Myst III: Exile Reviews

ITS A SMART GAME. REQUIRES YOU TO THINK.

It's ok, though I wish their was a remake.

Not as good as Riven but still fun to play.

I know this game has some detractors in Myst circles, and it is super old, but it remains a pleasure to replay every several years or so. It has all the elevators you could hope for in a Myst game, along with crawling through ducts, turning on the power, dealing with Atrus' dysfunctional family--all the staples. Plus it has 100% more Brad Dourif than any other game in the series. Edanna is still a nightmare to navigate and it's gotten a little patchy, but overall I think it's worth a play-through, especially if you're feeling nostalgic.

Used to love this game, played it for hours. But now, Steam has broken it- just appears as the bottom left quarter taking up the entire screen. Is there any chance that Steam can fix it?

Still have so much love for this one. It's definitely the most accessible of the Myst games and it's the one I would recommend to a novice to the genre. You could probably get through it without a walkthrough, which I can't say for the others. The puzzles generally come together well, and when you figure out the solution it never feels unfair - you never go "how was I supposed to get that?" Generally a beautiful world too.

An enjoyable expansion to the world of Myst. Great acting, and decent story. I liked most of the puzzles and found the whole thing to be better than Riven.

This is a really cool, atmospheric game. Creates a sense of wonder. While it doesn't quite live up to Riven, feeling more like a (big budget) spin-off than a true sequel, there's still a lot to love in Myst III. The environments are genuinely imaginative and evocative and Brad Dourif's performance rocks. The puzzles have some satisfying payoffs. What it lacks compared to Riven is a sense of being an indifferent, living world: Myst 3's puzzles and "Ages" are more contrived, and while it's justified in-universe, it's more like a trip to a theme park than the infiltration of an alien world. The game's structure is more like that of Myst 1, with a hub and spoke thing. It's good that the soundtrack incorporates more live instrumentation than Myst or Riven did, though Jack Wall's music sometimes misses the mark, being far too bombastic for what's happening. The soundtrack is great, though, and usually blends in properly. It's all nicely implemented with dynamic layering. The game uses a seamless spherical rendering system that allows you to look around pre-rendered panoramas freely, and interaction animations are less likely to lock you in place. The annoying side effect is that you have to constantly roll your view around as you jump from node to node. One Age, which appears far too dark on modern displays, is particularly disorientating. This game might need a reshade to correct the gamma. The in-game calibration screen is from the CRT era and has no built in gamma tweakers.