Welcome to a very familiar fissure.

Uru starts you in the middle of the desert, somewhere in the US. Here a bored gatekeeper, whom you later find out is called Zandi, explains to you that you are not the first to have been called here and that there is a message for you in the living quarters placed down in the fissure. Readers of the books will recognise this fissure, it is the place where Atrus was raised by his grandmother Ti'anna and now Atrus' daughter Yeesha has made it her home for a time. This being a Myst series game Yeesha hasn't just left you a note in an easy to reach place - oh no you have to figure out how to get the power on and run a somewhat arcane machine to do that. It is this edge of contrivance that is perhaps the biggest weakness of the game where puzzles shift from being a sensible part of the world to being a little too obviously just puzzles for the player to solve. Anyway, learn the viewing machines secrets and you are treated to the reason you are about to go on this path of exploration.

This should also be familiar if you have played Riven.

You see the original masters of the art of linking books, the special books that shift you to new worlds to explore, created a massive underground city of D'ni buried deep in the Earth and flourished as a culture for thousands of years. They learned to not only write the books but also how to manipulate and shape stone as well as harness many sources of power in efficient fashion. In short they were an advanced and cultured race who in many ways were significantly more advanced than humanity in general. However their own successes brought with them the seeds of their own destruction. Now, some 250 odd years since D'ni fell, there are efforts to rebuild D'ni and make it a living place once again. People are being brought from the surface to help with the mammoth task of translating, understanding and rebuilding the city of D'ni and the various ages it's inhabitants had wrought.

Each age has it's own day/night cycle.
Nothing like dual moons to say you are somewhere new.

Yeesha however is concerned. D'ni is being remembered only for it's enlightened accomplishments. She is worried that the darker and more disturbing side of the culture is being skipped over. As a result she fears the same mistakes are going to be made. So she has contrived to draw like minded people around her, to show them some of the follys of D'ni and perhaps enlist their aid to build something else from the ashes of D'ni. Something perhaps lesser but hopefully something that won't repeat those mistakes. Rather than lecture you as to what those mistakes are she has deliberately seeded selected ages (or worlds translating from Myst terminology) with journey cloths. Seven per age there are with a special door that can only be unlocked once all seven cloths are found. By finding the cloths you have to methodicly search the ages - often reading many journals, history texts and the like which give you a good understanding of what happened in this age.

Gahreesan features massive structures.
Although it takes you a while to get to this viewpoint.

End game has you having one final message from Yeesha who then offers you a choice, something that segues into the online portion of the game which two distinct factions you can play for no doubt with their own ages and puzzles to solve. We would love to tell you more about the online portion however Myst Live isn't actually active yet, early in the new year of 2004 seems to be the timeframe. Once it is up and running we'll come back and do a supplemental review of the online portions. We can however tell you about the single player portion.

Teledhan, age of mushrooms.
A lot of ambient wildlife features here.

For starters the graphics have to be applauded. Cyan have managed to produce an engine that renders reasonably vast areas on a level of detail comparible to the static pre-rendered efforts of the previous Myst titles. This isn't an entirely new feat as the previously released 'RealMyst' showed us this could be done. However Uru advances beyond what RealMyst achieved by getting close to Riven standards where almost photorealism was achieved. It is perhaps slightly frustrating that the game holds back on the more impressive vistas a bit requiring the solving of a few puzzles before you get to some seriously beautiful scenes. While this does make a good reward for solving the puzzles we can see a few people not being impressed enough to persevere.

Also worth mentioning is the fairly complete avatar customisation interface that allows you to create a wide variety of body and facial features on your in game avatar. While the clothing choices are a little limited initially the ability to create an in game avatar visually close in look to yourself is a great tool for increasing the immersiveness. This feature is largely a gimmick for the single player side of the game but will come into it's own with the online portions where having a unique look becomes more important. Complementing the visuals is an extremely accomplished audio engine. This title uses EAX3 to great effect with smooth panning of soundscapes, occlusion of sounds when doors shut or you go behind objects and a plethora of ambient noises. The aural loveliness includes an absolutely stunning thunderstorm sequence that occurs on one level and it firmly enhances the feeling of being there. Creative Audigy owners are in for a real treat with this title, it being the first title we have heard to properly take advantage of what these cards can do.

Kadish Tolesa, our pick for the most beautiful age.
What really makes it work are the fluttering leaves
coming down in the light.

So technically the engine is wonderful, it does suffer a little from mildly long load times but given that once in an age you suffer no further loads till you link away from it then this is quite acceptable. On average you will be spending hours within an age so the load times are but a minor irritant. Control is where things are less than ideal. Uru features a third person perspective that can be switched to first person as you wish. Third person suffers from the usual problems third person modes nearly always suffer from - odd camera angle choices at key moments, especially irritating when normally the camera floats behind the avatar but in certain areas it forcibly shifts to a fixed perspective. You can force the game to stay largely in first person mode but there are irritating moments where it pops out to third person whether you want it too or not. Worse yet the interface control in first person mode changes little from the third person mode. It would have made more sense for it to shift to a traditional 'mouselook' style of control. Instead to get mouselook you have to hold a button down and there the keyboard controls fight with the mouse causing you to pop out of mouselook mode even while you are holding the button down. It is a major drawback to the game as a whole and something that should be smoothed out with a patch.

A guild hall in D'ni.

Interaction is always marked out for you with your cursor telling you when objects can be pushed, prodded, pulled or otherwise directly manipulated. You can't pick objects up though and there are some puzzles that require the physical pushing of objects into the correct position. This would have been tremendously simplified if we could just pick the object up and drop it where we wanted it instead of having to laboriously push the thing into place with our feet. Puzzles that required this sort of manipulation ended up causing us to swear a fair bit as we fought the interface rather than simply worked on solving the puzzle. Also the contrivance factor came up a bit as one or two puzzles really did pull us out of the game and remind us that this is just a game. Perhaps the worst offender is the geyser puzzle which requires you to manipulate geysers then stand in the lava heated hot steam to get flung around. Maybe we have been to Rotorua one time too many but the concept of standing on top of an active geyser simply comes across as unrealistic. It actively breaks your sense of reality by requiring you to do something that in the real world is downright dangerous if not deadly.

Kadish Tolesa again, here dramatic use of shadow
and light is made.

Where Uru succeeds the most is when the puzzles flow naturally. Teledahn and Gahreesan work best here with a succession of puzzles that largely make sense in the environment they are in. Kadish Tolesa is a stunningly beautiful age that suffers a little from design. It is after all an extremely secure vault system designed to keep people out, why then would the combination and clues required to solve the puzzles be placed on display in a public hall in D'ni? It is the slight oddities like that which detract a little from the experience and pull the game back from being perfect. It is close though with an engine that never crashed or had stability issues for us (although it does demand the latest drivers for graphics and sound card) and provided an environment where once you are drawn in it is very easy to loose many hours contemplating the puzzles presented.