Cyan Worlds via PolygonSusana Polo is a senior entertainment writer at Polygon, specializing in pop culture and genre fare, with a primary expertise in comic books. Previously, she founded The Mary Sue.In honor of the 31st anniversary of seminal puzzle adventure game Myst, Cyan Worlds has a new Humble Bundle sale, “Enter the Mysterium.” Through Oct. 2, players can pay $20 and pick up 13 games, which run the gamut from Myst’s earliest 1989 predecessor, to its modern progeny, and every mainline Myst game in the franchise, with part of the proceeds going to Active Minds, a nonprofit dedicated to equipping teens and young adults with the tools to advocate for mental health advocacy and suicide prevention.Enter the Mysterium$20$19290% off$20$20 at HumbleOr, you could pick up any of four smaller, cheaper bundles. But in the opinion of me, Polygon’s foremost Myst-pilled weirdo, here are the titles you should make certain to grab, in order of importance.Myst: Pick your poison! The bundle offers Myst: Masterpiece Edition, which attempts to replicate the experience of playing the original 1993 game; realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, the first attempt to render the game in 3D; and Myst (2021), which supports both 2D, 3D, and VR play.Riven: The Sequel to Myst: This is the intricately cut crown jewel of Cyan’s puzzle games, in its original form. If you get really fed up with it I would also recommend their recent 3D remaster, which improves on perfection (but was released way too recently to be included in a discount bundle just yet).Myst IV: Revelation: Pretty much a direct sequel to Myst. Unequivocally the hardest Myst game, but my personal favorite for its story. It’s got an unskippable Peter Gabriel cutscene. Please, please, please play this game.Myst III: Exile: By no means easy, but still the easiest Myst game. The villain is played by Brad Dourif (The Lord of the Rings) and in one of the “bad endings,” he clubs you to death in first person FMV. If that doesn’t entice you I don’t know what will.Obduction: Not in the Myst setting, but if you play the others first, you’ll be able to call all the plot beats of this one. That said, it’s got a frightfully interesting sphere-based puzzle dynamic, an interesting setup, and gorgeous vistas.Firmament: I haven’t played this one yet. “And you call yourself an expert!” I backed the Kickstarter, OK?! I just haven’t had time! I’ll get to it… sometime after Dragon Age: The Veilguard comes out. I hear it’s worth it, though! And if you’re already picking up the rest, well, why not?But what am I, the Myst-pilled weirdo, going to buy? Well, even though I already own the vast majority of the games in this bundle, there’s still something here for me: Spelunx, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, and The Manhole. Two American dollars will net me three of Cyan co-founders Robyn and Rand Miller’s pre-Myst works, dating back to the unfathomable desktop gaming year of 1988, when Cyan released The Manhole on floppy discs available by mail order (the one in this bundle is a 1995 CD-ROM rerelease).Calling these three games “puzzle games” might seem like a stretch compared to Myst and its successors — I’ve poked around the original Manhole on the Internet Archive, and it’s more like an interactive object. But there’s a sense of humor, silliness, and, above all, play in it. Even just after ten minutes in a browser emulation, it was clear to me that I was looking at a couple of game developers fascinated by the potential of the point-and-click mechanic, and playing in that space as expansively and freely as they could. I could already see the lines running from this strange, Alice In Wonderland-themed object, to a couple of adventure games that were going to bust the genre wide open.Head over to the Humble Bundle, and you can make those connections, too.
Related Posts
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has made a surprise appearance at Gamescom Opening Night Live, with Katherine Anderson and Jon Zuck of Raven Software hitting the stage to reveal a brand-new trailer..This trailer provides us greater insight on what players can expect from the game’s campaign, with Anderson stating that we can expect “blockbuster action where players question everything and trust no-one,” and it sounds like open-combat – or perhaps open-world – missions might be present.Playing as Pantheon, the trailer showed off that there’s also an impressive homing knife to look forward to shown off towards the end of a trailer, alongside shock nades and a utility wheel. More importantly, there’ll be an open beta for Black Ops 6 from September 6 to 9.To see this content please enable targeting …
Read moreIt’s sounding like more live-action anime projects are likely on the way, as Crunchyroll and Sony are interested in developing some.The superhero well isn’t exactly dry, as there’s a whole ocean of IP to adapt from, but for Marvel, apart from its big success with Deadpool & Wolverine, the MCU has been waning in popularity since the release of Avengers: Endgame. That could be part of a broader superhero fatigue, James Gunn’s new DCU will be the real test of that, but Hollywood quickly moved on to video game adaptations, with movies like the Sonic the Hedgehog pair of films and the Super Mario Bros. Movie all doing very well, and shows like The Last of Us and Fallout proving very popular. But there’s another IP mine that Hollywood is clearly interested in tapping: anime.To see this conte…
Read moreRemember the Illuminate? Those alien lads from the first Helldivers that everyone was convinced would come rushing into Helldivers 2 through that black hole the forces of Super Earth turned Meridia into a few months ago. Well, it looks like they’ve just briefly made a cameo on the game’s map.As spotted by players on Reddit, a section of the lower portion of the Galactic map briefly turned purple yesterday, suggesting that it was under the control of force which wasn’t the Automatons or the Terminids, before returning to normal.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings Naturally, folks could only come to one conclusion – the Illuminate popped in, and they’re apparently fans of hide and seek. Especially since at least one of the occupi…
