Best game (series of games) ever

[avevale_intelligencer]

Some of you may have heard of Myst, the graphics-intensive point-and-click puzzle-solving game that changed the face of gaming and apparently boosted the sales of those new-fangled CD-ROM thingies through the roof. A few may know of Riven, the sequel. One or two, I know, are familiar with Exile, which came after and was made by a different company under licence from Cyan, the original creators. The reason for this was that Cyan was busy working on a new departure for them, a spin-off from the main series of games and one they hoped would be as groundbreaking as the original.

The premise of the Myst series is like this. Deep beneath (as it turns out) New Mexico, till about two hundred years ago, there lived an age-old civilisation of humanoids called D'ni. They had the Art of writing books which described another world so perfectly that one could "link" through the book into the other world, and (if they had with them a book similarly describing the world they had come from) back again. At their peak, the D'ni had thousands of such Ages (as they called them) in great libraries, and the Writing of new Ages was a jealously guarded skill, and closely monitored: a badly written Age would be at best unstable, at worst lethal.

It was natural that the D'ni would be proud of this Art. Whether the Ages written were created, or simply linked to, has not been finally established, though much debated. At any rate, two hundred and some years ago, through a chain of circumstance too long to go into now, almost all the D'ni were either killed or driven into hiding, and the deep city fell. The Myst series of games tells the story of the last surviving D'ni on Earth, Atrus, and how, with the player's help, he eventually overcomes various loony relatives, rediscovers the way to D'ni and collects the survivors from other Ages, building them a new Age to live in.

Uru is set in present time. You, the player, are "called" to New Mexico, where you find a way into the Ages of the D'ni, and a quest to fulfil, set by Atrus's daughter Yeesha. Whereas all the other games were pre-rendered, point-and-click adventures, this one is done in realtime 3D, which required totally new technology for Cyan and resulted in a perceptible drop in the usually spectacular quality of the graphics. This was a necessary trade-off...because Uru was going to go live. Once you had completed the single-player quest, you would join a new MMORPG, with new Ages being provided regularly by Cyan, and an online community to share the adventures with.

It didn't work. Whether it could have I don't know...but there wasn't enough initial interest, and Uru Live was put to bed. Two expansion packs were issued, containing the Ages that were ready to go at that point, and the consensus is that that's our lot. Myst 4: Revelation duly came out, and Myst 5: End of Ages will follow in the autumn, and after that Cyan is apparently leaving D'ni behind and trying something new.

But the ending had not been written. Somehow, between the fans and Cyan, a shadow of the promised online community came into being and still lives. It's called Untìl Uru (Untìl here meaning "don't hold your breath" in Zuni or something) and for a very small one-off fee you can wander through D'ni and the associated Ages and meet and chat with other members. Whether any more will ever come of it than this I don't know, but one can hope. Life finds a way, usually.

Anyway, I've been playing for a week, and I've got on to the first of the expansions (I read a lot of hints and so on when it seemed I was never going to get there, so I'm not finding it nearly as hard as I would have unaided) and I'm wandering through this huge old empty underground city and it's wonderful. I have been in love with the whole concept of the D'ni since I first saw a coming-soon poster for Myst back in the Middle Ages. The idea of travelling to another world by touching a moving picture in a book rings all the bells in my head: the idea of making a world by writing in a book...just seems so obvious to me that I can't imagine why it isn't possible. I have my Untìl Uru account registered. Some time in the next few weeks I will, at last, get there.

So, um, yes. Squee.