I'm A Myst Weirdo And Thought Scorn Was "Okay"
I'm too late to join the Giant Bomb Game Pass Game Club, but I finally played Scorn and have some thoughts to share. I gravitated towards the game thanks to its short playtime, which is increasingly becoming an asset with my advancing age. I was also intrigued by its impeccable environmental and level design. While I am the furthest from being a horror fan, I have a recreational appreciation for the works of H.R. Giger and the Aliens films. And for the first hour, the game delivered what I wanted from it. Its starting environment is a bit too big for what it is attempting to accomplish, but it does a great job setting the game's tone and atmosphere. The tutorial level even emphasizes exploring and observing environmental context clues to solve puzzles, which tickled me pink. And then I got to the first gun, and the game started to fall apart for me. I know there are alternatives, but every attempt I made to use weapons felt like absolute dogshit. Also, despite the game's compelling start, there's no real story, and its worldbuilding is virtually nonexistent. That quibble surprised me because many people compared this game to Myst after its release in either an attempt to rationalize its creative choices or pooh-pooh them. Still, I'm getting ahead of myself with that one.
My issues with the combat got marginally better when I discovered you could avoid virtually every combat sequence through stealth. However, at best, the stealth system is two or three pips better than attempting to use the pew-pew laser pistol. For example, if you gave me a choice between syphilis and polio, I would pick syphilis, but with no enthusiasm. However, from the game's mid-point forward, most puzzles feel disconnected from the game and exist primarily to show you new grotesque visuals or animations. Doing horrible things to a corpse or barely alive NPC felt like actions that exist for the sake of existing rather than scaffolding a greater sense of the world and its ecosystem. And while I like a good brain teaser or complex puzzle more than the average person, Scorn's puzzles are wildly unbalanced, with a few at the start being some of the hardest in the game and a few at the end making me want to bang my head on a brick wall. More bizarre is the large swath of puzzles that feel too simple to justify existing because you resolve them in only a few mouse or button clicks.
Again, my complaints are close to the general reaction most have had to the game. However, I jumped into Scorn with the best possible mindset the developers could have asked for, yet I still ended up mildly disappointed. Unlike most, I did not go into the game expecting a modern horror experience or a seamless visceral shooter. When I heard publications, and even some staff and users here, call the game "Horror Myst," I went into it expecting a game structured like Myst or Riven. As many of you can tell by the title of this blog, I emphatically believe that is not the case. In fact, I'm starting to suspect that people who said this haven't even bothered to play Myst, and I can tell you why I think that. Dear reader, I served with Myst in many battles on the internet. I know Myst. Myst is a good friend of mine. Dear reader, Scorn is no Myst, and we need to discuss why that's the case.
The Normalization of "Myst Slander" Is Something Everyone Is Okay With, And They Shouldn't
Scorn has become another opportunity for many in the gaming community to repeat the same rhetoric that drives many adventure game fans crazy. When an atmospheric puzzle or adventure game comes out, Myst is what it is compared to, and its observable shortcomings are Myst's fault. So, Scorn has instructible puzzle boxes or escape room sequences? Time to point your finger at Myst and the "awful" game design Cyan supposedly codified when they essentially ruled the world. This sentiment has even permeated into the game development scene, with some developers willing to feign praise for Myst and Riven for being important but calling perceived poor design choices in both "bullshit." There was also that weird period when Tim Schaffer started to dabble with Kickstarter and when people wouldn't shut up about Telltale's The Walking Dead. They heralded both as "THE RETURN OF THE ADVENTURE GAME!"
And let me tell you, whenever I see people say these things, I want to fucking puke. The fucking disrespect you must commit to, not just Myst but also to Riven, The Longest Journey, Syberia, Gabriel Knight 2, and Broken Sword is unfathomable. You don't need to like Myst; you don't. However, you should at least respect, and not denigrate, how the late 1990s and early 2000s were NOT an adventure game, "Dark Age," even if Sierra and LucasArts pivoted away from the genre. That Dark Age never existed. The Miller brothers, Charles Cecil, Ragnar Tørnquist, and Benoît Sokal, kept the genre alive and turned it into a massive money maker for the industry. If you don't believe me, consider this. The only Diablo to ever outsell Myst is Diablo III. No individual title in the Doom, Command & Conquer, and Age of Empires franchises, even when you account for re-releases and remasters, has ever surpassed the lifetime sales of Myst. Saying the 1990s was the era of arena shooters and CRPGs is demonstrably wrong. Adventure games were keeping the lights on, and it wasn't until the novelty of multimedia experiences waned in the late 2000s that things pivoted in the industry on the PC front. For fuck's sake, Riven HEADLINED Apple's keynote conference finale during MacWorld 1998 for a reason!
