Review: Myst 3: ExileReview: Myst 3: Exile;(creators);(publishers).Review written by Andrew PlotkinGraphicsPhenomenalAtmosphereSuperbWriting and dialogueOkay (bad in spots)InterfaceAcceptableStorySimplisticGameplayGood, but rather constrainingPuzzlesExcellentDifficultyFairly easyForgiveness ratingYou cannot die or make a mistake, except for the endgame, in whichsome mistakes are immediately fatal.I wish to object to the title.is a pretty good title. It's one word, it's recognizablein print, it's recognizable by voice.

It could be confused with 'Mist'if a game existed with that title, but none does. It's evocative. Andthe game world is both misty and mysterious.is a damn good title. It's one word. It's recognizable. It meanssomething, but the word is a little obscure, so it's evocative.

And thegame world is, indeed, riven.If I say 'Myst' or 'Riven', you will immediately know what I'm talkingabout.But what should I call this game? If I say 'Exile', you will immediatelythink of half-a-dozen games - a different half-dozen every year. So Icall it 'Myst Three'; as does everyone I've talked to.' Myst Three' is not evocative. Unless you want to evoke 'sequel'. Andthe game world - well, it has the number three in it, I guess. But'Myst Three' is about the most characterless, bland identity I couldwish upon a game.Enough about the title.As everyone knows (except that lemon on your left, who I must thereforeexplain history to), Cyan and the Miller brothers did not create thisgame, as they created Myst and Riven.

(Cyan is busydeveloping some immense multiplayer strangeness.) Instead theycontracted it out to Presto Studios, best known for theseries.Presto is a fine bunch. I enjoyed the JP games.

I JUST started this map UNDER CONSTRUCTION i will not work Fulltime on this map i also got another project to work on That is why i MIGHT Need somebody who is GREAT At making Texturepacks Btw SOME PUZZLES ARE NOT MADE BECAUSE I CAN'T MAKE THEM LOGO MADE BY MAKERS OF MYST EXEPT THE 2 WORDS. I JUST started this map UNDER CONSTRUCTION i will not work Fulltime on this map i also got another project to work on That is why i MIGHT Need somebody who is GREAT At making Texturepacks Btw SOME PUZZLES ARE NOT MADE BECAUSE I CAN'T MAKE THEM LOGO MADE BY MAKERS OF MYST EXEPT THE 2 WORDS.

Our black powder Golf ball cannons are big and loud enough to get your adrenalin pumping but compact enough for easy transport and set up. The WW I and WW II versions are already a hit. Cannons n balls reviews. They are just flat out cool!: This category is kind of a catch-all for new, unique, or one of a kind,cannons and products that don't quite fit in other categories. Coaches Club Cannons offers a variety of designs and barrel lengths to best meet your needs. If you are limited by space, most people shoot a 2” foam play ball found at any toy store.

Whendifferent authors take over an established body of work, an establishedworld, you can see the seams. Everyone brings their own touch. And Ifeel that Presto, in creating this very good game, did not quiteunderstand what made the previous Myst games great.(There. How's that for a mixed curse? It's also a confused curse, asMyst and Riven were quite different games, and Ishouldn't imply that a single magic ingredient informed both. Except.well, let me beat around the bush for a while.)For three days, I have been in gorgeous, spectacular places.

The visual design - no, the structural design - of the Ages ofMyst 3 is better than anything I have seen before. Stone isweathered, irregular, haphazard. Wood is organic. Nothing isflat. Straight lines and planar surfaces are afterthoughts, humanadditions. Okay, I phrased that badly. But none of the worlds have aregular, mathematical nature.

The deficits of most other games, withtheir polygonal rigidity and lattice maps, is achingly apparent incomparison. Even the human buildings in these worlds are more flowingthan geometric.Each Age has its own character, of course. One is purely organic,literally biological, and has not a straight line anywhere;others are more mechanical or industrial. But the design sense neverflags. Finishing one Age, I watched a transformation that left meentirely without words; my mouth was open and I could not think of athing to say. And then at the end of the next Age, it happened again.Elements of each world came together to a revelation which had beenaround me the entire time, and each time I was entirelysurprised. I could not prepare myself.

