Linear Myst

I'm also one of the kids who first experienced Myst as a child, 10 years old, at a family friend's house. But my attraction to the game has never been for the puzzles, for the intellectual stimulation, or for the mysteries of the island. The frustration of staring at an impossible (for a ten-year-old, and still impossible-seeming) puzzle for an hour, and not being able to progress, and the frustration of wandering around the island, over and over again, in circles, madly clicking on everything, waiting for the scenes to load, always have detracted from what I find to be the real pleasure of the game: The movie-like experience. Myst, at it's best, is a movie where you control the pace of the action. With an online walkthrough in hand, you can progress smoothly though the puzzles, enjoy the plotlines, and have a satisfactory narrative experience without getting bogged down in the problem-solving.

So that's just what my partner and I did in the lab, after 30 minutes of frustration. We grabbed the "Revelation Walkthrough" from fisicx.com, and blasted through as much of the plot as we could in the remaining half-hour. We restored the electricity, and saw the waterfall turbines come back to life with a roar, we were knocked out by a green flash/explosion, and got to use the astronomer's chair to look at the stars.

Cheating Myst makes the experience linear (you just follow the instructions, in order), but oh-so-much-more enjoyable.