Esher shows up quite a lot in the game, many times per area. What is more notable, however, is that he pronounces “D’ni” as “duck knee”. He does an excellent acting job, although some fans say that his D’ni accent in not authentic, whatever that means. The other main character of the game is Esher, a D’ni survivor played by David Ogden Stiers. Also, slaves of what? There doesn’t seem to be too many slave drivers around – everybody’s dead! Boy, black and white morality sure is fantastic. Anybody that isn’t on the side of the liberation of the Bahro will obviously turn out to be utterly evil under the surface. They play a pretty large part in the plot of Uru and are fairly significant here too. There’s also something in there about freeing the Bahro from enslavement, a species of monkey-like creatures with the innate ability to link. You just pop into existence, touch a stone tablet and then Yeesha shows up and gives you a speech as well as the quest to restore the tablet by touching others like it in the game’s four main ages. The story in End of Ages is even more barebones than usual. It’s in the skies, the caves, the clothes, the architectural details, everywhere. The game boasts some of the best texture work out there. The buildings once again sport that unique blend of tribal architecture and steampunk stonework that is the style of the imaginary D’ni civilization. Jack Wall has been replaced by Tim Larkin as music designer and the latter delivers a much more atmospheric score. However, the feeling is not just in the places – it is in the art design in general. It’s a place of significant importance to the Myst universe and is one of the central areas of the Book of Ti’ana novel. That crater is in fact the entrance (or rather, the exit) of the Great Shaft, a tunnel built by the D’ni that links the surface of the Earth with their underground world. Shortly after, you are transported to the inside of the crater that you see in the desert at the beginning of Uru but can never reach. It is in part the locales – the game starts out in the same room where the first Myst ends and Riven begins. Mere seconds after booting up the game, End of Ages feels like coming back home. Most puzzles are solved through the new mechanic of drawing on special tablets and you can finally meet and interact with the Bahro, creatures that were hinted at in Uru, but rarely seen. On the other hand, that doesn’t meant they skimped on the original content. In fact, End of Ages is actually made up of unused concepts meant for Uru and you can also spot that some assets were taken straight from it as well. As its name implies, End of Ages was meant as the final entry in the series – after the failure of Uru, it was decided to produce the franchise’s curtain call. After two quasi-successful attempts by third party companies at replicating the Myst formula, it was time for Cyan to get back behind the wheel again.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |