The XXVII Mysterium was held in Portland, OR, on July 24–26, with the panels and presentations streamed to both Twitch and YouTube.
Belford wrote a two-part summary in his blog, giving his perspective mainly on Cyan’s panel.
Friday started with the Opening Announcements, with a few words and reminders from the convention chairs.
☛ In the A New Age of Myst Tabletop Gaming (link TBA) panel, Kefrith introduced four new homemade tabletop games themed around the Myst franchise. Three are custom re-themed versions of existing card and board games, while the fourth is a brand new design.
☛ In the Gehn’s Grab Bag (link TBA), attendees took game pieces, cards, instructions, and like Gehn made games with no written rules.
☛ Twice during the convention, Curator played the 2024 Mysterium Marker Missions (link TBA) on stream (which you can get via Mir-o-Bot).
☛ The rest of the day was dedicated to events that were not streamed. In the voluntary event Achenar’s Journey, people were randomly grouped and assigned a puzzle packet to solve. Annacat explored the music of the Myst series through dance and creative movement, teaching a simple short choreography. She also guided attendees through warmup and cooldown exercises each morning and evening. In the bring-your-own craft project Wharkin’ Hard ’n Hardly Wharkin’ event, attendees brought sketchbooks, knitting, crochet, drawing tablets, embroidery, quilling and such.
Saturday started with the Creature Feature (link TBA) game: the cerpatee went extinct, Haven needs a new apex predator and it was up to the players to design one, either in teams or individually, using randomly selected Earth animals to create a creature that can fix Haven’s ecosystem.
☛ In the Restoration of The Great Shaft (link TBA) panel, Murry and Calum Traveler showcased the upcoming Descent location (thanks to the hard work of Calum, Tweek, Ametist, Ehren, TikiBear, Semjay and Maurus) and detailed some of the unique challenges in building it while keeping continuity with previous, often inconsistent depictions in DIRT, the novels, Myst V and Uru Live itself.
Besides the familiar access from the Eder Tomahn, it will also be possible to enter from the Cleft area to the caldera, with a newly installed elevator platform. The location will have brand new music by Semjay and Maurus, mixed with the existing one. The tunnels have been extended compared to Myst V, to match the novels and to fix a geometric issue with the top of the Shaft, that would otherwise protrude above ground level.
All the sections up (well, down) to the elevator platform are functional and roughly familiar if you played Myst V. There are plans for the sections beyond that, including the Bug Cave from the Intangibles assets; Semjay is working on this part.
There is no planned released date, but Descent will be split in phases: phase 1 and 2 are the tunnels and the Shaft, phase 3 is the Bug Cave. Initially Descent will be released as a public instance, possibly with all puzzles already solved. For the future, they’re planning on a private instance that will be reached from Rainy Cleft, climbing up the volcano to the caldera.
☛ In the Myst Documentary (link TBA) panel, Philip Shane gave a few updates on the status and the many difficulties of the Myst Documentary. He was joined by collaborators Randy Woods (writer), David Van Taylor (consulting producer), Joshua Reinstein (editing, history cataloging), Ben Reichman (editing), John Clark, Hollister Starrett (music), Elana Bogdan (web design), and Khatie Postma (community manager). He showed various completed scenes: building Cyan’s office, outtakes from the Making of Riven footage, Rand and Robyn discussing puzzles for Myst, and the preparations for Obduction’s launch. Apparently there was a plan for a Coke–Myst Online co-branded ad.
☛ In the Cosplay Contest (link TBA), participant competed for the best interpretation of Achenar in Haven.
☛ In the Trial of Daddy Atrus (link TBA) panel, the Giant Bomb crew put Atrus on trial to decide if he’s guilty of being a bad father, and how much he’s to blame for their atrocities.
☛ In the Flimsiest Page (link TBA) panel, a parody of The Weakest Link, participants tried to impress everyone with their knowledge of Myst lore, often embarrassing themselves for getting it completly wrong.
☛ The rest of the day was dedicated to events that were not streamed. In the Guildmaster event, Taerun assigned the participants a variety of unique tasks to complete.
Sunday started with the What Would Achenar Build? (link TBA) game, in which participants were split into groups, given a random pile of things, and given a task to build. Then each group presented their creation, to be judged based on creativity, best looking, and so on.
☛ In Cyan’ State of the Union panel (possibly the first in-person report not held in Spokane), Hannah Gamiel and Eric A. Anderson gave a few updates on Cyan’s activities in the last two years. The talk is also summarized on Cyan’s website.
