Myst (series)/YMMV

• Better on DVD: The digital version of Riven is much smoother than the original version, which came on a whopping five CD-ROM's that required you to swap them every time you went to another of Riven's five islands. In fact, Riven was one of the earliest PC games to receive a DVD release for this reason.
• Big Lipped Alligator Moment: In most of the ages, the linking books are just sitting out in the open. In the Stoneship Age, it rises out of a table for no explainable reason. This is not foreshadowed at all, it seems somewhat magical even by the game's standards, and it's never spoken of again, or really at all. Of course, it could just be Rule of Cool in play, since it is a pretty nifty effect.
• Complete Monster: Gehn, Sirrus, Esher, Nekisahloth.
  • YOU, if you get the Releeshann book back from Saavedro and leave him trapped.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Examples are few and far between, given the ambient nature of the games, but the one that stands out the most is "Curtains" from Myst IV, sung by none other than Peter Gabriel.
• Even Better Sequel: Riven.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Depending on your perspective, Myst V and Uru, the novels, or even the first four games, largely due to the series' massive Ret Cons and Literary Agent Hypotheses.
• Jerkass Woobie: Saavedro's been through a lot of shit thanks to Sirrus and Achenar, and deserves the chance to finally go home, but he's still a gigantic dick about the whole thing; several of the bad endings have him smash your head in with a hammer in a rage. He will even do this if you fulfill all the conditions necessary to get the good ending, then open the door that has thus far kept him from getting at you up until this point; apparently he doesn't really care if you've kept your word or not, he just really wants you dead for being on Atrus' side.
  • For the other bad ending, comply with his demands without question and he'll just chuck the Releeshann book over the side, as if to say "Thanks for the help, oh, and if you see Atrus, tell him to kiss my ass!".
• Magnificent Bastard: A'Gaeris.
  • Kadish too in Uru. He wrote many of the Ages the player visits, such as (obviously) Kadish Tolesa, Eder Gira/Kemo, Er'Cana and Ahnonay, but the lattermost is what really drives it home: its whole purpose was to make visitors think, through a series of rotating domes, that he could make Linking Books warp to different times and spaces, something only the Grower, a mythological figure, could do. The final, unfinished dome contained an enormous statue of himself.
• Moral Event Horizon: All pity for Sirrus drains away when you decode one of the conversations at the end of Myst IV. Hearing the way he's taunting his child sister about how he's going to suck out her brain and murder her parents is... well, it speaks for itself.
• Paranoia Fuel: Riven, full stop.
  • The intro actually has a too-fast-to-see frame of Gehn looking at you as a subliminal message to give you the feeling someone's watching.
  • There's a door on "Temple Island", where you start: it's locked, but you can crawl underneath it. What's behind it? Nothing, except a small peephole into the temple.
    • When the temple is rotated properly, the door gives access to the valve that powers the Star Fissure scope. The reason it's locked is that Gehn probably didn't want anyone else using the scope.
  • There's a throne room (of sorts) near the temple, connected to it by surveillance camera and holographic imager. If you enter the temple, sometimes the imager will be running and you can see Gehn hurriedly switch it off - and you can't catch him before he escapes.
  • There's a periscope in the middle of the lake on Village Island, which turns out to be connected to another hidden surveillance room. When you're out wandering around the lake though, the periscope is nearly always pointed at you.
  • When you break into Gehn's office, there's a D'ni rifle and smoking-pipe sitting on a desk. But if you break in a second time, they're gone...
• Porting Disaster: Porting the original game to the Nintendo DS did not go so well, given the DS's lower resolution and lack of a context-sensitive mouse cursor.
  • It's worth noting that, other than very minor issues with the smaller screen, the port to the PSP is actually quite good.
  • The 3DS version isn't much better than the DS version. It uses a cursor at least, but it doesn't use the 3D functions, nor does it use the touch screen for anything important. The cursor is controlled by the Circle Pad, and it re-centers whenever the Circle Pad is released, making it a real pain to control. What makes it worse is the blatant false advertising of the promotional materials, which claim that it displays in 3D, when it doesn't.
  • Many of the early ports could also be considered this, since they were often put on consoles that had lower resolution than the PC versions allowed. They also had clunky controls and Loads and Loads of Loading, which especially got bad in Riven where you had to make really long treks.
• Player Punch: The final part of Sirrus' memory sequence on spire. We begin seeing Sirrus raging against his imprisonment, then deciding to escape and discovering he can't get down to where the linking book must be, and deciding maybe if he can get to another of the structures he can see, he might be able to climb down from there. We see Sirrus' working on a way to get across and beginning to wish so much he could show his father what he was achieving. We see him beginning to miss his family, and grow closer, and closer and closer to repentance, making images to remind him of happy times in his youth or thinking about what his family might be thinking or doing. Then we see him complete his efforts, get below the cloud layer, and discover nothingness below. ...And then we see him snap.
  • The show of missing his family was an act to ingratiate himself to his mother, since it's all built within the survey of the viewer. His own journal entry reveals his motive.

"Perhaps if I play upon her guilt. Create a sculptural vignette which she can see inside their viewer. If I choose the appropriate memory, it should convince her that I, too, have my regrets."

• • There's also the moment in Riven where you read one of Gehn's journals. He's crying about his deceased wife Keta, and unlike the neat and ordered previous pages, the pages on this one are stained with tears. The worst part is is that you have to trap him before you can learn about this.
    • Just in case you didn't know how much he misses her, there is also a photograph of her and a short video message where she promises always to love him "to the greatest extent".
  • Saavedro's journal in Myst III: Exile. It starts off as a straightforward journal about the details of his revenge, but as you collect pages for it (which are scattered around various ages), more of Saavedro's backstory forms: he's clearly suffering severe mental trauma from his ordeal, was essentially tortured by Sirrus and Achenar, and once trusted Atrus before his sons ruined everything. It's quite tragic to read the whole thing once you have all the pages.
    • "Atrus, I'm not you."
• Seinfeld Is Unfunny: This could hardly be called Scenery Porn today... but consider the game debuted in 1993. Everyone else was still thinking in terms of 16-bit at the time. Real time 3D rendering cards can do a much better job these days, even cheap built-in Intel HD chips.
• Squick Gehn captures frogs and smokes frog extract for his pipe.
• Tastes Like Diabetes: Serenia, in the opinions of some fans (though it still had a couple of Nightmare Fuel moments).
• That One Puzzle: In Riven, the marble puzzle, sometimes given the Fan Nickname "the waffle iron from Hell." It's extremely tedious to solve, as not only do you have to pinpoint every dome on a hard-to-see 3D map of each island, you also have to physically go to each of those domes, look at the switch that opens them, have a very close eye on which symbol is yellow (they strobe by very quick), then match that symbol to a corresponding color in another room way far and off, then place that corresponding colored marble where it corresponds to map-wise on the waffle iron. To figure all of this out at once is incredibly unintuitive, but the amount of trekking you have to do just to piece together all the right information to get one marble is insane, let alone five! Oh, and if you're playing the original five-disc release, that also means the game brings out the worst of the disc swapping during this puzzle. The game's plot almost completely stops dead in its tracks when you hit this part, and is widely considered the worst part of what is otherwise an Even Better Sequel.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: Yeesha = Yeshua/Jesus.
• What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: Hi there, Teledahn... world of giant mushrooms.
  • And also novels-only Torus, as mentioned in World of Chaos.
  • In general, Catherine's ages seem to have this in universe. Yeesha even calls her the "writer of dreams".
• The Woobie: Saavedro, and possibly Achenar in Myst IV: Revelation.