Myst (DS)

Touch-screen controls maul a classic adventure.
6/1/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

The game's images are similarly diminished, a problem made worse since the porthole into the Myst world, as viewed on the DS's touch-screen, is cropped by a permanent tool bar. A magnifying glass allows players to zoom in on scenery, but, with the exception of coming in handy to read books, simply blows an image up, making everything appear more pixelated and ugly.

There's a camera that lets you take screen shots of the game, a feature that could come in handy were it not so unwieldy and untrustworthy. The notebook is woefully underdeveloped. Half the fun of playing adventure games comes from scribbling notes on scrap paper. Myst DS could have gone the way of Etrian Odyssey and given the player the means to sketch out their own maps or draw their own interpretations of the many symbols encountered in the game. Instead, they saddle the player with a worthless typewriter interface, which forces and endless hunting and pecking with the stylus.

It's touch-screen interaction that really sinks Myst DS. In traditional point-and-click games, the mouse is the player's sole means of exploring the game world. Here the mouse is replaced with the Nintendo DS stylus. But one key element is lost in the transition. When playing Myst in most of its other incarnations the player could see their cursor. When the cursor passed over something usable like a button, knob or item, the cursor would change, providing vital feedback to the player that the area they discovered was useful and part of the puzzle.

There's no such visual feedback in Myst DS, an oversight and near tragic absence of vision that frequently leads the player to overlook clues. To make matters worse, many of Myst's mechanical control panels become cramped on the tiny touch-screen, making it difficult to manipulate buttons or dials with any kind of accuracy. The game's difficult puzzles are already designed to befuddle. Nobody needs more frustration.

There's really so much to love about the original Myst game. Arm's-length storytelling let players experience the game's mythology on their own terms. Those who cared to dig into diaries and notebooks could learn more about the mind of Atrus, the thinker who handcrafted each of Myst's magical ages. Exploration generated a gut-level reaction. What purpose did those rusty machines and medieval-looking torture devices serve? And what kind of person would create or use such things? The sense of dread and wonder may be scaled back when playing a buggy, careless re-release like Myst DS, but it's still there. Some things time and man can smother, but never entirely snuff.

This review is based on a final retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.