Mystified

(listening to: Tori Amos's atrocious cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Blech.)

So: Myst V. It's an excellent game thus far -- at the moment, we're (I believe) halfway through. Storywise, it's pretty typical Myst stuff: questing to recover an item of great power, in this case a magical tablet; once you find it, you must choose what to do with it. One guy, Escher -- whose brilliant voice performance is provided by David Ogden Stiers, of all people -- keeps harping on the big choice you'll have to make once you get the tablet. There are four options, as far as I can see. Give it to him. Give it to Yeesha, the daughter of Atrus, who you helped in the previous four Myst games and is now nowhere to be found. Keep it yourself. Or give it to The Monkeys -- these weird creatures called the Bahro, who keep running around and bothering you. They look like monkeys, kinda, and we can't stop calling them monkeys. No matter how hard we try. Okay, we're not trying.

The monkeys are quite the interesting species. There's this slate you carry around, right? And you can draw on it whatever you want. Draw a certain shape and put the slate on the ground, and a monkey will appear and take the slate away. Most of the shapes are warps -- the monkey shows up and takes the slate to the location that goes along with whatever symbol you drew. But each Age seems to have a God Symbol: draw it, show it to a monkey, and out come the supernatural powers. In a snow-covered Age, the monkeys create heat. In the beach-like Age we're stuck in now, the monkeys call forth a hurricane. And then there's Todelmer, an Age that exists on a small, rocky moon orbiting a ringed gas giant -- scrawl your special symbol, drop the slate, and watch as the monkey realigns the planets and the stars. I'm afraid what will happen in the Age we haven't seen.

Note to self: don't piss off the monkeys.

I think that's a rule we can all live by.