I've just finished playing through
Ubi's new addition to
Myst - lore. I have to say, the game has some really nice eye-candy, and the musical score is really great. Then comes the conditional: like most video games being published recently, it doesn't look like there was much planning on how the player would react in the situations presented in the game. The design falls short of engaging the player to the point of seemless immersion.
Case-in-point: A player needs to have the motivation to continue on a line of thought (especially in a game with a design as open as Revelation's). Sure, I explored Spire and Haven, but with only going through about half of each of those ages, I had already figured out what had happend, most of the motivation behind what happened, and how the brothers had escaped. Basically, I got half way through the Age, realized what was going on, knew I could always return to Tomahna (the starting point), and had no motiviation to continue to explore the Age.
Unfortunately, the game logic won't progress the story until you've completed those Ages. Some would argue that is motivation enough, however for true immersion, you have to act the way you would in the "real world". In the real world, I would have done what I did initially, and leave the Age in a hurry, rushing to Serinia to rescue Yeesha.
Myst, by default, must approach things from a logical perspective. The series has lent itself to inviting the player to ponder why a particular machine is where it is, what purpose a puzzle serves. Usually these lines of thought are instrumental in solving the puzzles. For the most part Revelation follows those rules, but there's several places where it diverges. Most notably in Spire: How exactly did Sirrus place those conductors with such precision? And where did he get the metal to construct his machines? Presumably he'd been working on them long before he had contact with his father. In Haven, why is there a locked door to nowhere? (The argument can be made that Achenar had gone positively bonkers, but I really don't buy that.) The most frustrating things come when the answer to a puzzle involves "just playing around with the controls" until things work (that was actually how the strategy guide described solving one of Spire's puzzles). There should always be a logical means to figure out what needs to be done.
I also found the controls to be frustrating, both with the physical mouse control as well as the choice for "warp points" (not to be confused with "zip points"). The mouse has a type of accelorator on it, which make timing pinpoint moves (a must for some puzzles in the game) near impossible. Add onto that the distance between walking points, and mazes in Serinia's Stone Forest and Haven's jungle, and you have a real mess trying to figure out exactly where you are.
This isn't to say the game is a bad game, far from that, it just means that more detail needed to be placed on how the player's reactions to the environment would interact with the game's logic. And there lies the secret to good game design: construct a method to guide the player so that the player doesn't even realize they're being guided. This takes a lot of stress of the player, and makes for a much more enjoyable experience.
