What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

I played the 2021 Myst remake this last week, through one Age (Selenitic). I very much enjoyed the Riven remake, but for some reason this version of Myst really turned me off? To me it's like the original's style was very heavily based not just around particular aesthetics but the specific vantage points that you see the landscape from, and how those vantage points emphasized certain pieces of the Ages or puzzles. In Riven, I thought Cyan did a great job in 3D keeping the cohesion of traveling between five islands. Myst just feels... Wrong? Definitely cramped and lacking in impact.

One of my favorite bits was that all the Myst linking books from Ages spit you out directly and perfectly under the library chandelier; it feels like the border of waking up from a dream to land looking up at a disorienting geometric object looming between you and a painted sky before you click off, snapping back to the view of the library and refocusing your goal to the next loop through another Age. And the link process would always smack you with that abrupt black screen, the dramatic sound, and then immediately drop you in some completely alien point with no fade-in. The loosey-goosey 3D and loading screens really kill all the emphasis and foreign feeling, IMO.

Myst was always really video gamey, but it felt like it was in a way that stressed that there was stuff you could do with that to evoke a mood. Without the precise ambience it just feels... Like an Unreal Engine puzzle video game. And puzzles weren't really Myst's strong suit.

INDIKA (2024)

Finally I got this game. It always caught me eye. So glad I did. It’s so weird and interesting and well thought out, I was hoping for so long that it was what I thought, and it is. Hopefully that excited mess of words conveys my enjoyment of the game.

Sometimes the sound doesn’t match the animations in cut scenes, but the story and gameplay get me past those very rare and minor hiccups.