Myst (PS1) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
281A playthrough of Psygnosis's 1996 point-and-click graphic adventure for the Sony PlayStation, Myst.
The bad endings are shown at 3:37:14.
Anyone that knew anything about PCs in the early/mid 1990s is likely to at least have heard of, if not played, Myst. If you had a new PC between 1993-1995, there's a good chance that this was one of the showpiece titles you owned. It's nearly impossible to understate the impact that it had on the public's perception of games at the time: prerendered graphics, FMV clips, and full digital audio had been used in games before, but never like this. The production values were through the roof, and the beautiful presentation drew in everyone. Like the Wii did with console games, Myst was the kind of game that appealed to old ladies, school kids, and accountants alike.
So what makes Myst so enduring? What keeps it relevant beyond its gorgeous (for ’93) visuals? There are a few things. It was one of the first games provide an immersive "world." The animation was limited, but the impressively detailed landscapes and ambient sound went far in showing the potential of the multimedia PCs. It was also fairly accessible: it was controlled entirely with the mouse, and though the puzzles involved some heavy lateral thinking at times, there were always hints and clues that would clearly gesture toward a puzzle’s solution.
The story itself also was far more adult than most games had gone for yet, and probably the game's strongest point. You play as a stranger in the lonely world of Myst. Despite the clear signs that people used to live here, you find yourself alone. And if you hope to ever leave Myst, you need to find out what happened to them.
Things start with the library, where you find the journals of two brothers, Achenar and Sirrus, that are missing several pages each. You can communicate with the brothers through their journals by travelling through portals to other worlds where these pages have been scattered, and only by piecing together all of the tiny, disparate details will you figure out how to save yourself.
I tried to cater how I played the game to the tastes of different types of people that might watch this video. The reading is absolutely critical to getting anywhere, but I didn't want to continually interrupt the flow of the video each time I got to a new world so I read everything at once. This begins at 19:16.
If you would like to skip the reading and the process of getting the worlds' key codes, you can jump to 1:01:24, where I continue on with the game proper.
The constraints of the PS1 (tiny amount of system memory, relatively low resolution, and the lack of a hard drive) apparently made this a pretty hefty challenge to port. Granted, it's not as fast, smooth, nor attractive as the PC game is, but for running on a machine that cost $250 instead of $2500, it performs admirably well. There are some longer than ideal load times between screen transitions, visible artifacts from the heavy JPEG compression, ugly interlacing artifacts, and a few sound glitches, but none of those really get in the way too much. Myst is still a great game on the PS1, even if it is a less refined experience than on PC. It even supported the PlayStation mouse, if you were one of the three people to ever own one!
On a related note, the PS1 version ran in a 16:9 window that had heavy black borders on all four sides. Lower resolution images = smaller file sizes = faster loading, right? To make it look better with YouTube’s 16:9 format, I’ve scaled the image to fit the frame. Nothing is lost nor distorted – the aspect ratio is accurately preserved. The compression artifacts are more noticeable when blown up, but I figured it was a worthwhile trade-off for the larger image.
Hope you enjoy it! It’s a classic!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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