Posted by Andrew Plotkin

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/10/making-of-myst

Bit of news on the historic preservation front. Cyan has posted the "Making of Myst" video from 1993, remastered in high-resolution from the original video files. Credit to Ted Sase for a fantastic job.

This 13-minute video was included on the original 1993 Myst CD-ROM. Because CD-ROMs were enormous, and they had all this free space left over...! The original Quicktime movie data was a whopping 73 megabytes. It looked kinda like this:

Okay, that's a Youtube rip, so it's probably worse than what I watched on my Mac Centris 610. But this was highly compressed video data. Also color grading hadn't been invented.

Comparison, today's version:

How is this possible? A couple of years ago, the Video Game History Foundation got permission to scan and digitize a pile of videotapes from Cyan's vault.

With that material available, Ted Sase was able to recover the original recordings and recreate the original video in 4K res. I'm pretty sure he redid all the titles, the transitions, the lot. In-game footage re-recorded from the game, of course. Ooh, is that a fixed aspect ratio? Nice.

There's a couple of brief shots that haven't improved. (See "Testing", 11:45.) I assume that footage was not found, so Sase couldn't do anything except color-correct the CD-ROM version. And of course the images filmed from CRTs have no more pixels than they did in 1993. (Although the monitor desync stripes have been cleaned up!)

But I'm just nitpicking to reassure the creator that his efforts have been appreciated. This is an amazing effort. My congratulations.

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/10/making-of-myst

Posted by Andrew Plotkin

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/09/post-equinox

Continued from previous post. I finished all of these! Sometimes with hints.

• Strange Antiquities
• Daymare Town
• The House of Tesla

Strange Antiquities

• by Bad Viking -- game site

A worthy sequel to Strange Horticulture, packed with all the stuff I enjoy. Observation of a wide variety of evidence. Indirect logic, occult symbols, allusive clues, alchemical reference books, and secret panels. So many secret panels! And a cat.

The story is better integrated, a season-arc which you investigate -- or help other people investigate, really; you're just the shopkeeper. (Cozy!) But of course you get dragged in to resolve the crisis at the end.

Exploration is actively encouraged this time around. Horticulture more or less tied you to the shop, except for specific missions. Wandering the uncanny landscape at random just kicked your dread meter. In Antiquities, the map is tighter -- the town of Undermere. And wandering the town is fun! You probably don't want to intrude on private homes or the creepy woods, but there's no penalty for checking out libraries, museums, parks, and City Hall. Not to mention the plant shop from the first game. Useful surprises may await.

(Later the map is extended to more precarious locations, where you have to be more careful. You'll know 'em when you see 'em.)

My only nit is that the ending isn't much more than an extra-large mission, followed by a wrap-up scene. It's a perfectly satisfying ending to the story -- but it doesn't feel more satisfying than the rest of the game. Which is, to be sure, very satisfying to play. Go play it.

An apology: I previously referred to the setting as "European-ish medieval-ish". That was silly of me. Undermere is a spooky riff on Windermere, the English Lake District. The weird local cultists are very British cultists. And I feel like it's the 1800s; I bet someone can pin that down more precisely.

Daymare Town

• by Mateusz Skutnik -- game site

A remake of a series of Flash games from, I think, 2007-2013. According to the Kongregate page, anyhow. (Remember Kongregate?)

I have always loved Skutnik's style, ink-expressive and creepy and subtly surreal. Cyclopean cliffs and abysses. Floating rocks. Brick arches which crumble silently into the sky. I was happy to see the Submachine series reappear on modern platforms (as Submachine: Legacy), and Slice of Sea a couple of years before that.

Daymare Town has all of that, in spades and more. Maybe more than enough of it. I honestly don't remember what the original Flash games were like -- but in this one, exploring is intensely finicky. Layers and layers of rooms, alleys, and niches. Does this alley have nooks to the left and right as well as ahead? You'd better check and double-check, every time. The art style just doesn't try to convey it.

