Myst IV: Revelation (2004)

Uhm... I wasn't expecting a great game when I began playing Myst 4, and I think it's better than Myst 3 but just barely. During my gameplay I still had a few moments when I thought "wow, this must be the worst puzzle in all of the Myst series!" or "man, that puzzle was completely pointless!"

Thankfully, Revelation includes an in-game guide so (in theory) you don't need to go to GameFAQS or whatever to reach the end of the game. Also the "zip mode" is a lot more intuitive this time around, but you are still limited to some rules about teleporting that sometimes don't make a lot of sense.

The graphics and the music are on-point as it often is in the Myst series. I also really appreciate the in-game camera, so I had to use my smartphone only a couple of times to take a photo of my monitor.

The puzzles are... let's say OK. The first area is excellent: I felt all the puzzles were relevant and coherent with the game lore, It also felt simple to navigate (ignoring the downright abysmal loading times between some screens, even when using an NVMe drive) and the correct answers to the puzzles seemed fair.

Things start getting ugly in the next two worlds, which require a few instances of borderline insulting object-hunting where you need to slowly scan the whole floor of each scene looking for book pages scattered in seemingly random places. I also started feeling that some puzzles just didn't make sense lore-wise and I saw them more as the devs saying "hey, here's another puzzle!" without much reasoning behind it.

I finally lost my patience when faced against the "color clouds" puzzle in Serenia, point where I stopped playing. This puzzle is so uninspired and so unnecessarily frustrating that it convinced me to just go to Youtube and watch the rest of the game there.

I still think Revelation is worth playing... and I also still want to play Myst V. Let's see how that goes.