Read moreA third Dune film is in the works, but if you ask Denis Villeneuve, his take on the sci-fi classic is “not like a trilogy.”At the moment, Dune director Denis Villeneuve is currently in the process of writing a third film, which will be based on the second book in the series Messiah. But despite being a third film, the director isn’t viewing them as a trilogy. Villeneuve recently made an appearance on Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast, where he spoke about the Dune films, and his plans for the series going forward. “First, it’s important that people understand that for me, it was really a diptych,” Villeneuve said of his two Dune movies.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings “It was really a pair of movies that will be the adaptation of the firs…
Read moreMatt Reeves felt that The Penguin’s real name, Oswald Cobblepot, was just a bit too silly, so he asked DC if he could change it.The Penguin’s civilian name has been the very extra Oswald Cobblepot for a good number of decades now, but in something as serious as 2022’s The Batman, a name like that might seem a little out of place (though we can of course suspend our sense of disbelief at a man dressed up in bat-themed military gear). So, the character’s name was changed to Oswald Cobb, or Oz Cobb, which definitely doesn’t sound silly at all, and in a recent interview with SFX Magazine (via ComicBookMovie.com), producer Dylan Clark offered a bit of context as to why that decision was made.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings “They never got around to cha…
Read morePC gaming appears to continue to be as popular as ever, as Steam just hit a new concurrent user count record.I feel like every time I like away from Steam for five minutes, it’s setting a new record for the amount of players it has online at once. Valve started the year off by breaking its concurrent user count record (more than once) when more than 33 million users were online at once. In March that went up all the way to 36 million, then again to 37 million in August, and now, just under an hour ago at the time of writing, Steam managed to hit a concurrent user count record of 38,367,277, a very strong number for the video game distribution platform (via SteamDB). It should be noted that doesn’t mean over 38 million people were playing games at the same time, it’s just how many people we…
Read moreAfter a fantastic box office run as Marvel Studios’ first-ever R-rated movie, Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t saying “bye bye” just yet. Instead Marvel and Disney aim to position it as a big player in the upcoming awards season.While a bit funny, it doesn’t really come as a surprise, as Disney and Marvel have a tradition of pushing hard to sell their biggest blockbusters as cinematic achievements following Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther having a groundbreaking Oscars presence back in the day. It’s happened before and will happen again.To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings Via Variety, who had the exclusive, we’ve learned that Shawn Levy’s movie “will be submitted for consideration at the Golden Globes in the comedy categories, with Reynolds’ performa…
Read moreThe Electric State, the next film from Joe and Anthony Russo about an alternate history where Disneyland animatronics gained sentience and revolted, has received a first look.Here’s a pitch for you: imagine a world where once Disney had made animatronics for Disneyland, they became intelligent robots that rebelled against those that made them, with humans and bots fighting each other leading to the remaining, defeated robots banished to an “exclusion zone” in the southwestern desert. It’s certainly a big idea (based on Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel of the same name), and one that’s received a first look over at Vanity Fair, where the Russo’s and some of the cast spoke with the outlet about the upcoming Netflix film. First look at The Russo Brothers’ ‘THE ELECTRIC STATE…
Read moreMatt Reeves’ Batman universe is far from a silly one, but apparently one source of inspiration for The Penguin’s look is on the sillier side.Colin Farrell, if you didn’t know, doesn’t typically look how he does in The Penguin. No, it’s done by this thing called special effects make-up, as impossible as it might be to believe, obviously transforming the actor in such a way where you probably wouldn’t know it’s him unless you were told. Obviously his design has a bit of a mafia vibe about it, but as it turns out, that wasn’t necessarily the first port of call when it came to hunting for sources of inspiration for his look. In a recent interview with DiscussingFilm, The Penguin make-up designer Michael Marino shared that Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, of all things, is where some of …
Read moreThings have just gone from bad to worse for Joker: Folie a Deux, as Warner Bros. has apparently already lined up its digital release.When the first Joker came out way back in 2019, it surprised pretty much everyone by making a whole billion dollars and change at the box office. What was not a surprise was Warner Bros. deciding to greenlight a sequel, a sequel, I might add, that had a budget of $200 million to produce and $100 million to market and distribute. And how did it do in its opening weekend? So badly it made even less than Morbius, of all films. To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings The film just had its second weekend, which saw it take home $7 million domestically, a massive 81% drop from its first weekend, the worst second-weekend decline fo…
Read more