You may argue that Myst and Riven moved the genre mechanically in the wrong direction with obtuse puzzle design and inscrutable pre-rendered levels. Honestly, go back and play Myst, and you'll be shocked at how small that game is and how easy it is to grapple with its core reasoning with each of its brain teasers or logic puzzles. Things get dicier with Riven, but even there, you can't deny that it bore massive fruits and design lessons from which the industry and consumers benefited in the long run. For example, Myst and The 7th Guest are widely considered the "killer apps" that sold consumers on CD-ROMs. Myst and Riven captivated non-traditional game audiences and demographics, and the industry expanded thanks to that groundwork. Riven's then enormous production budget and casting forced many studios to take the quality of acting in video games seriously and consider paying actors a decent wage.
Some bring up the fact Myst was made using Apple HyperCard instead of a standard game engine as evidence that either Myst isn't a "real" video game or that none of its teachable moments in game design present genuine lessons to the industry. These people act as if that wasn't a monumental technological achievement or that it lacked widespread impacts on the industry. Both points are utterly wrong. A handful of you on this site might recall a time when Activision did not exist. There was a brief time when the company was called Mediagenic and began investing in business software and technology as much as they did in video game development. That happened because the company's leaders saw Myst and a HyperCard demo and were so impressed they decided to embark on a three-year experiment that almost bankrupted the company. That, in turn, led to the rise of Bobby Kotick. Only a handful of games on this planet can say they shook the industry to its core, and Myst and Riven are two that have that claim to fame.
Myst Is Not A Contextless Series Of Escape Room Puzzles, But Scorn Sure Is!
I want to return to my primary objection to Scorn. While instinctive and bound to get a rise out of the average person, the puzzles feel disconnected from building a wholeness to the game's world. Similarly, there comes the point in Scorn when it simply stops giving a fuck about telling a story and ebbs by on its atmosphere. I would go so far as to say Scorn barely has a story, and when it suddenly decides to drop all of its lore during its final hour, that is when I enjoyed it the least. That, for whatever reason, has been a primary reason for people to compare it to Myst and Riven. Push even the harshest critics of the series to say something nice, and you usually get the same one or two comments. You can typically get them to admit that the games were visually stunning and technological masterpieces at the time of their release. However, they will immediately contend that the Myst games are actionless and listless, with only a tiny percent of your experience providing anything that remotely resembles a cohesive narrative. The truth to that sentiment depends on what you want to get out of any playthrough of Myst or Riven, and I cannot deny it is impossible to avoid it happening to you. Where I push back violently is when people characterize Myst and Riven as Ur examples of "vibe games" that coast on their visuals and atmosphere to carry the entire experience. People enjoy forgetting that the franchise is based around a family that can travel to different worlds, or Ages, through magical books. Or that Riven features a ten-minute cutscene where Gehn lays out his reasons for attempting to establish an autocratic rule over his Age.
Or that there's a recorder in Gehn's office, and all it has is a single recording of his now dead wife, and there are hundreds of slots, and that's the only occupied slot.
The Myst franchise cares a LOT about you exploring your surroundings to learn more about the inner workings of its Ages and worlds. Maybe you didn't find everything in any given entry, but that leads to one of the series' most intriguing aspects: its multiple endings. You unlock different end routes depending on how you interact with the Ages. Contrary to popular belief, you don't actually need to solve every brain teaser in Myst or Riven to complete them. Some routes are faster than others, but seeking everything presented to you from the onset is a challenge only for those who actively seek it. It is a system far more complex and intricate than anything Scorn has working for it narratively in its background. Likewise, have any of you seen the time and effort Cyan put into the live-action scenes for Riven? You only spend time doing the backbreaking work of making sets from scratch if you have significant storytelling aspirations for your game.
