MYST (WMR) - The Review by a Myself
1MYST 3.5D snuts
MYST is the third 3D Remake of the first Myst game. Aka, the revolutionary point-and-click adventure title from 1993. Which, along with DOOM, can be seen as one the killer apps of the early PC market. It's quite legendary. It even has a PSP version.
In this latest remake. The entire experience was re-imagined as a VR title. And, honestly, I could not imagine a better candidate for a VR remake. Myst was always about exploring strange worlds, taking in their scenery and performing up-close puzzle solving. All of which feels perfectly at home in VR. If anything, it makes me wish for a VR port of something like The Witness.
The game can also be played as a desktop or console experience. But, it doesn't hold up quite as well that way, due to a variety of VR motivated changes. Like, for example. In the previous versions, you'd open doors by simply clicking on them. But, you often can't do that in this remake.
Instead, you need to open them using buttons or by clicking on their door handle. That's the kind of interactions that work well in VR, but demand far too much precision with a regular crosshair. With a mouse, it's not too bad. But, if you're playing it on consoles, it makes the whole experience absolutely miserable.
A big positive, tho, is the visuals and performance. Despite my PC just barely reaching the reccomended system requirements (which don't necessarily factor in VR, to begin with). I was able to get quite a relatively bieutiful and smooth experience out of it. There were definitely some framerate drops. But, as someone with good VR legs. I can say it never got dizzying.
And, since the game uses the Unreal Engine 4, I was able to drop the resolution down to 80% without sacrificing much in therms of image quality. Thanks to the engine's quite exemplary temporal anti-aliasing solution.
I made the claim, in my Psychonauts 2 review. that because of it, when reducing the internal resolution, you'd have a hard time telling the difference between 1080p and native 4K. And, that definitely remains true in VR. At its highest settings, it offers, by far, the smoothest image I've ever gotten from a VR game. At least, not without having to use ludicrous levels of supersampling.
On top of that, the game is utterly gorgeous. Everything from the lighting, the texture resolution or the quality of every objects is absolutely stellar. It's not perfect, this texture trough the window feels kind of raw and unfinished. And, in general, as a desktop experience, it might seem relatively quaint. Even with Ray Tracing. Which, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could use, depite not owning an RTX card.
That being said, if you're planning to play it in VR or with Ray Tracing. I would reccomend, at least, an RTX 2060 for optimal results. I could feel my 1070 start to cry a bit.
Even so, I would say that the performance with Ray Tracing on, even at 1080p, was surprisingly playable. Especially compared to what I'd get if I ran Control's Ray Tracing at 1080p. But, the overall look of the game, as much as we can try to spruce it up. Is still too marred in the limitations of 1993 CGI to really blow anyone's mind. The environments can feel a bit small. In VR, they're fine. But as a desktop experience. It's very compact.
I'm glad I waited this long to play MYST for the first time, honestly. Clocking in at 11 hours of playtime, spread across 4 or 5 days. I utterly enjoyed my time with the game. Experiencing it in VR feels so incredibly ideal. How am I suppposed to enjoy RIVEN, now? When I know that, given a few years, it could play like this. I would honeslty buy a VR Remake of RIVEN, day one.
I give MYST, 5 Sam Lakes and 3 Hideo Kojimas out of %.
By the way, here's a piece of advice.
If you wanna get into VR. Get yourself 6 quality AA batteries. Why 6? Because, you'll want to keep them in rotation. When they go dry, just take one battery from each controllers and replace them with the ones in the charger. Because, otherwise, you'll be eating trough the fucking things like candy.