Myst III: Exile is the spiritual successor to both
Myst and
Riven in every way imaginable--style, plot and gameplay. This leads to an obvious conclusion: if you didn't like the first games, you won't find much to like here. If, on the other hand, the style of the first few games was to your liking,
Exile is going to ring true for you. The puzzles may sometimes feel rather arbitrary, but never do they approach the
Myst levels of wackiness, and the game itself struck me as more immersive.
While the box claims that no prior knowledge is necessary for the enjoyment of Exile, it really does help to have played the first two games and read the books. There's a lot of complicated backstory that is only hinted at as you play Exile, and some of the actions in the game may not make as much sense to you if you haven't immersed yourself in the universe of Myst. While I played the original game, I never got around to trying Riven, so a few of the developments struck me as bizarre until I learned of their context. It's not a gaping flaw, and the game certainly stands on its own merits, but knowledge of the past definitely does help.
The game itself involves four major Ages, each with its own share of puzzles. After a lovely introduction where a wild man jumps into Atrus' home, steals his new Age, and leaps into it, you follow him into the newly created realm and attempt to, well, do whatever it is you do in a Myst game. The plot is actually quite intruiging, once you start seeing the snippets of it, and I found myself reading the journals and pages I collected in the game with considerably more care than I usually bother with. Of course, that could be because clues for the puzzles are found in the journals, but I digress.
The actual gameplay is what you'd expect--lots of puzzles and lots of exploration. Because of the self-contained universes in Exile, you generally don't have to worry about weird cause-and-effect sequences that make little to no sense; what happens generally happens close enough to notice. This is A Good Thing. While trekking back and forth between segments of the game may become tiresome, you really won't care the first few times because the game's so bloody gorgeous.
With intriguing puzzles, an interesting plot, and gorgeous graphics, what is there not to like about Exile? Well, it has its issues. Its nonlinear structure sometimes comes back to bite it in the butt, as it can be confusing to figure out just what you're doing or what you need to do. Yes, a good deal of adventure gaming is trial and error, but when you have to deal with clicking around a huge environment to see just what's going on, it can be a little frustrating. And a few of the puzzles still seemed rather arbitrary to me; I don't mind doing something if it makes sense in the scope of the world, and most of the times it did in Exile, but a few times I felt a little shoehorned.
Of course, sometimes adventure gaming is all about shoehorning.
