myst literally transport you to other worlds. However, in Myst this idea is made literal. It was something like, “Books can transport you to another world,” or, “You can travel to other worlds with a good book.” When I was growing up I remember something teachers and adults would say about books to get us interested in reading. In that age you see a cratered, dead landscape (somewhat like the moon), but filled with strange rock formation, volcanic fissures, and patches of Earth-like forests (which are the type of things that could appear in an old school sci-fi version of the moon, such as Jules Verne’s “First Men In The Moon”). There’s a Jule Verne style rocket ship that takes you to Selenitic Age (Selene being the goddess of the moon). There’s also interesting things I don’t know how to classify. It just feels very much like a digital art gallery at that point like a digital statue the artist wants you to inspect. The developer who designed it must have been proud of what he made to actually devote all those screens to the CD memory. ![]() I had played Myst for like six or seven years before I realized you can actually walk around this ship and look at it from all angles. Almost like an art gallery.Ī good example of that is the orange ship at the end of Selenitic Age. There’s the fact that sometimes things are presented in the world as though the developers just wanted to show off something cool they made. There’s the less obvious ones like boxes of matches and sheets of metal with raised patterns like you might see in a warehouse in the real world. There’s the obvious ones like Greek architecture next to sci-fi rocketships and log cabins. Iconic imagery unique to the game is created and then repeated throughout its “levels” to tie the different worlds together.Ī lot of the strangeness and surrealness is underscored through mundane, familiar, or anachronistic objects. There’s some general artistic choices going on in Myst that I like. I haven’t seen them talked about though, and I feel like talking about them, so I will. I feel like these things must have been discussed at some point by someone, because they’re somewhat obvious. I wanted to talk about how it uses artistic devices in a way that I feel were ahead of its time, making Myst truly one of the first, if not the first, art games. I wanted to talk about the interesting artistic things that Myst does. I’m not going to talk about why although I think Riven is the superior of the two games, why Myst might still be my favorite of the two. I’m not going to talk about why I love Myst.
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