My Favorite Puzzle Game Has an Unskippable Interlude with Peter Gabriel

In Cyan’s Myst games you can see the real seriousness of community theater, backyard cinema, starting from Mysteryin which founding brothers Rand Miller and Robyn Miller played all the characters in full motion video. Cyan is renowned for using FMV in its games, but even after Mystery AND Torn became hits, and the closest the Myst franchise ever came to a big-name cast was Brad Dourif (The Lord of the Rings) as a villain in Myst 3: Exile — which was not due to the casting, but because he was a fan of the series.

But there is one huge celebrity moment in the Myst series that is also the most astonishing musical choice I have ever experienced in a video game: Mystery 4: RevelationAn unmissable scene with Peter Gabriel.

On paper, there’s nothing great about Peter Gabriel’s unskippable cutscene. For example, it’s unskippable. What’s more, it comes out of nowhere—Myst, a steampunk FMV puzzle adventure series, is definitely not a “voiceover, English-language pop song” franchise. The cutscene visuals, while clearly a work of custom animation, are full of so many shapes spiraling out from the central screen that they inevitably resemble Winamp Visualization. And all of this leads to what is probably the worst puzzle ever to appear in a Myst game.

And yet… without irony, I love Peter Gabriel Winamp’s Unskippable Cutscene. Because of the joy of theater.

Peter Gabriel in the really undiscovered game Myst? you can ask. Peter Gabriel, progressive rock frontman, world music advocate, human rights activist – you know, “In Your Eyes”? This Peter Gabriel? How?!

Well, in the 90s Peter Gabriel got… Really on CD-ROMs. He produced two interactive music experiences/games, Xplora1: The Secret World of Peter Gabriel AND Peter Gabriel: Eve. And if you were someone who was interested in the possibilities of CD-ROM technology in the 90s, you were someone who played Mystery AND Torn.

Photo: Real World Media/MacPlay

In other words, like Dourif, Gabriel was his fan.

“When Mystery “It came out and I think it managed to create a feeling of other worlds where mystery and imagination were the draw, instead of the typical action-packed shooters,” said Gabriel in a 2004 IGN article“I think there’s a certain similarity to the way I try to create sound worlds. I really enjoyed working on Myst IV Revelation.”

Mystery 4 was always going to be a strange entry in the series, coming at a time when Ubisoft — demanding at work making popular games like Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia — owned the rights to the franchise. Story-wise, a direct sequel Mysteryit was the first time Ubisoft Montreal had made an adventure game with pre-rendered graphics, and this change Apparently it was a real struggle. The end result was a fascinating hybrid product. A custom-designed game engine delivered pre-rendered images with animated wind and water, and real-time features like lens flares and depth of field, so Mystery 4 the most cinematic and immersive game in the series. Despite this, the game still featured over an hour of FMV, with live actors in costumes playing the characters.

The game’s plot begins with Sirrus and Achenar (the mischievous adult sons of Atrus, who were trapped in another alternate world or Era at the end of the game) Mystery) break out and kidnap their much younger sister Yeesha. Your task is to explore their prison worlds and face them in the final era, Serenia, where Mystery 4 becomes not only a weird part of the series, but a really, really fascinating one.

If the Myst games have a consistent mechanic, it’s the anthropology of the puzzles—the clues to solving the puzzles are found in accounts and cultural artifacts from alternate worlds, usually ones that have been exploited and destroyed by the horrible members of Atrus’s family. Mystery 4 is the first game in the series that not only has something more complicated to say than “Don’t do colonialism” (instead, Mystery 4 (it’s about prison reform, but that’s a topic for another essay) — and it actually does what the franchise preaches.

Serenia is the first time that the culture you study is not separate from the people who belong to it. Unlike previous games, the natives not only appear, but they are not afraid of you, speak to you in a language you understand, and personally welcome you into their most sacred practices. There are definitely still some The natives of this land, so close to nature, so wise stereotypes prevail here, but for a Myst game this is a stratospheric leap in evolution.

