Reviews

So, Kaelis here with a review of Cyan Worlds’ latest iOS release: “realMyst for iPad”. You can grab it from the Apple App Store here. I’d recommend reading this review first, however.

My first experience with Myst was playing a friend’s copy of realMyst for pc, so realMyst has a certain nostalgia value, and well, to be honest, Cyan’s iOS port of this beloved game disappoints.

On loading it up, I was feeling rather positive, the opening was good, the new loading screens really added a nice feeling of how disorienting linking must be, I really, really like them. Its not a flyby, but having been in Uru for quite a while, it works,and it’s a huge improvement on those screens.

Ok, all looks cool, the water looks pretty decent, I thought as I wandered along the dock, I turned and walked into the imager room… And what’s this? A small loading bar as I wandered into the room. It yanked me right out of the world of Myst, and right back into my hotel room in Sydney. I thought to myself, surely they could’ve managed to at least have parity with the engine they had so many years ago – at least, I’d hoped, their new realMyst could page in content at least as well as plasma 1 did for the original realMyst

It was then that I wandered up to check out the library, and the observatory… More loading bars. I went ok… Let’s have a look at the books in the library… Well, yeah. The book pages were incredibly low-resolution, and grainy. They are actualy barely readable.

I went back over Myst Island and noticed more and more low-resolution textures, bad seams on the animated textured objects used as ripples in the water around the mast of the ship.

I haven’t mentioned this yet, but in general, the whole game is rather laggy, on a iPad3, and the control scheme is slow, clunky, and counterintuitive… You touch to move, any movement in that touch is interpreted as a swipe, and will turn you instead and you also touch to interact. I would’ve much preferred dual thumb/joystick style spots on the screen, and then touch objects to interact.

At this point, I realised that the “Epic Citadel” tech demo, that supports the first generation iPad had better performance (even on the aforementioned 1st gen iPad), looked significantly better, sounded better, and controlled better. The epic citadel demo had roughly the same amount to render, as Myst Island, if not more, infact.

As much as realMyst had a great deal of nostalgia value for me, that was about when I closed it in disgust. What exactly had Cyan been spending their time on? I know that the engine they used supports day-night cycles… Yet they removed the lovely ones from realMyst. I later tried to reopen it, only to be met with a massively long loading screen, it was about that point that I decided that this was no longer worth my time.

All in all a massive disappointment, I’d really recommend people steer clear of this one.