Product Reviews

Myst and its sequel Riven are two of the bestselling computer games and have been enjoyed by around 10 million players worldwide. The quality of the rendered landscapes and the outstanding attention to detail have helped make these games popular.

The immersive game play involves the player as they solve complex problems to progress through the various ages or islands. Cyan, which made the first two games, passed on the job to Presto Studios, which has now produced Myst III - Exile. Fans will not be disappointed, as Cyan has worked closely with Presto Studios to ensure that Exile keeps the look and feel of the earlier games.

The most significant change is the inclusion of the Presto Studios Sprint Engine, which is used to drive the graphics display. Previously, the player moved through static snapshot views of the Myst landscape. However, in Exile, the player can now navigate within a seamless 360¼ virtual reality environment. The swirling panoramic views can be disorienting and it takes a while to find your bearings.

Clued up

The story commences 10 years after the end of Riven in a new age called Tomhana, where we are met by the central character, Atrus. But you are soon introduced to a new villain called Saaverdo and transported over to the central J'nanin island. Saaverdo's tale of abandonment and subsequent revenge unfolds as you begin solving the various puzzles that will enable you to explore all four ages. Only by visiting each age will you be able to solve the game.

Myst and Riven contained some very clever and intriguing puzzles, while others could be downright obscure and perverse. The gameplay in Exile is more direct. When you attempt to solve a puzzle, the necessary clues will normally be made available and you will receive immediate feedback when you have completed a task successfully. So you don't have to journey halfway around an island in order to see if what you have just done has made any difference.

Having said that, Exile's puzzles

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are as frustrating as ever. Some are fiendishly complex and will require copious note-taking, while others may appear difficult, but the sounds and symbols are not as significant as you might think. So, in the search for an answer to an apparently complex problem, you may completely bypass a simpler solution. Yet again, the attention to detail and the interaction with the landscape is most impressive. The movie animations are superbly crafted and the game continually rewards the player with snippets of information and character dialogue. To do the game real justice, you will want to play the sound through external stereo speakers to get the full Exile experience.

Smooth operator?

The installation instructions suggest a minimum system requirement of a 233MHz G3, running Mac OS 8.1 or higher. A minimal installation will require that you have available 200Mb of free disk space and run the program direct from the four CDs, or, preferably, you can load all the CD data folders onto your hard drive. Exile ran extremely smoothly on our 450MHz G4, but complaints have been raised on the www.myst3.com players' forum that the game will not function smoothly at the stated minimum specifications.

Irritatingly, the Mac installation places fonts that are only recognisable by PCs alongside the Mac fonts in the System folder and, if ATM happens to be installed, this will cause a System Error message to appear each time you start up your computer. If this happens, you will have to go to the fonts folder and remove the offending items.

Exile won't run natively in Mac OS X, but it should run fine using Classic. Ubi Soft and Presto Studios are working with Apple to ensure that any future OS X updates will incorporate the necessary fixes and optimisation. In the meantime, the installation should, automatically, ensure a Classic install is performed on OS X machines. These kind of problems are not going to stop you playing Exile on a Mac and should soon be resolved.

Not so long ago, Myst was regarded as a shining example of what a talented group of game designers could achieve on their Macs. Now you have to remove gunk from the System Font folder to tidy up a sloppy Mac installation and even the press kit CD contained many files that could only be read by a PC. Despite all this, Myst III - Exile is an excellent game and a worthy successor to Myst and Riven. This is a great adventure computer game for people who don't normally like computer games.

NEEDS: 233MHz G3, Mac OS 8.1 or higher, 64Mb RAM, 200Mb hard disk space, 4x CD-ROM, QuickTime 4.1 or higher