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Comer

I love Myst. Comer is an unapologetic Myst clone, it's mentioned in the documentation and in the game. There are echoes of Myst on the soundtrack. And while all the big game review sites have ignored the game, all the little adventure-specific sites have given it glowing reviews. So if I don't like Comer, it must be me.

I don't like Comer.

The question is, what is it about this game, designed to be just like Myst, that left me cold?

Well, the visuals weren't as good. I mean, they were pretty good, they were pretty, they were Myst-like, they were pleasant. But there wasn't that same sense of being in a fully-realized world. Trees were plentiful, but were obviously computer created, whereas I recall trees in Myst looking more like trees. And the whole world was overly green, more like an impressionist painter's concept of nature than the actual colors you'd find in nature.

In terms of plot, well, neither game has one. But what little story there was in Myst kind of made sense. In Comer, I don't know what the hell the disembodied voice of a previous "comer" (what's a comer? I don't know, someone who comes to this place I suppose) was going on about. Poorly translated, badly recorded English read by someone who was quite obviously not an actor outlines a story of sorts, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what he was talking about. At least in Myst you eventually had an idea of what you were trying to do. In Comer that's never clear, and in a particularly striking example of the way this game was not thought through, when you've finished the last puzzle you don't know that you're finished! I found out the game was over when I read in the cheat file that the puzzle I had just finished with was the last one. How's that for stupid?

And the puzzles bugged me. They were hard puzzles, but while I'm not fond of overly difficult puzzles I can still respect them if they seem well constructed. But the puzzles in Comer bothered me because they seem fundamentally unlikely. In Myst there was a sense of a sensible, if somewhat fantastic, mechanistic world. In Comer that's not true. Here's a minor example. In Comer there are a number of elevators. In Myst if you were in an elevator there would be a button somewhere you could push to work it. In Comer you use elevator's by moving your cursor until it turns into an up or down arrow. And you have to be facing the right way, even if the elevator is just a disk and there is nothing to indicate which way is forward. By using the cursor to operate the elevator you are making the computer part of the environment, thus making the environment less real.

Throughout the game there are places where you have to do something to solve a puzzle that, were you really there, in this world, you wouldn't think to do. I didn't feel that I was in a world with its own mechanistic rules, I felt that I was in a game with a bunch of puzzles a game designer thought up.

Comer is a game for people who are patient and not easily annoyed. There is one part of the game where you have to go back and forth from one place to another, and this involves an elevator ride (two floors), a boat trip and a walk down a very long path, the whole thing comprising perhaps 20 mouse clicks to get through 20 scenes. That just bugged the hell out of me.

There were a few puzzles I liked, but for the most part I cheated without feeling that if I'd just thought a little harder I would have figured that out on my own, in spite of the comment in the documentation that the puzzles are: "very simple and meaningful when you solve them. An instinct in your mind will probably make you shout." In spite of being on 4 CDs it's an unusually short game, so at least it didn't annoy me for very long.

So, my minority opinion is: eh.

-- Charles Herold -1999

Glitches:Some small glitches.