MYSTified

Take a look at this picture.

Now, is the first thing you ask yourself, "What the HELL is the purpose of this thing???" If so, you may be ideally suited to play MYST games. This scene is actually from MYST III: Exile, which my wife and I are currently partway through.

She and I have played these games together for years now. They are full of quiet music, hauntingly beautiful worlds and designs, and frustratingly challenging puzzles. Luckily, our brains work in very different ways, so we make a good team... between us, we can generally work through the challenges.

Not terribly quickly though.

We played the first one, simply called MYST, back around 1996 or 97. The second game, RIVEN, we started around 1998, hit a wall, then returned to and finished around 2000. This third game we started in 2001, hit a wall again, and then picked back up a couple months ago. Happily, we've made lots of headway in this recent period. Hopefully we will finish this one off at some point soon, since we have the next game waiting patiently on our shelf... MYST IV: Revelation. Oh, and a fifth game is due to come out in the next couple of months.

So, assuming there will be no MORE in the series... we should have the whole thing licked by about.... um.... 2011.

Wish us luck.