The paintings next to the bookcase open and close the secret passageway behind it. There are 4 "red" positions, each one of them corresponding to where one of the 4 available link books is hidden (ship, giant tree, gears, spaceship). Grab the tower and rotate it until it flashes red, then stop. Each of the marker switches in the island lights one specific group of buildings in the map. Jot down any interesting diagrams from the others on your notebook. You can ignore the book with the weird squares in it, you'll deal with it later. Read the 4 legible books in the bookcase. Give the blue and red pages to the corresponding books. In the library, each wall contains interesting items. Turn back to the projector, push the button, and watch the man's message to Catherine. Enter the number of switches "08", and press the button to close the panel. Press the green button on the upper left corner, which will reveal a hidden Control Panel. You'll notice a piece of paper on the wall to the left. Go to the projector, and turn it off by pressing the big button at the bottom. In the pier, there is an entrance to an underground room. Worry about the clock tower marker later. As you explore the island, you'll find that there are 8 marker switches in total: Pier - Giant gears - Planetarium - Spaceship - Mall with small pool and pillars - Brick building - Wooden shack - Clock tower Turn each marker switch on (up) as you get to it. There's no way taking pictures can replace using a pen and paper to scribble down notes, something that would be exceptionally difficult to do while holding controllers and wearing a headset.Pick up the note in front of the planetarium. But even with this modern facelift, the world of Myst remains mostly static, and even in 3D it still feels more like a painting of a place than an actual place.Īnd while a photomode has been added so you can take pictures of puzzle clues to use as reference, I still can't really imagine trying to solve the game in VR. In VR it's nice to see Myst from a new perspective, and even just on desktop it's a beautiful looking game: hypnotic ocean waves lapping at the shore, clouds rolling overhead, and a few nice details like a small green frog hopping along a bridge in the woods. Solving a puzzle, or even figuring out what the puzzle wants from you, results in plenty of happy eureka moments, not just from feeling smart but from having resisted the urge to cheat by looking up the answers. Sound often comes into play, which I really love, like a distant clunking sound while turning a wheel in a cabin, or the hum of a wire that lets you know a current is running through it, or an underground train puzzle where sounds play at the track intersections and combine with one another to give you directions. Sometimes simple observation can get you a long way toward solving a puzzle, like noticing a locked rocketship is connected to a brick bunker by an electrical wire. There's still a lot to enjoy, though, and plenty of clever puzzle design. There's a bit of story and lore told through books, notes, and holograms (originally they were cheesy FMV, now they're cheesy CG) but Myst is mostly built from puzzles, not stories. To gather the missing pages of the book and discover the story of the island and the family who once inhabited it, players need to solve elaborate puzzles that transport them to new islands, where they complete even more puzzles in order to return. In case you haven't had a chance to play one of the many versions of Myst in the past 28 years, the adventure game begins with you trapped on a strange island after reading a strange book. Myst, no matter how it looks in 2021, feels pretty outdated. Cyan Worlds say it's a "reimagined" Myst, but while it's far more modern-looking it's still almost exactly the same game. As a remake, Myst is a faithful one, but maybe a bit too faithful. And this new 3D Myst works on both desktop and in VR, so I got to spend time actually (virtually) walking around in it. Cyan Worlds has completely remade the game (again, following 2000's realMyst and 2014's realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, neither of which I played). It's a little weird to be back in Myst in 2021, after all this time.