The story starts off with you at the house Atrus on Tomahna. Atrus being the writer who can create worlds and link to them through his books. There you find that Atrus has created a new world, Raleeshahn. With you, his wife and child he is going to link to Raleehshan, and live with the D'ni, the civilization that he has made Raleeshahn for, after their way of life was destroyed. However, just as he gets the key to unlock Raleeshahn, a portal opens and a wild man steals the book and leaves. You follow him using the linking book that he leaves behind and thus you are taken to the first world, J'nanin. Your task is to follow this man -Saavedros-, get Raleeshahn back from him, and find a way back to Atrus on Tomahna - and you have 4 CD's of mouse clicking, puzzle solving fun to do it in.

The control system is simple as everything can be done solely by mouse, to move you click to the area you want to go to, to use an object you put your 'hand' on it and then click. That is the total extent of the controls needed, save pressing the right button to switch your hand from being locked or unlocked - while locked your view is changed like in a first person shooter. While unlocked you can access your inventory, its at the bottom of the screen, and change your angle of view by placing your hand at the edges of the screen. All puzzles in the game are manipulated through levers or objects that you use, and the inventory is only used to hold books that hold vital clues to certain puzzles, yet are not used to interact with puzzles.

Movement is conducted through a series of viewing points in the worlds, there is no complete freedom of movement, only completely freedom of viewing. While this can be irritating in some cases, where you are left madly clicking everywhere on the screens in the hopes of finding a path you may have missed, it makes sense from technical viewpoint. To have complete movement everything would need to be rendered into 3d, increasing the game specifications considerably given some of the scenery in the game. By sticking to the original style of graphics presentation (note - released within the last year was RealMyst, which is Myst 1 with 3d rendered graphics) Presto Studios, the makers, have kept the specs low - if you are running in software mode, hardware graphics requires more computing power.