Amazon.com: Myst IV: Revelation (DVD-ROM): PC: Video Games

141 Reviews

5 star:		(62)
4 star:		(26)
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2 star:		(7)
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3.6 out of 5 stars (141 customer reviews)

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230 of 238 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Massive requirements but amazing puzzle gameplay, October 12, 2004

By	Lisa Shea "LisaShea.com" - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

The latest Myst game is out. With Myst IV Revelation, you have TWO DVDs full of gaming information. This takes up 8 GIG on your hard drive for a full install. It is massive.

Yes, as you can imagine, the graphics are gorgeous. Birds fly over to the birdfeeder as you watch, and then flit off. The water ripples beneath you. The clouds drift by. The art nouveau architecture is simply gorgeous, and each world has its own culture. It is a visual feast.

The sounds are equally immersive. Peter Gabriel did some of the sound. The audio track not only draws you into the world, but also gives you clues, if you listen carefully to what sounds you are hearing in which locations.

But how is the *gameplay*? I am a huge, huge fan of the Myst series so I have to say, if you're patient, the game is really fun. But you can't expect to just zip through the game quickly. The point is to sit with a glass of wine, roaming around, clicking on things, exploring your world. There is a lot of trial and error before you discover what the next puzzle is - and then a lot of twiddling before you get the hang of it.

Unfortunately, the very first puzzle, of lining up audio wave signals, is REALLY annoying. The helper is trying to give you assistance but most of the time his comments strike you as quite intrusive. It's not a puzzle at all that will "make sense" to most people. I am actually an audio buff and my boyfriend is a musician who plays with audio files, and even so we found the controls and setup hard to work with. This would have been find as an end-game puzzle, but it is awful as the way to get people into the game in the first place. The other subsequent puzzles are much more enjoyable and logical.

I wanted to pick up all sorts of things, and got frustrated that I could see books and not read them. You could never tell which pieces of paper were readable and which were mysteriously glued to the table. The amulet that you pick up is fun, giving you visions and sounds to help you move the plot along. However it blinks pretty much ANY time you zoom in on things. Why not just have it show you the video automatically the first time, and let you click on it after that to replay the video? The constant click - zoom - click - amulet got a bit much. Especially when the video was on the meaningless side.

I really would have hoped that by now the game would be "fully motion" enabled. In the first myst, you in essence walked through paintings. You could only look at the screen and then click to go somewhere else. You couldn't turn and rotate. Through Myst II-IV we got more and more video, first as tiny integrations and then as full screens. But while we can "look around us" in Myst IV, you still have to click and wait to move your feet. Maybe Myst V will actually let you walk. It's that clicking that begins to wear on me, the click, wait, click, wait. The quick-hop ability to leap to certain spots does help, but I would rather be able to move seamlessly through my world.

That all being said, Myst IV is definitely a must-have for any puzzle lover. The graphics and sounds are gorgeous, and the puzzles are challenging and fun. I do have a walkthrough online but please do NOT use walkthroughs until you are really stuck. The point of this game is not to race through and be done. The point is to enjoy the world, to immerse yourself and to try, try, try and finally succed at the puzzle in front of you.

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555 of 625 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Warning Defective By Design - Won't play on thousands of PCs, October 30, 2004

By	M. Rose (Downtown Colorado) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I so wanted to play this latest installment in the Myst series that I purchased the game even before it was released. I had heard it had demanding system requirements but I thought, hey, I've got a brand new P4 2.2GHz machine, wonderful Radeon 9800 video card and 1Gig of RAM. That the game shipped only on DVD seemed ideal: I have two DVD players, both top o' the line.

Imagine my surprise and disappointment when, after installing the game, Myst IV refused to recognize either of my DVD drives. I uninstalled, reinstalled, and still, no play. I'm getting frustrated and go out on the 'net and look at the support forums. I learn thousands of people were getting the same error. The only solution that seemed to apply to me? Ubi Support suggests I go out and buy "a cheap DVD player." There is no other solution provided (they have stock answers if you happen to run virtual drive software or have last year's graphic card, but for people like me, our curse is to have top-grade hardware).

