Cyan finally remastered their older games to 64 bit and the updates were free on Steam so I can now finish playing them all, including Myst 5 and Uru which I never had a chance to play before.
Myst 4 revelation is an odd duck in the series. While some of the visuals are as stunning as ever, the gameplay was a bit stale in places and the story wasn't as engaging as I would have liked.
Visually, the game is pretty stunning considering it is still basically a point and click game. The different is each node you click to has video overlays and the ability to pan around giving it gameplay ALMOST but not quite like some more modern 3D games. A lot of attention w s put in the details and designs and it shows.
Gameplay and technically there are problems. The puzzles are sometimes just annoying and hard and don't advance the story much at all. The ability to figure them out on your own is not always possible, too much information is missing to make sense of some of it. Some of the puzzles need much more precision with the mouse and its just not there making it very frustrating even if you have something figured out. A couple of the worlds have mazes composed on pathways that are deliberately confusing and i you stop moving the mouse, the scenery will rotate on its own making it impossible to get a good sense of direction.
At the end of the game I was literally minutes from solving the last part and could not move forward because I couldn't get to the a door. In the end I just watched a play through to see what I couldn't get to and it honestly wasn't that interesting. I would have felt cheated had I managed to get it working.
I would still recommend playing it to see the environments and the creatures that are animated throughout. When it's works, there is a sense of a real place with lots of life. There is a lot less room to explore and discover little details that are not important to the plot but nevertheless make it an interesting place to hang out bus there was enough visual stimulation to keep me playing until I was unable to move forward anymore.