I’m not a fan of most computer games. I have had enough violence and racing in my life to not want to invite it in through games of violence, war, racing, chasing, or bashing in heads. Among my favorite computer games are Myst and its sequels, Exile, Riven, The Revelation, and Uru, created by Cyan Worlds.
Myst and its sequels are beautiful mind games, challenging the best in us through complex puzzles accompanied by phenomenal real-life graphics. My husband and I would play these together, discussing strategies and solving the problems over meals and long drives. We’d email or instant message chat back and forth things to try or experiment with to solve the puzzles. They took our minds other places while we were in places and dealing with things we didn’t want to deal with. Great distractions, but more than that – great mind teasers.
We’ve been searching for Myst replacements for years on our desktop computers without success. With the new drive in mobile games for cell phones and tablets, we felt confident that the need for Myst-like brain games would generate something. After several years of poking, we’ve found some possibilities. Unfortunately, most of these are more like pretty maze games rather than mind-benders.
I used to think there was a difference between a Myst-like problem-solving game and a simple hidden object adventure game. As the games improve their visual quality, the simple games of finding hidden objects to solve puzzles can become as interesting as Myst-problem-solving games that require a little more brain power. I’ve included some well-reviewed hidden object games in the list below accordingly.
To be true to the concept of a Myst game, I believe the game should put you in the key role of the player, giving you a vested interest in solving the puzzles. There should be little interaction with other characters, just you and the environment, where the pieces of the puzzle tell more of the story than the characters could. The puzzles should make you think, fuss over, and experiment with before solving, but not be too simple nor too inane. You should shout with joy when you figure them out, not groan. This is where many of the new games miss the mark. I rarely have the overwhelming impulse to jump up and down and shout, “I did it!” Or do I experience the water-cooler effect praising the game long after finishing the play.
It’s sad because we need this form of escapism today more than ever.
Reedu
Reedu by Nomuda Games has been well reviewed by many as a good Myst-like game except for the “gory” parts, as one reviewer described.
According to the official description:
…We can say that what starts out as a journey through a dangerous land of aggressive plant life – which may or may not house your only true friend- quickly spirals into a far-reaching intergalactic and inter-dimensional adventure drawing into it notions of time, space, mythology, and science.
This is not a simple exercise in shoot-‘em-up gore without substance. Bubbling underneath the surface of the textured netherworlds is a story that delves past the superficial and into what may be considered philosophical (we’re not Descartes, but humor us for a moment). At the very least Reedu: The First Explorer will give you ample amounts of moments to debate with friends and strangers. What can we say? Space-time…it’s a tricky thing. You never know what will pop up. Just ask Charlton Heston and those damn dirty apes.
Reedu was released as a sequel of episodes. Episode One: The First Explorer was released in early 2011. Unfortunately, the Nomuda official blog has had no new updates since October and their Twitter account has been dormant for about as long, even though announcements were that a new episode would be out the first of the year. Reviews of Reedu were hopeful but not good. We’ve glanced at it and decided that the shoot ’em up aspect of the game didn’t make it worth our time, especially as we don’t know when the next episode will be released.
Google Play: Reedu
Amazon.com: Reedu
The Lost City
The Lost City by Fire Maple Games is a beautifully rendered visual experience with lovely music and sounds, but the game is not designed for intelligent adults. the developers of The Lost City, Mahjong Forests, The Great International Word Search!, Sunken Words, and Fire Maple Games!. Most of their games are word-based games but Lost City and Grisly Manor are testimonies to their potential as developers of Myst-like games, but they lack the true brain-bender experiences of Myst.
It’s a maze game, wandering through lovely landscapes and beautiful scenery to solve incredibly simple problems to gain access to new areas to explore. Most of the time is spent moving around back and forth and repeating your virtual footsteps, solving a problem in one part of the landscape then backtracking to put the next piece into the puzzle at the opposite end.
My husband lost interest within a few minutes. I kept on out of sheer determination to find something intelligent and mind-testing in the game. I didn’t find anything, and my fingers were in pain within 20 minutes of the back and forth navigation. The idea of being able to change the environment visually by switching seasons is a lovely graphic effect, making some things passable by freezing the water between you and your destination, finding blooming flowers, hiding things with snow, was a beautiful effect, which unfortunately led to more racing through the environment to get to the season-changing buttons.
Still, it’s a step in the right direction. It’s perfect for game novices and young people just wanting to explore and waste some time and not challenge their intellect. It’s also a game that is easy to complete, this qualifies.
Amazon.com: The Lost City
Google Play: The Lost City
The Secret of Grisly Manor
The Secret of Grisly Manor sets you on a mission by your uncle to explore his mansion home for clues and solve the puzzles to find out what happened to the missing uncle. By Fire Maple Games, the reviews are all over the place on Amazon, spread almost equally among the five star rating system. In general, they state low re-play value, too short, not very challenging, but visually beautiful and well constructed. All love the graphics.
