I mostly agree with Disco Bob. ("DiscoBob" or "Disco Bob"? I want to get it right.) On the one hand, the puzzles are a _lot_ more thoughtful, and the interface is... far more advanced. On the other hand, there's something to be said for the older style of play. Both have their merits. Oh, and, FWIW, the color-marble thing puzzle is just as hard in the original, arguably, but it is so in a very, very different way -- on the island with the big cartography stuff, you have to flow water to a particular island, and there's this round building with a dome that's in that empty lake in this version, and you go in there and there's a thing with a bunch of basically... you know that pushpin "game" desk toy thing where it's a block of pins and you can like press your hand into it and make an impression? It's a bunch of those, and it turns each of the large 'blocks' representing each island, into a five-by-five grid. You _then_ work out which buttcrack corner of which square of which island has the golden marble things (which have individual linking books in them, BTW, there's not one central book) and you figure out from the underwater throne room with the lights which island has which color, and you match all of that up and put the right color marble (with one "dummy color" left over) in the right spot on a 25x25 grid, and if you get it all right, when you press the white button the piston thing goes down and there's a loud BANG and the brass marshmallow-on-a-stick shakes, and you hear a rhythmic hum from underneath. It's a right pain in the tail ;3 If I may recommend a game to DiscoBob, kind of in the style of the old, original MYST and Riven games -- RHEM. It's got the same point-and-click interface, but the graphics are... very early 2000s, at best, and the sounds clearly came off a "10,000 free sound clips for $10" CD at Best Buy... or, well, whatever the German equivalent of Best Buy is, because the RHEM games were all done by a single guy, Knut Müller. His literal life's dream was to make a MYST clone that was decently popular, and he made RHEM and Got Game Entertainment saw it and liked it... scooped him right up. There's now four in the series and I believe a fifth in the works, and he is very much straight-up living his dream. Two words of caution, however -- one, get a map, FIRST. Rhem is an absolutely _sprawling_ place, and labyrinthine besides, in the worst of ways. If you don't have a map, you WILL get lost. (I speak from experience.) Two, write down, diagram, photograph, whatever you do, RECORD EVERYTHING. _Literally_ everything. _Literally_ literally _everything_ -- the puzzles in RHEM have a real bad habit of affecting things at least a dozen screens away, and there's one in particular that's very memorable to me because it's this sort of round green-screen that gives you slice-of-pie shapes, and each time you get a set of three shapes, it's random... and if you do not record all three, _exactly_ , you will spend literally over half an hour backtracking to reset that puzzle, because by the time you need them you are like 3/4 of the map clear away from where that screen is that sets those things. I remember, because I had to backtrack. Oh, and don't feel bad about buggering up the D'ni numerals -- I did, too. ]+[ isn't 25, it is indeed six; 25 is ]X[, and I feel a bit dumb for screwing that up. FTR, zero is ] · [ and 233 is ] ̶┌[] ̶
The puzzles in this are too much like homework for me, but really enjoying the playthrough. Y'all are right, FMV would have been much better than all this uncanny valley stuff for the cutscenes.
I agree, if it's worse than King's Quest 7, then it's truly bad. 😉 Anyways, yeah, sometimes trying to make things better doesn't work, but still enjoyed this Let's Play. Thank you.
It’s been interesting watching someone play this new version. From my perspective, I don’t think there’s enough improvement over the original to bother upgrading. Honestly, I don’t think the original needed any improvement upon anyway. Maybe in 25 years when they re-remake this game, I’ll consider buying it if they add in the desperately needed Lovecraft entity to the void.
You don't actually have to figure out what islands correspond to the numbers.. once you got the baseline and corrections, you can put it into the solution since the sliders can't change in order ;)