Your search for answers will eventually lead you to the priests of Serenia, who offer to assist you find what you seek in their sacred realm of dreams, guided by your personal elemental spirit (The natives of this land, so close to nature, so wise). A robed priestess leads you into a sacred chamber. At her command, you lie down on a stone slab, and she places a carved stone above you with two holes symbolizing the “eyes of the Ancestors.” As she gives her final instructions, soothing but rhythmic music begins to play, pliable percussion and high-pitched synthesizers. And then, as you start to stumble…

…Peter Gabriel starts singing about curtains.

Congratulations: You’ve reached Peter Gabriel’s unavailable cutscene featuring the approximately three-minute-long track “Curtains,” originally the B-side to his 1986 single “Big Time.” Things can’t get any less weird from here!

After the cutscene ends, your spirit guide, in the form of Peter Gabriel’s disembodied voice, presents you with a… color-reversing puzzle. You are surrounded by colored orbs and you must make all of the orbs turn white (“Lend your energy to the ancestors” or something like that). If the game thinks the way you’re touching the orbs is too erratic, it plays a disapproving sound and many of the colored orbs are randomized.

Not only that, but that colorful puzzle is the bottleneck. If you got there, it’s probably because you’ve completed everything else you can. Until you get through that, that’s the whole game. Not an intuitive thinking machine, a notebook to look through, or a number system to decipher. A cutscene to set the tone, featuring a Peter Gabriel jam, followed by Peter Gabriel ASMR with colored balls.

It’s tonal nonsense. It goes against the core philosophies of the series’ puzzles. It’s a huge coup that doesn’t work. And I still love it, because the Myst games are — listen to me — a bit like theater.

Even though these are not RPGs, Cyan invited the player to co-create the game’s reality. Mystery AND Torn start with candid notes advising you to put on the best pair of stereo headphones you have, dim the room lights, and calibrate your screen and sound to get the best immersion that ’90s video games can deliver. Cyan also maintains a charming kayfabe with its community, in which the Myst franchise is based on true events, stemming from archaeological discoveries in the Southwestern United States and the personal history of the Atrus family.

These attempts at preserving the reality of Myst only show how imperfect the illusion is. The seams are right there, in front of you: amateurs, the limits of exploration in a pre-rendered 2D environment, long animations that make you wait, live-action footage superimposed over digital environments. The Myst games demand patience—with frustrating puzzles and waiting—and ask you to accept their reality because a tiny indie studio like Cyan can’t create a perfectly convincing illusion on its own.

In this context, what is the “Curtains” cutscene and Peter Gabriel (honestly, really quite good) acts as the gamer’s spiritual guide? It’s an invitation for a fan to come on stage to contribute to something they love. The scene is all over the place: the trapdoor lines, the microphones glued to the actors’ cheeks, the animation that looks more like Winamp, the song from out of left field, and the silly color-matching puzzle.

But you go down that route with your own mind, and the stage becomes a whole other reality, not just a platform for people reciting lines. Mystery 4Peter Gabriel’s unskippable cutscene is made entirely of really perceptible stitching, but it also feels like an truthful inventive choice from someone personally invested in the work.

Rand Miller, who claims to have a powerful dislike for acting, played Atrus in Mystery out of efficiency and necessity. And he’s stuck repeating his amateur performance ever since, because the fans wouldn’t have it any other way. It just wouldn’t be Atrus without the awkward vibes! And if I’m here for Rand Miller’s Atrus, how can I turn my nose up at Peter Gabriel’s spiritual guidance? How can I love Myst games and not love their biggest risks? I’m already lying on a slab of stone. It’s not demanding at all to close the circuit with my mind and relax by flying around that Winamp visualization while a rousing song plays. This is the Zen of Myst games.

Despite all this, the color mystery remains unsolved.