Like “The Lost City,” it is another beautifully graphic visual game without much in the brain-challenging department. There is a lot of wandering around and moving back and forth over already traveled territory to put all the pieces together, but it amuses for a while. Especially good for novices and younger people.
Amazon.com: The Secret of Grisly Manor
Google Play: The Secret of Grisly Manor
Other Myst-like Games for Android
The following are Myst and Riven style games for the Android that we haven’t explored yet. I’d love your feedback on these if you have played them.
- Azada: Trapped in a haunted room, you must help release Titus from the magical spell and solve puzzles and fill in missing pages to an enchanted book. Google Play, Big Fish Games (direct)
- Infernus: Amazon.com,
- Forgotten Places – Lost Circus: Play youth detective and solve the mysteries of the nightmares Joy has about a circus. Amazon.com,
- The Treasure of Mystery Island: Parachuting onto an uncharted island, this is a lost treasure hunt. Amazon.com, Google Play
- Pirate Mysteries: A mysterious tale of monkeys, masks, and hidden objects on a deserted island. Amazon.com, Google Play
- Magician’s Handbook: Cursed Valley: Using the Magician’s Handbook, you search through the Cursed Valley to find hidden objects and solve mysteries. Amazon.com, Google Play
- Dream Sleuth: Catherine has strange dreams and turns into a young sleuth to solve the puzzles to discover the secret behind a kidnapping crime. Amazon.com, Google Play
- The Mystery Of The Crystal Portal: A journalist has to solve the riddle of what happened to her archaeologist father lost after making a discovery that could change “the course of humanity” in this hidden object adventure. Amazon.com, Google Play
How to Play Myst on Your Android Phone
If you are tech-savvy, here are some solutions for playing Myst, Riven, and others on your Android phone. Note that rooting may be involved.
- How to play Myst on an Android phone – Allocosm
- The Iso Zone Forums • View topic – Play Myst, Riven, and other P&C with ScummVM on DROID!
Why Aren’t There More Myst-like Games on Mobile?
While I’m still puzzled over why there aren’t more Myst-like games on desktops, the puzzle of why they aren’t on mobile is fairly obvious. The computer processing power to manage the high resolution motion graphics is demanding. Processors and server space are improving but we are still pushing them to get a realistic experience.
Still, why aren’t there more Myst-like games in general for the now more powerful computers? Computers have come a long way since Myst was released in 1993 by two brothers in Spokane, Washington.
The demand for high-action and violent games seems to push games like Myst into the background with the low blood-letting and splatter quota. Still, with the continuing popularity of Interactive Fiction games and problem-solving puzzle games, while not a huge commercial market it should be market enough for more Myst style games.
Myst was the bestselling PC game until 2002 when The Sims broke its records. As of 2003, more than 12 million copies were sold and I still find them occasionally in thrift shops and used book stores. Myst was converted to iPhone in 2009 and has made its way onto Nintendos and PlayStations and Pocket PCs, but nothing has been released for the Android, a demographic crying out for Myst-style games. The tablet market demands higher quality interactive games, so now is the time, folks.
The Tech Nag 
I enjoyed reading your article, reminded me of the last time i did a adventure. Myst series truly were captivating, and rewarding experience like no other. It was the last time i ever played a game. perhaps, its my vintage, however i have never seen anything like it since. A search on web for tablet adventure games like myst, led me to this article. I do hope there are other like minded people who know of something for android, and can write in. Thanks, for article, a great memory
i am an adventure game nut and i have about 200 games in my quest to find myst type games, have you played obsidian, shivers, shivers 2,
I played Space War on a PDP-1 in 1963. It was like something called Asteroids – an early “modern” computer game (TRS-80 I think) except it was displayed on a round, vector graphics monitor and ran on a computer the size of three refrigerators. Myst-like games are what computers were designed for, if you ask me. They stretch the technology, and the fallout is the truly graphical user interface we enjoy today.
I’m commenting, because I get my Droid tomorrow, and I want to join the crowd waiting for these multi-dimensional, intelligence demanding aps. Maybe when I retire for the third time, I’ll write one. The only problem is that I am just not as damned creative as the Rand brogthers or Knut Mueller (Rhem,if you haven’t discovered it yet).
Have you tried Machinarium? The puzzles are hard, and the story utterly charming. Not photo-real like Myst, but instead very cartoony. You have to guide a robot around finding clues and objecst while joining up the various bits of the world until he can rescue his partner and escape. It’s available on iPad, and Blackberry.
