now playing: "Gateway II"

[Thanks to Zekk Rotaru for this loverly recommendation! Sorry it took me a while to get around to it. -AJ]

Two summers ago, I was idly wandering around a garage sale when I stumbled on a fifty-cent CD-ROM named MYST. Ergo, I flipped. Call me out of touch with the times if you will, but I was just as bloody hell enthused as the next gamer person who arrives hours in advance of Skyrim's midnight store premiere. And on that particular day, I had just enough precious quarters to hand over for that CD-ROM, perfectly encased in in a borrowed album case with the original Cyan Worlds manual tucked inside. I rushed it home, somehow convinced my dad that playing a game at least as old as me wouldn't kill the already incredibly old and slow PC, and played away. The resolution messed up a few times, but that was the least of my worries. I was lost in the nostalgia of an era I never got to live myself. I felt like a time traveler, suddenly a child. It didn't bother me that the graphics were outdated and the puzzles impossible to solve without a Facebook chat window open on a monitor in another part of the house, making me run errands back and forth. I never did actually finish MYST--in all likelihood, I'm still only ten percent of the way through--but you know what they say about true love. It's unconditional.

Fast forward to this week.

When said friend mentioned earlier and to whom I credit this suggestion today introduced me to Gateway II (Cockroach, 2008) (which, appropriately enough, uses the exact same engine and mechanics as does the tantalizing Dream Machine, considering it's crafted by the same geniuses), I didn't play it. Rather, I wadded through it. Stumbled. Groped in the dark, sometimes quite literally (every room in the game appears to be orbiting in the astral plane somewhere). So I pulled up a YouTube walkthrough, scoured players' suggestions on the Kongregate comment threads, took frequent snack and social media breaks, and in short felt like a complete noob who's never touched a keyboard before.

Toilet time! Well, not really. Just a locked cabinet with a keypad. You can flush the toilet though, with the lid open or closed. And excuse me, but I take serious issue with that pretense of a shower stall. How appalling.

I don't really get the point of it. I had the sound down trying to listen to podcasts (multitasking!) in the background, and there was an option after all on the menu screen for showing textual cues whenever critical game sounds occurred. (And also an option for making color-oriented puzzles grayscale for the benefit of players who would, well, benefit from a grayscale option. And both of these really got my attention. Talk about games catering to their audience. You know, there are other kinds of localization options that don't refer necessarily to lingual translation issues, and Cockroach wisely remembered this. But I digress.)

I don't really get the point of it. Well, didn't. I'm controlling a robot, at least that is what I automatically assign his identity to, because it's made out of cubes. I don't know if this is purposeful or not. Is it a game about robots, or are the robots a convenient metaphor for humans simply because of production issues with the game's cartoon aesthetic? I don't really know, because that question never gets answered. I don't know who I am. I'm just a visitor, I guess. So I wander around, collecting video tapes that get plugged into a TV in the central room, watching clips of some depressed yellow robot talking to the blue robot boyfriend and running away from the evil red mother of robots. And then there are weird eyes a la 1984 that keep popping out all over the place that seriously freak the crap out of you in an already rather chillingly lonely game atmosphere.

And puzzles just aren't my thing. How I was I supposed to know, for instance, that the door wouldn't burn down when I put the lighter next to it? I could demonstrate its ability to work in the real world, if you paid me $100 to do it. So I just went through the game almost automatically, following the master speed player on YouTube, pulling numbers and codes out of seemingly thin air. Gateway II and myself = not really a coherent match.

No, actually, I can't see that. Because I'm a mopey depressed girl who will do anything to get a guy to fawn over me. Oh wait, that's something else...

I got through as much of the game as I'm going to right now. So far it's a very psychological, slightly creepy point-and-click puzzler, so that's how I'm probably going to write about it. I mention it briefly to said friend who recommended it in the first place. And what is the first thing he says about it that completely catches me off-guard? The MYST of the online flash game world.

MYST.

Of course. Immediately. How could I not have seen it? Was I just too tired, too grumpy, too stressed? In my frustration with the Gordian puzzles, in my disconcerted reaction to the juxtaposed cartoony visuals with the dark themes, in my obsessive back-and-forth versus war between it and the Dream Machine's identical mechanics but with a much more compelling narrative execution, I failed to see the obvious.

MYST had time-traveled. Caught up with me. New and improved is the saying, although it doesn't really apply in this case. More like it had just shuffled up its wardrobe.

Mistakenly assuming that it was the stunning '93 pixelated vision or the richly obscure names or the motif of literature as a literally escapist device that drew me into MYST, I failed to see its offspring--no, its essence--reincarnated for "the modern world."

Scribble ALL the paper! No, really, you can color on the notepad.

Lesson learned of the day: Don't judge a game by its graphics, its mechanics, or even its narrative. A game isn't any of these in one combination or another. A game is something that plays. To you.