(The game has a "hard" mode in which objects are slightly less prominent. I didn't generally have a problem noticing objects; it's exits that are tricky. An "easy mode" for exits would have been a benefit, I think.)

Remember I said Neyyah's problem was balance? Everything Daymare Town does is familiar -- it's the same kind of gameplay as in Submachine. And I like that gameplay. I enjoy a good pixel hunt. But it felt like this time, I was grinding through the landscape. Traversing every room over and over, hoping to unearth that one last cog that will uncover one more orb that will unlock the next gate. By the last chapter, I was playing from a walkthrough.

The puzzles are generally lightweight use-this-on-that. It's only hard because, again, there's a lot of stuff scattered around a lot of landscape. By mid-game, experimentation means clicking thirty or forty inventory items. And in a surreal world, puzzles require a lot of experimentation. (Why a seashell? Why there?)

Nearly all of these items are peripheral to the main game -- there are many side interactions and achievements to discover. That's great; they add to the texture of the world; but you've still got this very bulky inventory to deal with.

The story... is barely a story. Something's up with the mist and the world going away, but don't expect extensive narration. It's all environment and weird little characters to interact with. This is Skutnik's forte (is there really a cohesive storyline to Submachine? Do we care?) so just roll with it. A running schtick takes the piss out of "___ will remember that", which made me chuckle every time.

No, play it for the artwork and the visual style. Also, this release includes the platformer-interlude originally published as Daymare Cat, in which you assemble an audio track by Cat Jahnke (as "Cat and the Menagerie"). Worth the price of admission on its own.

The House of Tesla

• by Blue Brain Games -- game site

I said I wanted more The Room fan games, and here it is.

Tesla is a followup to the House of Da Vinci series, which was such a Room riff that it straight-up lifted its magic-lens idea. (Not a criticism -- the Riven remake borrowed it too. It's too good an idea to not borrow.) This time around, we swap the magic lens for a magic "see electrical flows" device. You can also use it to connect certain devices with wireless power. We did say this was Nikola Tesla's house, right?

All of these series tend to ramp up their size and ambition as they progress. House of Tesla drops the series format entirely; the entire intended progression is crammed into a single game. At least, that's what it looks like. If you divided Tesla into thirds, I think each part would be larger than the original House of Da Vinci release. Lotta game here, is what I'm saying.

Which is good and bad. These games were originally scaled to be played an hour or two at a time, on a handheld device, sitting in a comfy chair. Tesla still has the touchscreen-centric design: one-finger controls, free panning but no free movement. But the economics of mobile have forced it to a Steam-first release. And thus, forced me to my Big Gamer Chair, inhaling the game in marathon sessions until puzzles dripped out my ears. Overstuffed rather than cozy. Well, I still enjoy adventure games, and I'm happy to pay Steam prices for them.

(Perhaps the economics of Steam forced Tesla to the big-game-all-at-once model, rather than a spaced-out sequence of short games. I'm less sure of that. I'm plenty sure that mobile revenues suck.)

So, overstuffed with puzzles. How's that work out? Uneven, but very good overall. Like I say about Quern: if a game contains enough kinds of puzzles, it's bound to contain your least favorite. (Block-slider, cough.) Tesla sticks to mild versions of its puzzle ideas, though, rather than skull-crackers. So when you come across one that annoys you, it won't annoy you for too long.

To be sure, there were some puzzles that were under-clued, or which I didn't understand at all. I looked at the hints, cried "moon logic!" and hammered the hint button until an explicit answer came out. Or I unlocked the box by accident and couldn't figure out why it had worked. Or I did understand the puzzle but decided it was too annoying to solve, so hammer time again.

(The designers say they're working on a "skip this puzzle" button. Clearly a good idea.)

But the majority of the puzzles were solid fun. Even the familiar tropes had a bit of an original twist. The jumping-pegs puzzle won big points by permitting two-way moves, rather than the (much too) familiar "restart-from-scratch" button.