Try amania-design.net. Machinarium is witty, beautiful, and has terrific music and challenging puzzles. It’s available for ipad and pc, and can be tweaked to work on android. It has a hand-drawn style that’s artistic and charming.
Botanicula, their latest offering, is also original and fun, if not quite as engaging. There are also some shorter games to download on the site that are well worth playing.
Machinarium2 is in the works. 🙂
I would encourage anyone to read more about the Amanita team. Word has it that they pooled their resources and made Machinarium for just $3000. There’s an active message board,too, where folks who enjoy this kind of gameplay share their finds.
Hi, I found a couple that are interesting: The Sybieria series, and one called The Rhem Trilogy.
Look on Amazon, you might find others.
Dee
Hi Tech Nag,
It is really disappointing that you approach this with such narcissism and a condescending tone.
Surely, someone of your obvious superior intellect would realise that puzzle games are very hard to market across a large demographic. Games that do provide a challenge for more experienced players, while still allowing entry to less experienced require significantly more time/money to develop. Which is the reason why the Myst and Zork series of game eventually died (I also think lack of real innovation in puzzles and a tendency for the puzzles to become ‘too hard’ for the average player alienated a large part of the audience). This is the reason the high profile puzzle games like myst developed such elaborate hint systems, how do we make this fun for everyone?
I’ve played through both the Lost City and Grisly Manor and enjoyed them for what they are. I’d be very surprised to find a significant market that wants puzzles of the level you describe.
But, that is not to say that a really difficult but collaborative/social puzzle game (which Uru attempted but didn’t quite pull off) is not possible the app space. It would require a significant upfront investment though…
Having worked in game development for 8 years and an absolutely huge fan of puzzle games, I would love nothing more than to see some great puzzle games enter the app space (and even be responsible for some of them ;))
Cheers,
Brad
Actually, games like Myst and Interactive Fiction are now making a huge comeback. Portland State University has started an IF game group and is using IF games to teach coding and programming. Very exciting times.
Thanks You been help or need to find more games like Myst.
well… I haven’t tried it for myself but the computergames of RHEM should make a pretty nice replacement for Myst http://www.rhem-game.com/
YES! I totally agree that there should definately be Myst apps for Android based devices. I had an HTC tilt, and Myst worked well. I love my entire Myst collection, and would be pleased to be able to play these games on my mobile Android based device. C’mon Cyan, let’s get moving on this!!?? I’m on my phone more than my pc, so it would be ideal to play it on the phone. I’m sure many Myst fans would kick out the cost for the Android apps.
You must try “lighthouse” I remember it being very similar to must but didn’t take me quite as long to complete.
Love!…..Obsidian was also great
Games like Myst and its sequels would be killer on an Android device…and Zork Grand Inquisitor! 🙂
Glad to see that there is still an interest in Myst like games. Keep up the search folks. Would love to see something more than first person shooters or MMRPG’s that can eat your life away playing for years. Agreed that the hints creation within the myst games were intuitive and hope that similar tools become available again, easing new players into games without penalty or undue stress.
Try a game called Reah, i think its even better then Myst but its my opinion
The mystery of the crystal portal no where compares to myst but is good in graphics. To get to whst you need to find,you must find objects for a certain object to unlock.everything. I apparentltly only downloaded a demo but from that it seems rather easy. Not much of a thinking process as myst requires
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Solace: The Escape is pretty good. Shorter than one would like but that is par for the course with apps at this stage. Some of the puzzles were common types-a cryptogram and a slider puzzle (have to create the picture by sliding the pieces around), but a few were novel and took going back to a few times to figure out. The Room is also decent, lovely graphics, the puzzles aren’t that difficult but better than most other games I’ve found. A lot of these games suffer from being too obvious, I’m not sure why they are created that way, maybe it’s space limitation. But with these I didn’t feel like it was only search and tap.
take a look at The Room. very short, but the most Myst like game I have found.
I realize that this is an older post, but the game called The Room is a good challenging puzzle game for android.
I’ve just found a game called The Door for the Android Tablet very much similar to the CyanWorlds
I’m a bit late to this thread, but if anyone has a Kindle, please check out “The Room.” If short, the game still gives me that wonderful, mind-bending satisfaction you describe above. It’s a real gem in Amazon’s often lacking app store.
I’m not sure if you are still following this thread at all but I found a good (but somewhat short) mobile game along the lines of must that I rather enjoyed. The game is “The Room”. It is also coming out with a sequel later this year
I will check it out. Thanks.
