URU: Complete Chronicles
Playtime: 20.9 Hours
Finished 17 August 2025.This game is a huge pain in the ass to get running properly; there's a Steam guide out there that I followed to get the game running in 4K with some other enhancements for playability & graphics. The game ended up looking quite good and ran very smoothly afterwards for the most part. There's still some weird glitches though, which is pretty much inevitable given how old the game is.
I played through all the vanilla content available on the Steam release of URU CC, which includes the original game, plus the two official expansions - To D'ni & Path of the Shell. There's actually a community-maintained MMO that has way more stuff to do - new ages, new storylines, and tons of fixes for general playability, as well as a live community. URU Live also has the blessing of Cyan developers which rules, and I suppose that makes it canon as well. That said, I really just wanted to get the original experience (and to get the sweet Steam playtime) so I stuck with a patched version of URU CC instead; doing it this way also leads more nicely into Myst V, which is essentially the singleplayer continuation of the new storyline introduced here.
I should note that given the overall jankiness of the puzzles (which I'll go more into detail about), I did end up using hints and even outright walkthroughs much more frequently in this game than any of the others. A big part of this was to stem the frustration around the slow animations and clunky controls; at times, this game really makes the puzzle-solving process quite unfun.
URU is a really weird concept, which led to a predictable strange & janky result. It was originally pitched as an MMO, which is a pretty crazy left turn for a game series defined by isolation; every game before this found some way to ensure that the Stranger would spend the vast majority of their journey alone. Unfortunately, since the original game & expansions were so short-lived, I didn't have the opportunity to actually experience what the MMO format would actually be like. Part of this is that Ubisoft made an additional requirement to produce a separate version of the game that was entirely singleplayer, which is what I played here. This tumultuous development history is probably the reason for most of my gripes with the game.
The first thing to note is that this is the first major entry in the series that is rendered in 3D, ie. not using prerendered scenes. RealMyst might have come out before this, but apparently URU began development right after finishing Riven. I'm happy to say that it still looks fantastic and doesn't feel out of place in the universe at all; the draw of Myst was always as much about the aesthetic and world design as it was about the pure graphical fidelity, and it's on full display here. I did use a simple 4K patch for my playthrough, but all of the original assets still create a fantastic & mystical feeling when exploring the Ages. I can't look at any of the shots from Kadish Tolesa and say this game looks bad; I'd argue that it's probably the most visually stunning Age in the entire series so far. Most of the other Ages also look great as can be seen; the concepts are quite interesting, and execution is solid. Even better, you get to visit actual sections of the main D'ni city for the first time in this game, not just a couple of rooms in K'veer. They're abandoned, but the atmosphere is all still there.
The actual plot of this game feels a bit more muddled, though. I feel like Myst thru Myst IV have fairly simple, but effective stories (even if the return of the brothers in IV wasn't really necessary). On the other hand, URU had to come up with a pretty nonsensical plot to justify the MMO nature; or else it'd feel kind of silly that all of these players were somehow able to each solve the same problems with the world. They came up with a wack concept of the "Bahro", some kind of "slave" race of the D'ni that need to be freed from servitude. This is basically just an even dumber retelling/conceptualization of the plot of the Book of D'ni to be honest, and Yeesha is some weird insane druggie who's convinced she has some crazy powers or something. Not sure how much I care for all the little & big retcons of established mechanics of the world. It makes me a bit worried about Myst V, which continues this plotline.
Puzzles and gameplay are a bit different than the other games, kind of. The worlds generally still center around some big puzzles, but the actual stated objective is to find a bunch of "hand" tapestries in each Age, 7 to be exact. Once you find them all, you get access to another hidden Journey door leading to the Bahro caves, from which you can bring a totem out to your personal Relto age. Once you complete all the ages, you're tasked with returning all the totems back to their original positions in the cave, which (apparently) frees a single Bahro from slavery. The puzzles in each age are fairly consistent with the other games, except maybe a bit more obtuse on average? This was probably originally to promote discussion between people to share what they've learned, but you can't do that much in singleplayer. There isn't too much more to comment in general; contrary to what some people say, URU isn't significantly harder than other entries, and I'd still say Riven's standing stones puzzle still keeps the crown as the biggest, most involved puzzle in the series.
The two expansions bring a little bit extra to the table; note that both are included now in the Steam release (URU: Complete Chronicles). To D'ni was the "free" expansion that gave you access to all the locations in the actual D'ni cavern, which felt more like a showcase or "museum" rather than an actual plot expansion. There's an overarching task to calibrate "The Great Zero", which is some kind of giant mechanism central to D'ni society. This just manifests as a collectathon requiring you to walk around D'ni looking for little markers -- that's it. The other one, Path of the Shell, introduces a couple of actual ages with real puzzles. Not going to lie, I barely understand what the actual point of the expansion is, but it does eventually take you back to Myst island which is cool. I thought PotS had a ton of really finnicky mechanics and even some broken aspects that made it a pretty poor experience, but some moments are pretty cool. Ahnonay having a "Truman Show" twist was something I definitely didn't see coming.
There's a ton of really annoying aspects of this game that really dampened my overall enjoyment. The most obvious (and most immediate) is the really weird tank controls, and extremely slow movement and animations. This makes navigation around the ages and interaction with puzzle elements really clunky, which is a big no-no for any puzzle game. It's the biggest contributing reason for why I decided to just look up hints or answers to some puzzles instead of wasting time learning them fully; I don't want to watch my character waste 5 seconds pushing a lever 50 times in a row. There's also a ton of random bugs and irritations; a couple of Ages have jumping puzzles that simply do not work if your FPS is too high, because of some issue with the physics engine. PotS had some unbelievably stupid mechanics that literally require you to stand still for ~15 minutes which feel like a complete waste of time to "lengthen" the game. Worse yet, the core mechanic of the game, tossing a light tablet from Er'Cana into a water in the lower chamber in Ahnonay, was completely bugged and didn't produce enough light. Finally, the last puzzle of the DLC requiring you to walk a circular path around a tree also bugged out and would not work correctly; I only managed to get it to work after ~1hr of retries and a full game restart. At various other points in the game, I got "stuck" on puzzles only to realize that something in the game just didn't work as intended.
URU is kind of in a weird spot for me. It looks great, and it has a pretty complete skeleton for a good Myst game, but the poor gameplay experience and sub-optimal puzzle design really dashes what could otherwise be a solid entry to the series. It's not even particularly memorable from a lore standpoing because the writing is so muddled, and Yeesha's rambling and other journals are kind of incomprehensible. We'll see how Myst V followed up this later, but I'm seeing the reason why these last 2 entries in the series are frequently regarded as the worst in the franchise.
