Oh my word, I have never heard anybody else reference the Bionicle Mata Nui online game. That game entered my life at just the right moment to never be forgotten. I think it managed to stick with me almost entirely off of aesthetics as I sat and watched my brother play it. Also, I quite like the term mystwave and am very much a fan of these types of games.
Another factor, unrelated, is that Nyst drove CD sales on personal computers. It became the "must have" app driving CD ROM sales for a while - "You want to play the game everyone is talking about? Why then you need to buy a CD ROM drive!" This laid the groundwork for the next generation of games which assumes everyone has a CDROM drive.
I really like the term Mystwave as a replacement for "Myst Clone", I hope it catches on! It's cool that you had so many recommendations at the end there, I'm always on the lookout for new games in this genre and you went pretty deep! The more I look though, the more I realize there aren't dozens of these, but easily multiple hundreds. I just keep finding more. And those are the ones who have some small following online, I've played a few myself that barely have screenshots to find on Google and definitely no trailer or letsplay. It's also worth noticing that even though Myst is absolutely the typifier of this genre, it's not quite the first, having being beaten to release by two games generally considered "Myst clones" that is the Journeyman Project (8 Months before Myst) and Return to Zork (Literally just 10 days before Myst). It's just an idea whose time had come.
it was a cultural juggernaut in the second PC gaming golden age of the 90s which ushered in the best graphics and sound card options to ever exist it's weird to think about it but the first 2 decades of pc gaming, while so different, were legitimately golden
I think I have something to add on how Mystwave games look. It's kind of similar to how PS1 games all have that PS1 look, it's due to how primitive and inflexible render engines were at the time. They were streamlined to render things exactly one way, and barely gave you any flexibility there. In technical terms, most of the mid 90s raytracers simply presented a scene by shading the pixel like this: apply light color, brightness and the most basic possible shading based on if the pixel is in shadow, add a single color to simulate ambient light, then multiply all this by the applied texture, then add the (extremely quick and easy to compute) distance-fog. Some times the renderer will allow for basic specular reflections, but due to primitive simulation, and poor calibration of the specular information, surfaces won't feel right, either being too reflective, not reflective enough, or just... off. There's a reason Kojima had an entire lab dedicated to scanning materials to get this just right for the Fox Engine (RIP). Another thing is that in these early days of CG art, un-processed photo textures are often used and aren't edited to remove highlights and lighting, clashing with the actual lighting of the scene. All this gives a very eerie look where nothing quite feels right, even if the models are well made and highly detailed. To get away from this, the larger studios would invest in workstation graphics computers, which were a cut above the rest and allowed for post-processing camera effects and basic shader work. A good example of this would be Riven, with its honestly gorgeous reflective brass and tropical ocean. However, the underlying renderer were largely unchanged, with basic unshaded ambient colors for indirect lighting, no ambient occlusion, no bounced lighting, resulting in the same overall Mystlike look for most scenes.
I really like the "-like " instead of "-clone". To this day, games inspired by Rogue are called roguelikes (or nowadays roguelites, although there is a difference between the two). This term seems much more neutral and hass less of a negative connotation than "rogue clone" would have - or indeed both "doom clone" and "myst clone" do have. The "-like" ending terms seem to imply a relationship of influence, while still leaving room for the games thus named to have their own genuine identities and worthwhile qualities. I do like your newly coined term "mystwave" - and it seems oddly fitting, since in some ways the aesthetic of myst at least to me is similar to the vaporwave scene (maybe it's that early 90s CGI graphics that is also often featured in vaporwave).
