I finished Myst 3: Exile a while ago. My lack of posting about it probably gives a good idea of how I felt about it at the end.

Edanna was fun. It was a bit more linear than I expected, but the puzzles made a lot of sense as a teaching Age. For its time, the graphics were beautiful and engaging. My only complaint was that it was sometimes difficult to tell which bits were background and which were pieces of the puzzles.

When I got to Amateria, I just used a walkthrough. The puzzles made absolutely zero sense to me, and even after completing the Age, I have no idea what it was trying to teach.  The “lesson” was a clue as to how to solve the puzzles, but had little bearing on the Age itself. This is where the change in game creators comes through most clearly. This Age threw me out of the game and made me want to give up on the entire Myst franchise.

I’m pretty sure that whoever developed this game had a hand in Minkata in Myst: Online. One messed-up, overly-difficult Age that is completely unrelated to the game’s story, or the story at large, can ruin an entire game.

It’s been long enough that I’m considering installing Myst 4 and 5. Maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment. We’ll see.