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Just downloaded XON which looks promising in the puzzle play domain
Really? Machinarium was actually made for $3000? That is very impressive and inspiring… I always am encouraged by people who pull off amazing things with scant resources. Like Phil Fish’s game Fez (which is amazing, BTW) where he practically got the game made by himself from start to finish over the course of seven difficult years. I would like to see some of my ongoing projects reach completion soon but it won’t be easy given my current constraints. Right now my emphasis is on virtual-world project “Panoramic Worlds 2” (which the author of this article will no doubt despise as it has almost no puzzles or real challenges) and on wrapping up my work on Sevkor (the much-discussed Uru fan age in development). I have been putting 2-3 hours of work into that each week for the past 21 months or so, and I get the sense that people are getting impatient and want me to finalize it.
II am now ramping up hours on both of those projects to approx. 18 hours/week on the former, 8 hours on the latter. The aim is to quickly make my final revisions to Sevkor and hand a completed version off to a couple of coders who have graciously volunteered to tackle the interactive elements of the age. I want to get both of those projects moving forward in a big way by the end of July 2014.
No games like Myst you say. What about Schizm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizm:_Mysterious_Journey), Schizm II (http://www.schizm2.info/) and Sentinel (http://www.dormeuse.info/) ? These were all from the same guys and for me after playing Myst were quite similar in styles.
SO agree with both of you in the mind set about mobile games or in general about device games for this class.The idea that the Android or any of the others to catorigize games of challenge is so small. Hey why don’t you two start something!! I am sick of Big Fish. They always have a hidden agenda, never up front about what you’re getting. I veer away from them. Can you still find the Mystic game line you speak of? Let me know. I am craving such a game. Also cudos to having each other for gaming partners. That’s another wish I wish but that’s a whole other topic. Take care and be well. . Sue.
I loved your article. I am a big fan of the cyan games. I have both myst and riven on my iPhone. I would like to have exile but they don’t have that for mobles. I still haven’t solved either game and it drives me crazy at times. Like you , sometimes my husband will play with me every now and than. Thank you. It seems to be a thing of the past. But what about obduction. I can’t wait.
Try The Room by Fireproof games. It’s an amazingly beautiful game for the Apple android systems, Puzzles that really puzzle. Of course some of the puzzles are more brain bending than others. The Room and The Room 2 can be bought now for very, very reasonable prices. The Room 3 is due out sometime this summer. I’m on pins and needles waiting for the release!
I just finished XON, episodes 1, 2 and 3 on droid. It’s alot like Myst, but instead of point and click you walk around discovering and unlocking the secrets of the world. Very good visuals too, especially in ep 2 and 3. I definitely recommend you try them. Can’t wait for an episode 4!
Thanks. I’ll check it out. Did you hear that they have decided to make Mist a TV show?
Your list of myst-like games on android platform seems to have missed out The Lost Chapter… check it out…its good…
Loved the article 🙂 Myst was such an influential game changer when it came out and while there are a lot of great Myst like games out there, we’ll probably be forever “chasing the dragon” trying to find something that really compares to the spirit of that game. I see in the comments that someone mentioned Machinarium, and while that game isn’t it’s really like Myst, it has something really special to it, which I think is the hardest thing to achieve in any adventure game. The “je ne sais quoi”, if you will 😉
Absolutely we need to resume brain games lije the Myst, Uru, etc
Series.
You should try The Room, as well as it’s sequels.
I strongly recommend you check out The Room, The Room 2, and The Room 3. They’re visually stunning, intelligently designed puzzlers, and well, classics in the making. The biggest difference between them and Myst is that they’re set in a confined space instead of an expansive world.
XON Episodes 1, 2, and 3 are also worth a look. They’re more superficially similar to Myst, but they lack the incredible polish of The Room series and Myst itself.
Curious about the violence and racing in your life that has turned you off to computer games. My first reaction to reading that was to roll my eyes but hey, maybe Oregon has something going on that I don’t know about.
Anyway as others have mentioned, The Room games are what you’re looking for.
Sidenote, research is starting to show that such games can help stave off Alzheimer’s.
You shouldn’t assume that where one lives in the moment represents a lifetime of residences and experiences.
I’ll checkout the Room games. Thank you.
Also note, research has not proven games prevent Alzheimer or dementia, but it makes for a great selling point. Actually, learning languages, furthering your education, and staying physically active do more, combined with genetics and dumb health luck, than games…unfortunately. I wish they did. I’d become a couch potato gamer. LOL!
I realize I’m a little late to the party but in my search for “Myst-like” games for the tablet led me here. I’m divorced now but in reading your article I thought that maybe it was authored by my X because like you, we played through the Myst series together, often I.M.ing each other and discussing the puzzles at night, in the car or from our desks at work…brought back a lot of good memories. Anyway, thank you for the article. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions…one game I didn’t see mentioned that my wife and I played (back then) is called “Time lapse” and it was as challenging and beautiful as myst is (to us at least). I’m gonna check out “the room” for sure. And…Brad, you need a hug or something!
Jp