(One nitpick: a scene where you combine colors of fluorescent gases in tubes. Perfectly good puzzle, except that you combine cyan, magenta, and yellow to make red, green and blue. Yes, mixing magenta and yellow glowing gases produces glowing red. Yes, these gases are explicitly transparent when not electrified. I cannot express how painful I find this.)

The story, I'm afraid, was a lot of maundering about Tesla and Mark Twain and Aleister Crowley, of all people. Twain really was a friend of Tesla (things I learned!) but the game doesn't manage to make anything of this. And Crowley just shows up as a generic bugaboo, with bonus mysticism to contrast with Tesla's mad science. This is all extensively explored in flashbacks, but they're just an excuse for more puzzles. Which need no excuse!

The interesting antagonist is Tesla's indomitable ability to spend money faster than he could raise it. The game highlights this, but there's no satisfactory ending to that story, in the game or in real life.

So, a big old puzzle-fest and I enjoyed it. Will there be a House of Tesla 2? I'm sure they could go there if the sales justify it. Or maybe they're setting up for House of Crowley. I'd play that.

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/09/post-equinox

Posted by Andrew Plotkin

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/09/equinoctial-adventures

Not summer games, not fall games, but... something of both. (In betweens.) I let the review file accumulate for a few weeks and here we are.

More reviews coming soon! A whole lot of adventure games dropped this month; I'm still in the middle of a few.

I'm also did-not-finishing a few of these games, which is unusual for me. Some of this is general world stress. I am pretty distracted with all the terrible things. Some of it is just saying, hey, I'm not having fun with this part, I'm allowed to put it down. Doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad. Or even that I don't recommend it!

• no signal
• Neyyah
• The Siege and the Sandfox

no signal

• by exodrifter -- game site

A modest adventure game of the "something happened on this space station" subgenre. You float around... well, you fly-mode around; your first-person view is curiously immaterial. Walls and furniture don't impede you but closed doors do, until you find the right keycard. Good thing keycards are material. For quite a while I thought that the developer just hadn't bothered with gravity or colliders. Turns out no, there's a story reason for it all, but you don't discover it until the end.

This has just a couple of kinds of repeated puzzles -- slidey circuit boards and a mathematical keycard system. Aside from that, most of the game is obsessive package-hunting. The sort where you check every drawer in every closet, and then look under every bed. And there's a lot of empty rooms to search. There's probably nothing in an empty room but you have to check the drawers just in case.

Admittedly the fly-mode makes this easier than it otherwise might be. Also the hint button, which gives you a rough location for any unfound objects in the room.

You are collecting keycards, fuses, hard drives, and a few other tools. The hard drives contain journal entries, which is where the story comes in. But it's not very connected to the gameplay. If you're cynical, you're just skimming the journal entries for the very occasional drop of a safe combo or keycard location hint. If you're into space station slice-of-life, you get an interestingly out-of-order narrative about a handful of people -- decent writing, just somewhat peripheral to what you're doing.

The ending is the best part. I won't spoil it, but it does a good job of contextualizing and doubling-down on the situation you've discovered.

Not a ground-breaking game, but I enjoyed spending some time on it.

Pet peeve: everybody uses that Interstellar black-hole rendering now. Fewer people know how it works. You can't just putt-putt around the bendy halo and see it from underneath! That's a visual distortion of a flat ring. Please.

Neyyah

• by Defy Reality Entertainment -- game site

Someone loved Riven very much and wanted to create an experience just like that.

You know how Tolkien created Middle-Earth because he wanted a place to fit all his language ideas? And then we got a decade of writers creating worlds to fit all their ideas about Middle-Earth. Completely different starting point.

Or, closer to home: Will Crowther was a caver who recreated a cave he'd explored. The kids at MIT were not cavers. When they made Zork, they were recreating a game that they'd played -- Crowther's game. Different approach, right?

