i played and loved all the myst games, including uru live. i was really excited for neyyah, followed development for years. think i'm a third of the way through now, going by achievements.

so far, it feels like what people who don't like myst think people enjoy about myst. it's beautiful, densely detalied, and impenetrable . it starts with a five minute lore dump (cut down from fifteen in the demo, the dev was really proud of having "streamlined" the experience), there's a new made-up word introduced every sentence (don't worry, you get a glossary), and all the puzzles so far have been "align these in order" or "put the square thing in the square hole".
puzzles are sort of integrated into the world like in riven, but in a weird haphazard way where there are random screens placed in the world. there are encoded notes everywhere, and they're unreadable unless you "know the trick", which you learn fairly quickly and after that they all become plaintext instantly. which is just as well because most of them are just fluff.
there are hints at interesting mechanics but i've not gotten there yet, the biggest change so far is getting a briefcase full of balls that activate machines. the balls are one-time use and uniquely coded so once you put the right ball in a machine it stays on and you no longer have that ball. it's basically a series of fetch quests but you get all the items at once and have to just go around and put them in the right place.

all in all, a strange experience. i'm holding off on final judgement but so far i'm only impressed by the graphics. i'm hoping the story finds its footing soon because my patience with the glossary is starting to wear thin.

Wow Micropose is still around. I'll ad them Apogee and 3d Realms are still kicking around.