Part 22: Lore: Myst Summary

Lore: A summary of Myst

I realize I've said that knowledge of Myst's story isn't required... But it could be nice to know. If you want a more comprehensive overview, I'm going to plug Magnatux's LP again. But if you want a cliff notes version...


This might be the original resolution

Myst begins with you, the player, finding a mysterious book with an astonishing (for 1993) moving picture depicting an island covered in strange objects and buildings. For one reason or another you place your hand on the picture and are whisked away on your very first link to the eponymous island of Myst.


Pictured. Note the weird misshapen mountain and the old timey rocket ship.

You arrive, gormless and confused, to an empty mysterious island. Fortunately, if you check a door you arrive next to, you can get access to a recording which explains quite a bit.

_{If, however, you are a six year old with poor object permanence and a short attention span, you might just never find the damn thing and swear off the game for another five years.}


it would take 5 years for them to replicate the Star Wars grainy hologram technique

You get a grainy message from this guy, Atrus, to his significant other Catherine. He suspects one of his sons is destroying his books, and moved the remaining ones to places of protection. Those places being a variety of somewhat arbitrary puzzle locks solved with obscure hints from the observatory on top of the weird looking mountain.

But the library holds other secrets. A red book and a blue book, and when you open them, you meet these happy fellows.


Nothing makes people relatable like an extreme close up.

Sirrus and Achenar, Atrus' sons. They each tell you the other brother has trapped them in these books, and to free them you must travel to the ages connected to Myst and collect the red/blue pages missing from each book.

So you, having nothing better to do than watch the water pool screensaver in that imager from earlier, do so.


You explore the lush and tall canopies of Channelwood,


The barren and alien wastes of Selenetic,


The slick and precise fortress of Mechanical,


And the wood and stone impossibility of Stoneship,

Finding red and blue pages in each age. But Atrus' journals discusses these ages, and described each of them as inhabited. Your visits, however, are to abandoned places. And its not long before you discover why.


Yes that is a body part in the box on the left!
Achenar is a sadist, who keeps torture instruments and symbols of death in his private quarters on every Age.


I think that's the only rug on the entire Age
Sirrus is a greedy sociopath, wanting nothing more than to extract wealth from every age.

So you, as the player, presumably decide that neither of these assholes should be set free. _{Or you free one and rather grimly discover that the only way out of a prison book is to swap places with someone, shortly before your friend burns the book you're in.} But both brothers mention another book you absolutely shouldn't touch, and considering they're jerks, you go ahead and open it up.


You can tell he's good because he's giving the camera some space.

So you find Atrus, who doesn't try to deal or wheedle or blame, but explains that if you can find a page the brothers hid, he can get back to Myst and fix everything. He seems nice, and furthermore hasn't left a trail of plundered wealth and tools of death across the ages, so you gladly comply.

And Atrus is quite nice! He opens up the library, gives you free run of Myst, and states that this terrible chapter with his children is solved.



... solved for good.

Thus the game ends, until Atrus finally gets up the nerve to ask you to solve another of his problems in Riven.