None of this speaks to quality, one way or the other. Zork was better than Colossal Cave. (More imaginative, better puzzle sense, better parser.) Terry Brooks never rivalled Tolkien but he settled down to some readable stuff once he'd gotten the shameless riffs out of his system.

Neyyah... it's pretty and it's got lots of neat machines. It's not really recreating Riven though.

I think it's a problem of balance. Any particular puzzle machine in Neyyah is a reasonable idea. Each location is interesting. The pathways are appropriately convoluted. You can ride a minecart or a hoverpod. There's portals. (Lots of portals.) All neat stuff.

But it's all spread out over a lot of scenery. You spend days just exploring and exploring, collecting keys and clues and plugging power-cores into consoles. (Almost the first thing you find is a box of power-cores.) You don't have to actually engage with the game -- or the story -- because you're still filling in corners of the map. When I found a key or a clue, the hard part was remembering where its associated lock or puzzle was.

Just because a puzzle machine is neat doesn't mean it fits into the player experience. And if your volumes of carefully-worked-out lore aren't an active part of the story? Cut 'em.

(I have a post brewing called "Lore was a mistake." I mean, as a game-design concept.) (Yes, that includes those long journals in the Myst library. Riven avoided that problem! That's one of the reasons it was really good!)

When I scrubbed through the last of Neyyah's easily-reachable zones, I realized that I had completely lost track of my goals. I'd have to re-explore the world again -- this time taking map notes on where all the puzzles were. That was when I lost steam.

Like I said about the remake of Obsidian (1997): I now find slideshow-style adventure games tiring to play. Without free movement or even free panning, parsing the environment is more work than I want to put in. Squinting at the cursor to see whether I just turned 90 or 180 degrees: not fun.

Also not fun: lack of autosave. I don't care how retro your style is. Autosave is mandatory.

Enough griping. What does Neyyah do well?

The islands really are pretty. I love a baroque wrought-iron catwalk. (Remember Schizm?) The islands are in different time zones and the varying light is beautifully done. There's cute critters.

I complained about the world being too spread out, but navigation is actually speedy and responsive. You can click-click-click your way along the paths and walkways, and click through the elevator/portal/minecart animations as well. This is not your creaky DVD drive from the 90s.

Similarly, the journals are voluminous and somewhat repetitive. But you don't have to read them exhaustively. I'm pretty sure every important clue appears in at least two places. That's a good design principle.

The dialogue is cheese-tastic but the FMV actors have a great time delivering it.

I realize this is a lot of very qualified praise. Sorry! The creator of Neyyah has put an intense level of effort and attention into his game. I am genuinely impressed. I want more Riven / The Room fan games. I will buy yours. (Playing House of Tesla now!) I just think I've played enough of this one.

The Siege and the Sandfox

• by Cardboard Sword -- game site

Everybody's playing this month's metroidvania but I'm terrible at fighting. So I bought a different one.

The Siege and the Sandfox is a 2D stealther/platformer. It's a spiritual sequel-or-homage to the original Prince of Persia -- minus the combat. If a guard catches you, you die in one hit. So it's about the sneaking, plus a bit of whacking unsuspecting guards from behind. But mostly the climbing, jumping, and exploring to find new climbing-and-jumping skills.

There's a frame story (murdered king, duplicitous queen, you know the stuff), provided by a narrator. It's almost an audiobook: "The Sandfox knew that the key would be nearby..." Amelia Tyler (the narrator) has great fun with this, even doing voices for different characters. It's not just for story beats, either. The game generates contextual storylet lines as you move around and encounter different situations. It's really nicely done.

The first half of the game was very satisfying. Unfortunately, I got bogged down in the second half, as the map broadened out and required me to find more corners to explore. I think I know where I'm supposed to go next, but it's got a lot more guards than previous areas; progress got frustrating. Also the game is a bit buggy. So I put it aside. I don't regret the time I spent, though.

(If you want to know exactly how far: I got the wall-climbing and roof-shimmying gear before giving up.)

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/09/equinoctial-adventures