Once Saavedro is introduced, he dominates the spotlight for the rest of the game, and with good reason. Video is used sparingly and efficiently, never lingering long enough to make the player impatient. I want to stress the brevity of these clips: this is not a game which forces you to sit still and watch a long drama play out before being allowed to act. It’s a well-paced introduction: a short video to establish character and backstory (particularly important for those who didn’t first read The Book of D’ni), followed by a small interactive section (which prevents the game from stagnating into a movie), culminating in a brief but effective cutscene which segues into the game’s primary storyline. Saavedro then links away again and the player is compelled to follow him quickly, the music and encroaching flames creating an illusion of urgency. Saavedro hesitates for only a second before setting fire to Atrus’s study and stealing the linking book to Releeshahn, the Age which Atrus has created as a new home for the D’ni. Catherine gets a brief cameo with baby Yeesha, and Atrus manages to get in a few lines before being interrupted by the dramatic entrance of Saavedro, the game’s antagonist. The player is then dumped unceremoniously (and with no explanation whatsoever) into Tomanha, Atrus and Catherine’s new home. He then explicitly states that he’s reached a turning point at which he can put his past behind him. His sons are gone, but he has a new daughter, Yeesha. The game opens with a cutscene in which Atrus conveys a bit of backstory: he has decided that D’ni should not be rebuilt, and has instead written a new Age for the survivors of the Fall. Despite its weaknesses, however, it does ultimately come out as a worthwhile addition to the canon. It can be outstanding one moment and laughably stupid the next. It waffles between the profound and the silly, the realistic and the absurd. The game they created was Myst III: Exile.
If Cyan was not to make the next game, Presto’s team was probably the most qualified to do so in their stead. Presto was familiar to Myst fans as the creators of the Journeyman time-travel series. Mattel Interactive, which at around this time had acquired the publishing rights to the series, wanted a new Myst title as quickly as possible, though, and Presto Studios was enlisted to take up the mantle. After Riven was released, Cyan went quiet for a while in order to research and produce what would eventually become Uru.
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