Turns out, Ubi programmed the notoriously lame and always disruptive MacroVision anti-piracy software into the game. This anti-piracy software is famous for screwing up any program where the developers were dumb and lazy enough to use it. Ubi Support indicated that they knew full well that MacroVision would make Myst IV unplayable for a huge percentage of us who were foolish enough to purchase the game, who didn't have "cheap DVD players." In other words, Ubi designed Myst IV to be defective.

If the slide show you get to see while you are installing is any indication, then the thousands of us who wasted $40 on this drink-coaster-ware are really missing out on something good.

So, caveat emptor, fellow gamers. Try a friend's copy before forking out the clams for a game that likely won't run on your machine. Just ask the Ubi developers. They designed it that way.

By the way, bad copy protection software only keeps honest people out of the game. I wonder if lost sales due to defective design and bad press will be more significant than lost sales due to piracy...

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36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Myst" the perfect mark - but only by a little bit., November 25, 2004

By	Zyxx "Dragon of Eternity" (Nacogdoches, TX USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

For some reason, I love this game. It's a little odd, because while I was playing it I kept thinking "Why'd they do it like that? It should have been done this way". But there's no doubt that if you want your good old-fashinoned Myst weirdness -beautiful, interactive worlds with more cool gizmos than you can shake Jules Verne at - Revelation delivers in spades.
But first, a few warnings.
As you might expect, it being on DVD and everything, the amount of memory this game takes is HUGE. 3 gigs is a MINIMUM PC install. Full install is 8. Minimum gives you ridiculous screen-transition times, often over 3 seconds. This is a long time for gamers, and sometimes I'd look up a puzzle solution just to make sure I was on the right track so I wouldn't have to endure running back and forth to check a machine or find a symbol.
Second, you need a pretty good, new graphics card. The graphics are still pretty nice - okay, gorgeous - without a top-of-the-line card, but having some more depth perception would have been nice.
Thirdly, I found the acting quite disappointing. Everything sounds scripted. Longtime fans might remember a gibbering, drooling Achenar. The new one looks and sounds like a pirate. Granted, it's been 20 years since you've seen him, but I think research has shown that extended periods of solitary confinement cause more mental breakdowns than they correct.
Finally: during one really quite fantastic travel sequence to a magical spirit realm, they play a song with discernable lyrics. I'd have preferred it if they'd used the more unintelligible chanting in the rest of the game, but maybe that's just me.

Now, for the good bits: The world is even more interactive than before. One really cool addition is the ability to "tap" on almost anything. Doing so produces a very quiet sound that is more or less what you'd expect to hear if you tapped such an object: wood, metal, water, whatever. If tapping on something would reasonably cause a visible effect, that appears as well: water ripples, pans vibrate. Sometimes the effects are two way- touching fire or a powered circuit board makes your ghostly hand recoil, accompanied by a painful-sounding hiss or zap. There's more life than ever before: one world in particular has no less than five different kinds of more-or-less interactive creature, and you'll likely have some interesting encounters with each of them, whether it's being snubbed by fish-eating karnak or narrowly avoiding dismemberment by a hungry camoudile.
The puzzles, of course, are a central aspect of the game, and be thankful that there's a built-in guide. If you know someone who's puffed up on his own intelligence, get him this game. He'll be weeping within hours. Simply put, they're hard. Really hard. Of course, it didn't help that I had to wait 2-5 seconds between each screen. Had I possessed the resources, I'd have done a full install and maybe avoided looking for hints simply because I didn't want to waste more time and maybe risk my computer crashing from memory shortage by going back to check that symbol-covered panel AGAIN. Though you can take pictures of nearly anything and look at them at will, a weaker graphics card like mine puts visual garbage over the pictures and so lowers the usefulness of that feature. Keep pen and paper handy.

If you liked Myst, you'll probably like Revelation. If you didn't like Myst, why are you reading this?