{"id":137,"date":"2007-05-09T16:50:19","date_gmt":"2007-05-09T21:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/137"},"modified":"2016-06-09T10:53:18","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T17:53:18","slug":"rhem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/137","title":{"rendered":"Rhem"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rhem-stairs\"<\/a>When I said yesterday that I wanted something more thinky, what I was planning to do was pick up a copy of Myst V: End of Ages<\/em> at one of the various retailers I pass on the way home from work. But it turns out that it’s no longer on store shelves (although, for some reason, Uru: The Path of the Shell<\/em> is.) I have already made other arrangements to acquire it: as a completist, I definitely want to finish the Myst<\/em> series sometime, even though the series seems to have peaked at Riven<\/em>. But in the short term, I’ll have to make do with the next best thing: a blatant Myst<\/em> imitation. Fortunately, I have several.<\/p>\n

Rhem<\/em> is one of the better ones, and in some respects utilizes the form better than any of the actual Myst<\/em> games. Andrew Plotkin’s review<\/a> does a good job of explaining this. I honestly don’t know if I’ll have anything significant to add to what he says. I will note, however, that while his review talks at some length about three CDs and overcoming the need to swap disks, the game was later re-released on a single CD, apparently the result of better video compression. This is the edition I’m playing.<\/p>\n

My history with Rhem<\/em> is typical of my experience of graphic adentures. I started it, got a good way into it, got stuck, got distracted, and set it aside to finish later. Well, this is not a game that you can just abandon for a week and remember enough of to keep playing. Some time later, after some system upgrades, I tried to play it again, but hit strange technical problems. The publisher’s tech support was unable to help me, as is usually the case with games more than a year or two old. Whatever the problem was, subsequent upgrades seem to have fixed it. (I love it when that happens.) I have of course forgotten most of the game, but I have a vague recollection of what I did before that makes it a little easier to figure out what to do.<\/p>\n

Faded familiarity does not, however, make the map easier to navigate. Talk about twisty passages — Rhem is made largely of catwalks and stairways that cross over and under each other a lot, ruining my sense of where I have and have not been already. The game provides a partial map at one point, and I’m relying on that a lot, when I can figure out where I am on it. Annotating the map with the locations of stairs helps a lot. I may wind up making a simpler map that only notes junctions, once I have a better handle on the layout. As much as the author has tried to ease navigation within the framework of a Macromedia Director adventure game, I really think this aspect of the game might be served better by a full 3D engine, where continuity of motion would make it easier to keep track of which peripheral objects are which. Or maybe not: it would slow down movement, now handled by swift mouse clicks. Besides, it’s not like the author had the time or the budget to develop such a thing. This is another of those indy efforts, sold at first exclusively through the author’s website, and I’m glad that he chose to devote his efforts towards a game rather than a new engine. But the point is, Rhem is conceived as a continuous three-dimensional object, and understanding how that object is put together is crucial to figuring out the game. I made comments to this effect about The Neverhood<\/em><\/a>, but it’s even more true here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I said yesterday that I wanted something more thinky, what I was planning to do was pick up a copy of Myst V: End of Ages at one of the various retailers I pass on the way home from work. But it turns out that it’s no longer on store shelves (although, for some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[70,85,126],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mystlike","tag-andrew-plotkin","tag-mystlike","tag-rhem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3387,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/3387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}