![]() There's almost no detail and very little texture to the game worlds-they all come off rather plastic. Pretty as they are, there's simply no comparison between these images and the earlier ones, and these screenshots fail to convey the gameplaying experience itself, which often seems to be a miserable cross between your average, polygonized FPS and Monkey Island. In End of Ages, the game designers made the decision to move to a fully immersive 3D environment-all movement is animated, at the cost of image definition and the aforementioned cut scenes (even the swirly fly-bys when you link into a new age are gone). The price for all this exquisite detail was restriction of movement-the first two games were essentially slideshows, series of static tableaus, and although the third and fourth games allowed 360 degrees of motion from any fixed position, movement between these 'nodes' was still static. Myst games have always placed a high premium on beauty and on spectacle-lots of elaborate, lushly decorated interiors and breathtaking exteriors, lots of cut scenes, usually fly-bys, whose only reason to exist was to give the player a visual treat-see the following examples from Myst, Riven, Exile and Revelations: It's not just the absurd and quest-like plot, but the very look of it. There's something profoundly un- Myst-ish about the entire game.In the end, you have to decide what to do with the Tablet, in an ending that mirrors the final choice of the original Myst, if by 'mirrors' we mean 'replicates the situation without any of the attendant tension or interest'. The whole thing is very vague, and there are also some kind of alien creatures who respond to the Slates and the Tablet. ![]() Yeesha and another D'ni survivor, Esher, send you on a dimly understood quest through the remains of the D'ni city and four other ages to collect four artifacts (the Slates) which will in turn release a fifth one-the fabulously powerful Tablet (not that we ever see even a hint of its power). ![]() She's also bugshit crazy but, surprisingly enough, not a homicidal maniac, which puts her ahead of the curve when it comes to her family.
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