![]() However, as a prologue to something bigger, it did its job well enough to keep me invested in its follow-up game on the horizon. I enjoyed its bleak and haunting atmosphere, but was left unsatisfied by its length, narrative ambiguity, and so-so puzzle design. Late in 2021, the developers first released The Whisperer, a bite-sized first-person adventure set in the Lower Canadian wilderness circa the early 1800s, grounded by realism and yet tinged with the supernatural. If you’re a fan of Scratches, the Dark Fall series, or Barrow Hill, you’ll likely feel quite at home playing The Whispering Valley, even though its limited scope and minimalist story prevent the game from reaching those heights. This panoramic node-based adventure builds a suitably spooky mood with some great moments of exploration throughout – though not without some stumbles along the way. Even when the final product doesn’t quite hit the mark, I’ve always been able to find plenty of appeal in just about any horror adventure, and that’s exactly how I feel with Studio Chien d’Or’s perfectly competent The Whispering Valley. ![]() There's no way taking pictures can replace using a pen and paper to scribble down notes, something that would be exceptionally difficult to do while holding controllers and wearing a headset.Horror and point-and-click adventure gaming are a match like peanut butter and chocolate: allergies notwithstanding, the perfect marriage. But even with this modern facelift, the world of Myst remains mostly static, and even in 3D it still feels more like a painting of a place than an actual place.Īnd while a photomode has been added so you can take pictures of puzzle clues to use as reference, I still can't really imagine trying to solve the game in VR. In VR it's nice to see Myst from a new perspective, and even just on desktop it's a beautiful looking game: hypnotic ocean waves lapping at the shore, clouds rolling overhead, and a few nice details like a small green frog hopping along a bridge in the woods. Solving a puzzle, or even figuring out what the puzzle wants from you, results in plenty of happy eureka moments, not just from feeling smart but from having resisted the urge to cheat by looking up the answers. Sound often comes into play, which I really love, like a distant clunking sound while turning a wheel in a cabin, or the hum of a wire that lets you know a current is running through it, or an underground train puzzle where sounds play at the track intersections and combine with one another to give you directions. Sometimes simple observation can get you a long way toward solving a puzzle, like noticing a locked rocketship is connected to a brick bunker by an electrical wire. There's still a lot to enjoy, though, and plenty of clever puzzle design. There's a bit of story and lore told through books, notes, and holograms (originally they were cheesy FMV, now they're cheesy CG) but Myst is mostly built from puzzles, not stories. To gather the missing pages of the book and discover the story of the island and the family who once inhabited it, players need to solve elaborate puzzles that transport them to new islands, where they complete even more puzzles in order to return. In case you haven't had a chance to play one of the many versions of Myst in the past 28 years, the adventure game begins with you trapped on a strange island after reading a strange book. Myst, no matter how it looks in 2021, feels pretty outdated. Cyan Worlds say it's a "reimagined" Myst, but while it's far more modern-looking it's still almost exactly the same game. As a remake, Myst is a faithful one, but maybe a bit too faithful. ![]() And this new 3D Myst works on both desktop and in VR, so I got to spend time actually (virtually) walking around in it. Cyan Worlds has completely remade the game (again, following 2000's realMyst and 2014's realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, neither of which I played). It's a little weird to be back in Myst in 2021, after all this time.
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