Cyan Worlds via PolygonSusana Polo is a senior entertainment writer at Polygon, specializing in pop culture and genre fare, with a primary expertise in comic books. Previously, she founded The Mary Sue.In honor of the 31st anniversary of seminal puzzle adventure game Myst, Cyan Worlds has a new Humble Bundle sale, “Enter the Mysterium.” Through Oct. 2, players can pay $20 and pick up 13 games, which run the gamut from Myst’s earliest 1989 predecessor, to its modern progeny, and every mainline Myst game in the franchise, with part of the proceeds going to Active Minds, a nonprofit dedicated to equipping teens and young adults with the tools to advocate for mental health advocacy and suicide prevention.Enter the Mysterium$20$19290% off$20$20 at HumbleOr, you could pick up any of four smaller, cheaper bundles. But in the opinion of me, Polygon’s foremost Myst-pilled weirdo, here are the titles you should make certain to grab, in order of importance.Myst: Pick your poison! The bundle offers Myst: Masterpiece Edition, which attempts to replicate the experience of playing the original 1993 game; realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, the first attempt to render the game in 3D; and Myst (2021), which supports both 2D, 3D, and VR play.Riven: The Sequel to Myst: This is the intricately cut crown jewel of Cyan’s puzzle games, in its original form. If you get really fed up with it I would also recommend their recent 3D remaster, which improves on perfection (but was released way too recently to be included in a discount bundle just yet).Myst IV: Revelation: Pretty much a direct sequel to Myst. Unequivocally the hardest Myst game, but my personal favorite for its story. It’s got an unskippable Peter Gabriel cutscene. Please, please, please play this game.Myst III: Exile: By no means easy, but still the easiest Myst game. The villain is played by Brad Dourif (The Lord of the Rings) and in one of the “bad endings,” he clubs you to death in first person FMV. If that doesn’t entice you I don’t know what will.Obduction: Not in the Myst setting, but if you play the others first, you’ll be able to call all the plot beats of this one. That said, it’s got a frightfully interesting sphere-based puzzle dynamic, an interesting setup, and gorgeous vistas.Firmament: I haven’t played this one yet. “And you call yourself an expert!” I backed the Kickstarter, OK?! I just haven’t had time! I’ll get to it… sometime after Dragon Age: The Veilguard comes out. I hear it’s worth it, though! And if you’re already picking up the rest, well, why not?But what am I, the Myst-pilled weirdo, going to buy? Well, even though I already own the vast majority of the games in this bundle, there’s still something here for me: Spelunx, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, and The Manhole. Two American dollars will net me three of Cyan co-founders Robyn and Rand Miller’s pre-Myst works, dating back to the unfathomable desktop gaming year of 1988, when Cyan released The Manhole on floppy discs available by mail order (the one in this bundle is a 1995 CD-ROM rerelease).Calling these three games “puzzle games” might seem like a stretch compared to Myst and its successors — I’ve poked around the original Manhole on the Internet Archive, and it’s more like an interactive object. But there’s a sense of humor, silliness, and, above all, play in it. Even just after ten minutes in a browser emulation, it was clear to me that I was looking at a couple of game developers fascinated by the potential of the point-and-click mechanic, and playing in that space as expansively and freely as they could. I could already see the lines running from this strange, Alice In Wonderland-themed object, to a couple of adventure games that were going to bust the genre wide open.Head over to the Humble Bundle, and you can make those connections, too.
Related Posts
A new teaser trailer for The Monkey, the latest film from Longlegs director Osgood Perkins, will probably put you off those awful cymbal clashing toys for good.Back in August, the first trailer for The Monkey didn’t show off all that much, just the titular monkey doing a light spot of drumming with a shot of lead actor Theo James covered in a lot of blood. Just yesterday, Neon put out another teaser trailer, this time a redband one, so it’s got more of that classic horror stuff: violence. A lot of it is just implied, the calm before the storm when it comes to deaths, instilling a strong sense of anxiety around swimming pools, hibachi chefs, and, well, drumming. Much like Longelgs, the vibes look quite strong once again, though that film’s ending was a bit pants so I have some reservations …
Read moreDuring last night’s Gamescom Opening Night Live, veteran developer Peter Molyneux took to the stage to properly reveal his latest project, a god game called Masters of Albion. While there was plenty about it that’s designed to remind people of classic Fable, it seems the game also bears some similarities to Molyneux’s ill-fated blockchain game, Legacy.For a bit of context, Legacy was announced back in 2021 by Molyneux and his company 22cans, with the pitch being that it was a blockchain-based business sim in which players would buy NFT ‘plots’ of land using cryptocurrency, as, to paraphrase Grandpa Simpson, was a bit of a style at the time. The game was released late last year, and is still a live thing, even if the NFT bubble it was designed to captilise on f…
Read moreUPDATE (21/08/24, 12:55 PM BST): Arrowhead has just issued another patch for Helldivers 2, this time aiming to rectify just one issue: “a common crash that occurs when killing the Impaler inside a Stronghold”. “This patch is an emergency hot fix addressing the Impaler crash. We deemed it worth bringing this one crash fix in now in an attempt to minimize the crashes during the weekend. Thank you for your understanding,” the studio wrote.Good news, people who’ve been unhappy about the state of Helldivers 2 since the deployment of the Escalation of Freedom update, there’s a fresh patch out and it very much looks to be the first step on Arrowhead’s road to addressing all of the complaints.If you’re out of the loop, the studio’s previously outlined a 60-day plan of…
