This powerplant-like facility is a pleasure to explore
with mostly very logical puzzles to solve.

If you haven't played Uru, or indeed any of the Myst series of games, the story involves a race that created a series of linking books. These books described worlds, or ages in the game parlance, which you could travel to and as such they gave the inhabitants of D'ni considerable power as well as access to materials you wouldn't expect in such a subterranean locale as D'ni.

It also brought with it hubris and greed as the D'ni book makers started to believe that they were gods who were destined to rule over the various ages they linked to. This overarching pride is what led to the fall of D'ni and training people to avoid it is a large part of what drives the narrative in the various games. Uru particularly concentrates on it with the original game centred around Yeesha's attempts to show you D'ni culture in both its glory and failure.

Control machines often provide vital clues to progressing.

Path of the Shell takes a step further and hints towards the revival of Dn'i in a new and better way. For some time before D'ni fell, a quasi-religious figure known as the 'Watcher' claimed to have received divine visions that were both prophecy and warning as they talked about events that had happened as well as those to come.

One particular theme of the Watcher was of the return of the Grower who would revive the great tree of D'ni, heralding the birth of a new age in the old stone city. Naturally, many aspired to be this Grower, including Guildmaster Kadish who constructed an age he claimed allowed him to travel through time on the D'ni's original homeworld. This ability is part of what the Watcher possibly predicted; his phrasing is ambigious enough to leave waggle room, and it is to Kadish's work that you travel in Path of the Shell as you try to discover exactly what the Watcher's words allude to.

Your in-game avatar is completely customisable, allowing you
to recreate a reasonable fac simile of yourself if you wish.

It is a neat hook and builds nicely on the history of the series, particularly on what Uru explorers will have previously discovered. The nature of Kadish's involvement here also helps to mitigate the still slightly gimmicky nature of some of the puzzles. There is still a few that seem a little forced into being puzzles for puzzles' sake, but the vast majority flow well from the world they are in. Er'Canna is the best age in this respect with its processing-plant nature making for a variety of machines that need to be manipulated into performing what you need.

This puzzle takes some keen observation to solve.

Ahbonay, however, is a puzzle in itself. Frankly, this one age caused a great deal of teeth gnashing as we tried to figure out precisely what was going on. When you do get it everything makes sense, but we can see people being stuck here for a while thanks to the somewhat offbeat nature of the puzzles. (Not that this is a bad thing in a puzzle game, mind you.) Indeed, Ahbonay makes something of a mistake in that it forces players to use their linking books a lot - which incurs the not inconsiderable loading time penalty that transfering an age involves. The number of swaps once you know the trick isn't bad but for those struggling to puzzle it out we wouldn't be unduly surprised to find them reflexively wincing as the load screen comes up one more time.

If you are having an Indiana Jones moment here...
...so were we when we first met this.

Gameplay and the gameplay interface is virtually unchanged from Uru itself. This leaves the slightly awkward first person mode controls in place - something that we wish had been remedied with the update. Why completely conventional FPS controls complete with free mouselook weren't implemented is something of a mystery to Gameplanet. Having to hold down the right mouse button to get free look quickly becomes both tedious and painful for extended periods.

What is an improvement is that the Ki device is unlocked in single play - previously it was limited to the online portions of Uru. This little device's most useful function is the in-game camera mode where screenshots of inscriptions, diagrams and the like can be captured and then recalled when pouring over a puzzling piece of machinery.

We like this option greatly, especially when combined with the new in-game journal which you can type notes into - the normally standard procedure of playing a Myst game with pencil and paper handy is lessened greatly. In fact, in many ways this improves over the paper as many-a-time in the past we had sweated over a non-working puzzle solution only to find that our diagram of the inscription that is key to the solution was out of scale or incorrect in some crucial way.

Kadish loved his formal and elaborate entrance halls.

Another misstep is the inclusion of some platform-style jumping/movement puzzles. Given the awkwardness of the first person movement - even in third person mode it can be clunky - these quickly become trying. Mercifully there are few and they can usually be dealt with quickly. But it amazes us to see such a well known, player-irritating game mechanic creeping in here.

Imaging devices like this often let you glimpse another
perspective on a puzzle and gain clues to solving it.
Take the time to study such images.

Technically, the game engine is very stable, though we did experience some oddness after alt-tabbing in and out of the game engine a lot. A restart and reload quickly cured that, but we never crashed or had more problems. Otherwise we have the fairly lush texure and visual work along with a strong audio engine that uses Creative's EAX HD to good effect.

The audio work alone is large part of what sells these surreal worlds to the player and here the game delivers with machinery that clanks, groans and hisses largely as you would expect. The effect of environment mixing smoothing the transition from enclosed spaces to the wide open areask, along with good sound occlusion culling, reinforces the reality of the environment well. Thanks to the slower pace of the game and the less stringent frame rate requirements, we were also able to turn anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering up on our test rig. This produced dips into the mid-20s on the more intense scenes, but nothing that kept the game from feeling smooth and playable. With a healthy amount of straight-edged railing and the like, it cannot be underestimated how much of a difference AA makes to improving the visual look of the game.

Surreal environments like this add to the magic of Uru.
The world above features stormy lightning which rumbles and echoes
around you.