The Myst series

I'm pondering whether to get started on these or not... so I'm looking for some feedback from anybody who played any of them: how many have you played ? Did you like it ? What did you like about it/them ? What did you not like about it/them ?

How big of a factor is the atmosphere ?
See, I'm not usually much into adventure games and silly puzzles, but if the atmosphere is good enough, and I get sucked in deep enough, then I'll cringe a bit and plod through the damn puzzles...

What about difficulty - again, since I'm probably not much good at solving puzzles, and my limited experience with adventure games suggests that I might just get annoyed if puzzles are made stupidly difficult just for the sake of it...

Did any one game of the series stand out in any way ?
Does it matter if I play them out of order, do I lose anything significant of the plot/timeline ?

thank you.

Even if I have a Myst game somewhere, I have never played it and don't intend to. Therefore I have no own experience with this one or this series, but I have found this for you.

Well I am extremily dumb so Myst isn't the best choice for me. They are legendary games with good reason, but when puzzles start to include algorithems and other things I hated at school, no thanks.

My mom adores them, and she is actually good at them.

Bijo: heh, thank you - you didn't really have to go out looking for links, though. I did that myself, but the reviews don't always tell you what you're looking for, and that's why I wanted some feedback from people, rather than from some reviewer that may or may not have even played throughout the whole game...

Fragony: yeah, that's the kind of puzzles I was kinda afraid... I didn't hate them myself, but it's definitely not something I'd want to do for fun...

thanks, you guys.

I think the first one in the series is quite good. The environments are quite attractive - although they are in fact only 2D - and the plot is interesting and original.

I found the puzzles quite logical, unlike some of this type of game, and hard enough to be a challenge but logical enough so that you can keep making progress.

The problem for me was that something weird went wrong at a certain point and the damn game couldn't read my savegames anymore. So I had to abandon all my saves and reinstall. The myst series was designed primarily on and for the Mac and is notoriously unreliable on the PC, you've got to have Quicktime to make it work, and as I recall you've got to have exactly the *right* version of Quicktime for each one (except IMO the first) or they won't run. And maybe they won't run anyhow. Or will eat your savegames or something stupid like it did to me.

As for the later games in the series, they use this sort of pseudo-3D which was innovative at the time I guess but which looks kinda hokey now and is rather disorienting. That's part of the reason I liked the earlier game better.

Myst (the original game) is certainly worth a look because it's quirky and original enough to appeal to at least some folks who aren't usually into this type of game. It's also in my experience the most reliable of the series, but as I said I myself had problems with even this one.

gotcha, thank you very much, screwtype. I wasn't aware of the stability issues and savegames stuff - I mean, I expected some of that, especially with the earlier games, but not as much...
Thank you again for your feedback.

In all fairness, my savegame issue seemed to be something of a rarity when I went to the Myst help forums to try and help solve it. So you probably wouldn't encounter it. It pretty much killed my interest in the game though, because after it happened I had to go right back to the start of the game and found I had forgotten the solutions to the puzzles and couldn't be bothered trying to figure them out again.

You may well have issues with the later games though. I certainly did - one of them wouldn't even run, even after I'd done all the things the Myst helpers told me I should do - and the other one was pretty finicky. Problems on PC's with the later games are quite commonplace.