Read moreHelldivers 2 developer Arrowhead’s CCO Johan Pilestedt has popped up on Discord again, this time to tease the effects that the studio believes the next balancing update it has in the works will have. In short, it sounds like a big change is being targeted, with the aim of brining the game a lot closer to the kind of experience many vocal players have suggested they’d prefer.While there’ve been plenty of Major Orders to be getting on with while you wait for info, Arrowhead’s generally kept its cards pretty close to its chest in terms of specfics regarding updates that’ll be coming as part of the ongoing 60-day plan it outlined last month. That said, studio CCO Johan Pilestedt has been getting back to answering player questions in the game’s official Discord, with his latest foray into the s…
Read moreNeed even more fighting games in your collection? Capcom Fighting Collection 2 should help out with that.Capcom announced a brand new Fighting Collection during today’s Nintendo Direct, adding in some more, underrated fighting game classics to your ever-growing collection. There’ll be eight games in total in the collection, and includes: Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 Pro, Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium 2001, Capcom Fighting Evolution, Street Fighter Alpha 3 UPPER, Project Justice, Power Stone, Power Stone 2, and Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein. These ones are definitely more for the hardcore fighting game fans, but still, Capcom’s commitment to keeping its back catalogue alive is still worth commending.Capcom Fighting Collection 2 – Announcement Trailer – …
Read moreThe Black Ops 6 beta, which kicked off over the weekend, has been a little polarising. Call of Duty players are split on the new changes to movement and time to kill. And though many are having fun with the new body shield/hostage mechanic, there’s been a lot of complaints about game feel in the beta’s first couple of days.One thing that everyone agrees on, however, is just how incredibly slow weapon levelling in the beta has been. It’s so slow, in fact, it feels like a bug.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings You’re not imagining things; it really does take multiple games to unlock even a basic set of attachments for your chosen weapon. The good news is that the weapon XP earn rate in the Black Ops 6 beta is, indeed, not the on…
Read moreDragon Ball Daima finally has a release date, and it sounds like fans of the series are in for a good October.It’s generally always a pretty good time to be a Dragon Ball fan, but October 11 in particular is going to be a very good day to be one. It was already known that Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, the return of the fan favourite Budokai series, was set to launch that day, but as reported by Mantan Web, Dragon Ball Daima, the newest anime based on the classic franchise, is coming October 11 too. It’ll be airing on Fuji Television at 11:40pm JST, which obviously isn’t much help for the international audience, but it’s still good to know that it’ll be airing in just over a month’s time.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings Yuichi Nakajima, head of progr…
Read moreThe creative director of Star Wars Outlaws has seen your complaints about some of the early stealth missions, and promises some changes are coming.Probably one of the most universally hated mechanics in games is stealth. Don’t get me wrong, a good stealth game like Metal Gear Solid or Dishonored makes playing sneakily fun, but when it’s in games where stealth isn’t the entire point, it can sometimes end up being a bit frustrating, particularly when there are moments that you can instantly fail. Star Wars Outlaws is the most recent game to fall victim to this, but luckily it sounds like some improvements are coming in a patch some time in the near future.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings The game’s creative director Julian Gerighty was recently asked…
Read moreAstro Bot has been delighting many a player with all of its cameos and references, and it seems like a few more could be on the way.For better or worse, Astro Bot is essentially a massive love letter to PlayStation games past, though it does feature plenty of characters that aren’t exclusive to the platform (though frequently have a strong connection to). There are a ton of cameos featured in the game, from classics like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, to the more recent Sony tentpoles like God of War. And as spotted by VGC, the game’s credits, there’s a list of thanks to various developers like Konami and Sega, as well as more, because of their respective appearances in Astro Bot. Except oddly, there are also a few mentions of titles that don’t make any kind of appearance in the game in cameo …
Read moreWelp, not everything from the ’80s can make a comeback, as Apple’s Time Bandits series has already been cancelled.A couple of months ago, the first season of Time Bandits started airing on Apple TV+, but I doubt most of you knew that because clearly it didn’t do well enough to be renewed for a second season. As reported by Deadline, the iPhone maker’s streaming service has decided to not go ahead with a second season about a month after the last episode was released. If this comes as a surprise to you, I’m not really sure why, as on Metacritic the show sits at 66/100 on the critics side of things, with only 4.6/10 on the user score. That’s not a great start for a first season of television, especially in an era where shows need to be massive hits to have any chance of getting renewed.To se…
Read more