Point and Click Adventures in the Myst Vein

A recent podcast from Watch Out for Fireballs highlighted the classic adventure game Riven - the sequel to Myst. I loved the Myst 1-3. I went on to play some games of questionable quality (Darkfall, Frankenstein: Through the eyes of the Monster) because I enjoyed the genre so much. What I think hooked me was the alternate worlds and variety of puzzles. I especially enjoyed learning how a puzzle system worked in order to solve it.

Since that time, I have not played as many games in that style. The Room series was very good, but the Witness felt very repetitive and unsatisfying - I couldn't stick with it. I have Obduction on my list to play next, but I wanted to see if anyone had some hidden gems they would recommend. I've read though many "Greatest adventure games" lists, but those are pretty scattershot in recommendations.

I would strongly recommend Return of the Obra Dinn. It's a little smaller in scale than your typical Myst game, but I got a similar sense of satisfaction from that game. It's less about turning power on and interacting with weird technology, but has a similar sense of discovery as you go.

If you enjoy alternate worlds and good writing then I would recommend the Dreamfall/Longest Journey games. The puzzles might not be up to snuff but they exist, its more focused on characters and worldbuilding.
The quick look for Dreamfall Chapters is also hilarious.

And if you want more like myst then there is Obduction which is from the creators of Myst.

Those Nancy Drew games that Abbie kept playing? At least how they presented the world as these pre-rendered vistas you panned around reminded me very much of the early Myst games.

Phantasmagoria 2

I remember liking Schizm: mysterious journey. it has long animations when walking around which I don’t think you can skip. I liked that...
I didn’t like Schizm 2 much, mostly cause they made it fully 3D and it lost all of the charm of the original.

You also have the Zork games. Zork : Nemesis and Zork Grand inquisitor are my favorites.

First person puzzle/adventure games are one of my favorite genres, so I'll throw in a few of the less popular/obvious ones (i.e. I'm not gonna mention Portal etc.).


Quern is the closest game I've played to a 'modern Myst.' It came out at the end of 2016, but I had it at number one on my 2017 GOTY list. I really liked it.

You mentioned Obduction already, which I also really liked, though not quite as much as Quern. Still a good game, though; second on my 2016 GOTY list behind The Witness, which is one of my favorite games of all time.

There is also Haven Moon, which I remember being fairly short and not really liking all that much.

The Eyes of Ara is maybe even closer in style to older first-person 'point and click' adventure games in that you don't have free positional movement (like the early Myst games). It was okay, but near the bottom of this list, and it didn't grab me enough to finish it.

I've also bought The House of Da Vinci 1 and 2, but I haven't played them yet, so I can't speak to their quality.



Those are the Myst-likes that I can think of right now, I'd say. For still-puzzle-but-less-Myst-like games:


Fez is another one of my favorite games.

The Talos Principle was number one on my 2015 GOTY list.

Antichamber is also very good, though fairly short, depending on how quickly you intuit the mechanics.

I'm an hour into Manifold Garden and it's interesting, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it yet.

I'm also an hour into Superliminal, but it seems very derivative of Portal 1 so far.

Supraland was neat, though I think I heard that it had been rebalanced pretty substantially since I played it at launch, so I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Fairly unique in the puzzle game space in that it's on one big open map with combat and Metroidvania-style path unlocks.

The Turing Test is okay, though is maybe more about the narrative than about difficult puzzle-solving.

People might recommend Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds. Obra Dinn didn't grab me after an hour or two and a few scenes, if what you do through the entire game is the same throughout. Outer Wilds is one of the most disappointing games I've ever played; I'd hesitate to even call it a puzzle game. I think most of what people like about it must come from the exploration/narrative/atmosphere, because there sure aren't many discrete 'puzzles' to solve.

@ajamafalous: this is really helpful, thanks!

Myst 4 and 5 are pretty good, might want to try those as well. Also, Cyan World's weird, failed attempt at an "online" Myst, Uru, is actually not bad either. You can still play it today as a single player game (although I think there are fan servers for the online part) and it's not bad. It's in full 3D, not slideshow style, but it's not a bad game if you like weird puzzles and immersive, surreal environments. I would also recommend Eastshade, which while not strictly Myst-style, is a sort of a slow exploration/dialog/puzzle solving sort of thing that is largely non-linear. I've heard really good things about Quern, but have not played it myself.
If you want to go super old-school (games that may or may not run on modern computers), one of the best of the "golden age" point and click games is probably Amerzone, which was Benoit Sokal's first major PC game (the guy who directed the Syberia games and a few other classics). The Dark Fall series is another one. Atlantis: The Lost Tales was pretty good, as was Microsoft's "The Lighthouse." The Rhem series was pretty good, but very, very basic in terms of graphics, not sure how it would hold up today. There's a whole truckload of good games in that style from the mid to late 90s/early 2000s that I feel like have been mostly lost due to abandonware status or just not getting a shell update to play on current PCs.

It's not really Myst-like at all in that its a 3rd person perspective but one of my favourite point and click adventure/puzzle games is Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure. I realise the chance that you have a working Wii and access to a copy of the game is extremely small but I'll take any chance I can to bring this game up. It's just such a delightfully original entry to the genre.

@imhungry: That was a good game but what a horrible horrible title. Zack & Wiki sounds like a really bad edutainment title about how to responsibly use Wikipedia in your 4th grade research papers.

My suggestion here is Starship Titanic, which is available on GOG. Here's the pitch. Written by Douglas Adams and featuring voices by John Cleese and Terry Jones of Monty Python. Some of the puzzles are obscure but it is among the funniest games ever made, and, I think, the funniest game that nobody remembers.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter for exploration and stunning vistas.

Aporia: Beyond The Valley checks all of the boxes, though I remember the puzzles being a bit unsatisfying.

I haven't played them because they're co-op only, but if you have someone else to play with, I think the We Were Here games are good candidates for this kind of thing.