by Siren Drake » Sat 30 Jul 2016 19:49
If you want to play "Which of these things is not like the others?" with the games in the Myst franchise, Uru is the odd man out. It has avatars, because originally it was designed to be a multi-player game, so people needed to be able to see and distinguish between each other's characters. Fortunately, for those of us who prefer the first person view, Uru can be played in first person mode. That's the typical default for Myst games, because you're supposed to be playing as if you yourself were the one there and exploring all those fascinating environments. Indeed, the very name Uru can be read as U-R-U, or You Are You.
Uru has excellent environments and excellent puzzles. There are a couple of moments in the Path of the Shell expansion where the puzzle solutions can only be described as "What the heck were you thinking, Cyan Worlds?!" Which is a shame, because up until the very end, Er'Cana is some of the best work Cyan Worlds has ever done. And that's saying something. The fact that they used the exact same solution again is just … inexplicable. But still, there's some first class stuff in there. To appropriate what Quentin Tarantino said of the movie It Follows, it's so good it makes you angry that it's not great.
The story in Uru wasn't as satisfying as it could have been, but it's important to remember that, even if you add on the To D'ni and Path of the Shell expansions, Uru is just the first chapter in what was intended to be a very long-running story arc. Sadly, that first chapter is probably all we'll get. Uru is the game that nearly bankrupted Cyan Worlds.
