The immersive beauty of Myst feels particularly suited to a quarantine: At a time when I can’t go anywhere, it makes me feel far away, surrounded by lapping waves and opulent rugs and actual mist.īut sheltering in place has also activated a strong nostalgic urge. Myst Time is the opposite of News Time, Twitter Time and Doom Googling Coronavirus Projections Time. The soothing sounds of flowing water, crackling fires, flipping pages, groaning wooden elevators and satisfying mechanical clicks and whirs ought to be marketed separately as a sad-girl white-noise machine. The gameplay involves clicking and occasionally dragging objects, but mostly wandering around befuddled. It’s just you, an old windmill, an old library, an old lighthouse, an old rocket ship and several old clock towers. Much like in real life now, the player rarely encounters other people in Myst. But the game’s real draw is its meditative atmosphere.

As you traverse Myst Island - encountering riddles, age-worn letters and magic books that transport you to new “ages,” or levels of the game - you also unravel the story of Myst, which concerns an olde tyme teleporting family that loves drama. Myst begins on a mysterious island, on a dock next to a sunken ship.

And all I want to do is play Myst, an immersive adventure computer game from the 1990s that I was obsessed with when I was 11. The plush yellow duck of my youth has waddled out of storage and into my bed. We are entering Week 3 of social isolation, and I have regressed.

Myst video game