Myst

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

Basically the greatest game ever. This was the only other game your dad played aside from solitaire.

1. Goto Library.

2. Open compartment below book.

3. Place page into book.

4. ???

5. Profit.

Ok Seriously, What is it?

Considering the previous paragraph is intensely unhelpful to the subject as well as factually wrong about the game, here's a real explanation.

Myst is a video game that came out in 1993 on the Macintosh as an “Exclusive” until it was ported to windows again and again and again. It was one of the best selling adventure games of all time, due to its beautiful (For the time) CGI island, subtle lore, and cryptic puzzles (because /V/ cant read more than 2 pages of a book that would explain how to open the rocket ship).

Lore wise it's about a man named Atrus, an author so talented you could literally fall into his books and take part in the world he wrote about. Atrus, thinking it's very cool to make his own magical realms to explore, made himself a little home island and called it Myst and invited his wife Catherine, and two children, Sirrus and Achenar to join him. At the start of the game, your dumb ass starts reading MYST and winds up accidently on the island, only to find it strangely empty. (The lore was retconned a bit, and expanded and enriched a lot, with the development of the absolutely stellar sequel, then retconned again in later, less impressive sequels by a different studio in ever less coherent ways that frankly made some aspects of the earlier, better entries stop making any sense - remind you of anything? - but the above paragraph is how the original concept started out.)

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

The kids wind up immediately taking advantage of the number of islands and proceed to play their own fucked up game of crusader kings among all of Atrus’s precious worlds. One would torture the inhabitants and start up murder cults to himself. While the other would demand valuables or threaten them with decimation. After a while of this Atrus took it upon himself to leave a few “Prison books” in the library, basically empty black void books where by reading it, you become trapped until someone replaces the pages. He succeeded in trapping the two but not before the brothers damaged Atrus’s newest book in such a way it was also a bit of a prison book. As for who hid the pages of the books behind absurdly elaborate puzzles and placed them in locations that would incriminate the brothers? Maybe the wife who never really shows up much did it. If you were a smart cookie and wound up saving Atrus in his book (And didn't just click the picture like a monkey and thus trapping yourself) you got the true ending where Atrus winds up burning the books with his sons alive in them.

So why does this matter to TG?

Don't know honestly. It may be a very popular video game, but beyond setting and the tantalizing idea of turning your fanfics into literal traps to hold your players hostage in, there's very little connection to TG at all. Sure there's a lot of books, reading and lore in this particular vidja but one could say this about a lot of video games we don't cover on this site. Myst's creators, the Miller brothers, were apparently quite into Dungeons and Dragons, so there's that, although you'd have to look quite hard to see how this may have influenced the design, because the actual gameplay experience is in many ways the polar opposite of a TTRPG.

If you are looking for a more modern version of this game, try Obduction, by the same people with the same “Trapped on an island trying to escape” premise.