But I get it. You want to hear a Myst and Riven die-hard defend Cyan's puzzle design! First, it is essential to take notes when playing any classic Myst title, especially Riven, which was at the time not beyond the pale of the adventure game genre. Sierra, LucasArts, Infocom, Westwood, and Virgin Interactive adventure games expected you to either use the "Notes" section of the provided physical game manual or your own notebook, and Myst was no different. Shit, even consoles with password save systems or cheat codes at the time still demanded as much. With notes and graph paper, most puzzles are exponentially more straightforward. That's especially the case when you must transcribe and transliterate alien languages and number systems. Second, the level design of the Myst games involves a proto-Souls template we are all too familiar with today. With much of this design now codified law in specific sub-genres, an argument can be made playing Myst is easier for certain people. Regardless of how far or minute it might be from the player's starting position, every observable monument or landmark is indeed explorable and likely the lynchpin to a puzzle or cinematic set piece. If you can see something, there is a way for you to get there, and if you can hear something, the game is trying to draw your attention. Pipes usually point towards cardinal coordinates, and wires track to other locations. There are subtle ways every screen allows the player to use scenery to map environments, and nothing you look at is ever a throwaway. Unlike Scorn and many imitators, everything in a Myst game has cohesion and tries to communicate context clues about what you need to do and how. It doesn't just plop you into a room full of hostile aliens that will murder you if you don't shift the pieces of a puzzle cube into the correct slots in a limited amount of time.
Yes, there are times in Myst and Riven when you need to engage in pixel hunts, which can expend your patience as quickly as anything in Scorn. The pre-rendered screens and backgrounds often take advantage of optical illusions and perspective work that can be hard to see. However, Scorn had twenty-nine years of game development to work from that Myst didn't. Let's also not pretend that even the legends of the "Golden Age" of adventure games were not immune to the same stumbling points that Cyan made in Myst. Raise your hand if you knew which stone to click for Full Throttle's Brick Wall Puzzle when you first encountered it. Do I need to say the words "Goat Puzzle" to activate the nightmares of Broken Sword fans? Gabriel Knight 3 has the Moustache Puzzle, a puzzle so byzantine and infamous that it has its own Wikipedia page. Now consider this fact: Myst predates all those games by a year or more.
The Way People Use Myst As A Catch All Justifiably Pisses Off Other Communities When It Is Their Game Of Choice In That Position
I'm not a fan of Souls games. I have completed two Dark Souls games and am busy at work on Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. All these experiences have made me confident that I am not capable or willing to derive joy from the Souls sub-genre and its mechanical quirks. However, seeing so many previews, reviews, and threads characterizing Scorn as "Myst-like" makes me more appreciative of Souls fans. I get it now. I finally understand why Souls fans bristle whenever they hear any role-playing game with open-world environmental storytelling or repeat player-character death described as "Souls-like." Just because Scorn is an atmospheric puzzle adventure game doesn't make it "like Myst." The same goes for challenging puzzles. Seeing every single adventure or puzzle game be called "Myst-like" because it has one or two tricky logic puzzles drives me up the wall.
A puzzle being complicated or relying on you fiddling around with weird gears for ten minutes doesn't make it on par with the ones in Myst. Again, what makes the Myst franchise so special is how much craft and care goes into piggybacking the player into knowing where to look for clues or how to find new locations or puzzles. Meticulous detail is injected into every frame and screen, and, as a result, every screen is distinct from the previous one. When Scorn drops you into a new area, and you don't know where to go because everything looks the same, be aware that doesn't happen in Myst or Riven. The Ages, or in-game worlds, always emphasize scale and scope and do tremendous work to communicate that to you every step of the way. In Riven, the player's starting position becomes a speck when they summit a mountain, and from that new perspective, you can notice scaffolds, walkways, and pipes snaking around to future locations in the game. That sense of scale was unheard of in 1993 with Myst and was still impressive in 1997 with Riven. If and when you get teleported or locked into a location, the game always moves to communicate a new batch of lore, context clues, and worldbuilding. The NPCs in the Myst franchise tell you precisely what you need to do and who you need to worry about as you do it. If that happened at least a half dozen times in Scorn, it would have spared me from so much frustration.