They started with a brief recap of the last two years: Riven’s many awards, the addition of Rime to Myst, the layoffs, the console ports of Firmament, Myst and Riven, the re-release of the novel trilogy ebook, updates for their classic games and Steam Deck verification, Steam bundles with Blue Prince, Outer Wilds and other games. Obduction was developed with early version of UE4, so further updates and ports are difficult; updating to a more recent release will take work and would lose support of certain features. Spyder is back, and posted recently on Cyan’s Discord, hinting about a link to an ARG teaser page.
The main course was a presentation called “Paths Not (yet) Taken: Scraps from Cyan’s Development Past”, in which they showed concept art and prototype shots from various cancelled projects:
- Latus (2004): one of the most known projects, it was an experiment in linear narrative, an episodic spy series with many interwoven storylines;
- Obduction v.1 (2005): “Myst meets Halo”, Cyan at some point wanted to try making a shooter-style game with narrative twists. Over time the idea morphed into a game about a farmer trying to rescue his dog, who was abducted by aliens; then a scenario of a televised intergalactic game show where aliens would kidnap humans to compete for prizes. The Obduction that was released only kept a few ideas from the original concept;
- DiSC v.1 (2006): the Cyan crew used to really be into disc golf, and actually started working on a disc golf game for the Wii, with powerups and wacky environments;
- Lift/Lyft (2007): a game about flight and exploration, in a massive world with floating islands, alternating between third-person exploration on the ground and first-person flying combat;
- Origami (2007): a much smaller, top-down action game about fighting paper monsters. Both Lift and Origami used Plasma 3.0, only used in Hex Isle;
- Latus v.2 (2010): the second attempt was a timeline game in a 3D world, in which you could move along the timeline, seeing the ripple effects of small changes, opening new locations and new options as you progressed, exponentially expanding the possibile branches;
- Goldfish (2011): “a love letter to the D’ni Cavern”, it was a game set in D’ni but not about Atrus. Some concepts and ideas were reworked for Obduction and Firmament;
- DiSC v.2 (2016): similar to DiSC v.1, but in VR; they even had a prototype, but it didn’t go anywhere;
- Goldfish v.2 (2023): a new take on the concept, quite ahead in design progress. This one is not in active development, but may still happen one day;
- Eric has also been modeling the whole D’ni Cavern in Unreal, including Ae’gura and the City Proper. It’s a “backburner side project” that “might come in handy someday”;
- Minnow: DarkPath (2025): a puzzle game under time pressure, set on a boring D’ni machine tunneling at high speed through the earth;
- Minnow: WhoD’nit (2025): a murder mystery visual novel in the style of Phoenix Wright; Guildmaster Kadish makes an appearance;
Then Eric and Hannah showcased Anglerfish (2024): a D’ni-era thriller with a darker tone, heavily under development towards the end of Riven production and teased as “Prefall” in early 2025, before the layoffs. The player is sent to fetch a Linking Book by a Guildmaster named Damreus, who’s also editing the Age as you’re exploring. They built a fully playable prototype, and showed a publisher pitch trailer (spoilers warning). It has more storyline and gameplay spoilers than you’d expect from a Steam game trailer. The game is not currently in production as they could not get it funded. Both the attendees and the stream chat were very clear they want to see it completed!
The trailer was quickly featured on a number of online gaming websites (Criticalpixel, Games.gg, PCGamer, RetroArcade, RockPaperShotgun, VideoGameGeek).
Mudfish is the project Cyan is currently developing, a first-person adventure in the Myst setting, with “denser, more intricate game spaces”. The name is intentionally connected to Mudpie, Uru’s prototype.
They’re not focusing on VR for the moment, as the team is too small to target all platforms. They’re planning boxed editions of Myst and Riven for PS5, Xbox, and Mac/PC. PS5 and Xbox boxes will have actual discs, while PCs will just get a Steam code. They’re also working on deluxe hardcover reprints of the Myst novel trilogy. As for The Book of Marrim, the manuscript turned out to be very incomplete, and the lore and story didn’t match the direction they’ve been following for the last twenty years. So BoM is a dead end at this point.
Also, 2027 will be a year of anniversaries: Riven will be 30 years old; Cyan will be 40 years old, reportedly the oldest surviving independent game studio in the US. There are talks about a possible exhibition in Spokane, which led to the announcement of next year’s Mysterium location: Spokane, WA!
☛ The Closing Ceremonies (link TBA)wrapped up this year’s convention and ran the prize drawing.
Thanks and kudos to the Mysterium Committee, who did a great job at organising and managing the event.
Looking forward to next year!
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