People cite the Myst games' characters sometimes speaking in an unsubtitled alien language as a demerit. However, a lot of consideration is put into the writing and acting of these scenes. Even if you don't take the time to bother translating anything, you can register the intent of the performances from their inflections and emotional expressions. However, if you take the time to rewatch scenes and audio logs to record and translate them, you will learn more about the world, characters, and story. Taking that step is optional and only for the most die-hard fans, but it is there, and the game even provides all the tools to make it happen. Even the most inscrutable puzzles in Riven often have context clues wherein the player can register the purpose of devices from the scenery and nearby objects surrounding them. A bear trap next to pellets is quickly discerned as a trap for frogs, and pathways hidden behind doors is the game doubling down on its general philosophy that everything is permitted when you want to move forward in the story. Myst and Riven's "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to environmental storytelling and puzzle design is easier to process than Scorn's "maybe, sometimes" approach. Once you grapple with the core logic of a Myst game, you are basically set for the entire franchise. On the other hand, Scorn exists in a microcosm where its core logic exists entirely in a vacuum.
Scorn Has An Identity Issue. Myst And Riven Have An Identity, And Cyan Knows Their Target Audience Perfectly
That last point in the previous paragraph is something I wish to discuss in more depth. Every area in Scorn has subtle but significant changes in how to play it from previous ones. That in and of itself is not why I think the game has an "identity crisis," but when combined with its awful combat and shooting sequences, it feels like a game that doesn't know what it wants to be. I don't know what motivated Ebb Software to include the stealth and shooting levels in Scorn, but considering how poorly they play and control, it feels like they were out of their element. The slow but moody pacing during player exploration and self-discovery sequences immediately clash against the action-oriented ones, making the game feel like a herky-jerky mess. And the lack of balance with the difficulty of the game's puzzles suggests another flaw. They either ran out of novel puzzle ideas after a certain point or rushed through certain parts of the game's development (i.e., Q&A or focus testing).
In this regard, I again press critics of Myst or those that reviewed Scorn and declared this issue endemic to the Myst franchise. Say what you will about Cyan, but they know their audience and have never prompted them to stomach uncomfortable combat sequences no one asked for, even when it was the zeitgeist in the industry. When everyone included stealth sequences in their adventure games (i.e., Dreamfall, Beyond Good & Evil, etc.), the Myst franchise remained true to its style and aesthetic. It and Cyan continue to do so to this day, even twenty-seven years after the release of Myst on the Macintosh computer. If the Dragon Quest franchise has proven anything, small evolutions to an established franchise can be as important as big earthshattering ones. From Myst to Myst IV, when the series introduced a new mechanic or aesthetic with a different area or Age, you could bet there would be cheap imitators that would emulate them. Myst V ditching FMV live-action actors marked the end of an era, and, again, the industry and genre followed suit.
I also don't understand why people speak of Myst sticking to its guns across decades of video game history as a bad thing. The Souls games span over ten years, and even more if you want to throw in King's Field, and have been praised for remaining faithful to what their audience has come to expect. Supergiant Games has aesthetical hallmarks that make it unmistakable that something they have touched is theirs. DoubleFine and Tim Schafer have a style of comedic storytelling most actively seek out when a new project of theirs gets announced. But, okay, it's cool to dunk on Myst and Riven because sometimes you have to click on levers while looking at pre-rendered backgrounds. Cyan and the Miller brothers are happy to no longer be on the "throne" of the cutting edge and are perfectly content with making games for the audience that got them through good times and bad. I fail to see how that's not an admirable accomplishment considering they have been making games for over thirty years.
The Myst franchise is no longer "that series," but the Miller brothers are still kicking around and happy to be making games, and so are their fans. To a certain degree, Cyan is aware of who buys their games, and they plan accordingly. When the Miller brothers and figureheads behind Myst retire and look back at their body of work, they will not suffer because of what their games are not or did not do. I feel confident that they will look back and say, "Yeah, we probably shouldn't have made an MMO, but everything else sure was a lot of fun!" To a certain degree, we will all say some permutation of that when we get to that stage of our lives, or at least I hope. When the recently restored Cyan announced a complete remaster of Riven this year, I could not help but get excited. I was only nine years old when Riven was released. Playing it was a formative experience in my life, and for that alone, it still stands as one of my all-time favorite games ever. I never used hint forums or guides, and it took me five whole weeks of almost non-stop playing to see the game's good ending. I consider it a masterpiece, and nearly every game in the series. But before I sign off, I recommend Dark Seed if you want to play an H. R. Giger-styled adventure experience instead of Scorn.
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