I could not anticipate.Oh, and the music is good too. (Note to self: buy soundtrack.)The storyline is very simple. You are visiting Atrus and Catherine -how you manage that, after the end of Riven, is quite unclear,but there you are. Atrus has been writing a new Age called Releeshahn,which will be a new home for the D'ni people. He's about to give you atour of it. A Bad Guy pops in, grabs the Releeshahnlinking book, and pops out again.As we well know, the great monkeywrench of the Myst mythos is that whenyou travel through (into?) a linking book, you leave it behind.

Ipsognusto, a book falls to the floor when the Bad Guy vanishes. It'slabelled 'J'nanin', and you have no time to waste, so into J'nanin yougo.J'nanin, according to the usual journals and background material, is oneof Atrus's early creations - the start of a teaching sequence that hedesigned for his kids. (You know, back before they grew up into eviljerks and he offed them. Ahem.) Anyway, the only reason I delve this farinto the plot is that, well, this is the plot. You're in ateaching world. A puzzle world.

The Bad Guy has twisted it around some,but the basic challenge here is to - guess what - solve the puzzles.And this stands in stark contrast to Riven. The islands of theRiven Age were part of a civilization. People lived on one; the localtyrant lived on another; he built machines on others, to do his work.The puzzles were part of the living environment - a boiler in apaper-making plant, a sub-way car, a ventilation shaft fan. Elevatorswere useful elevators, even if someone had positioned them toimpede you.

Yes, yes, you found doors locked with combination locks. Butthose were areas in which someone wanted privacy.In Myst 3, everything you find is puzzling because Atrus wasgoofing around designing puzzles.I don't mean everything is absolutely arbitrary, like a slider puzzlestuck in a nuclear reactor. The contrivances form logical sets: turbineand generator and distributor, insect and flower, pivot and balance andcounterweight. Each environment is, in fact, perfectly integrated withthe puzzles that reside there.But there's no. Story behind the environments. Nothing has a reason.That underpinning of purpose (civilized or evolutionary, builtor grown), from which puzzles can be suspended with delicate (or sturdy)chains of plausibility - that's what's missing in Myst 3.Here's an exception, and I'll tell you why it's not a perfect exception.You find an elevator.

Some of the machinery has been torn out, so itdoesn't quite take you to the right place. The Bad Guy's diary mentionsthat he's been cannibalizing gears, so this makes sense. The elevatorhad a use, and now it's harder to use, but of course the BG left himselfa way to jigger it into working.You find clues about how to jigger it.

You have to set various pieces ofmachinery to various positions. And here's where the plausibility,heretofore exemplary, falls over: the pieces of machinery don't actuallydo anything. I can see, from the visual design, how some of themought to relate to the elevator's functioning, but this is notreflected in their behavior. If you set them all right, the elevatorworks; if not all of them are right, they have no effect.So that's the best example of story-puzzle integration I can think of,and it's flawed. Oh well.I say nothing against the puzzles themselves, mind you.

They wereexcellently designed. It's the overall purpose of each area that I foundlacking, not the function of any particular piece; the use of nearlyeverything I encountered was clearly and coherently and wordlesslyexpressed, by its behavior and context.

(The elevator serves as anexception here, too, I'm afraid.) Small clues built from unexpectedsources, and came together into knowledge. The ending of - I won't saywhich Age, and I've already described being speechless. It wasn't justthe visuals. The sense of, of, 'of course that's what's goingto happen.' Beautiful.Every challenge opened itself to a bit of experimentation and analyticalthought.

I never once felt I had to read the designers' minds; I neverfelt a puzzle was unfair. I got confused about things sometimes, andthen realized that the mistake was all mine.And so you bounce from puzzle-world to puzzle-world, until you get tothe endgame, which is. A puzzle-world. And not the best puzzle in thegame, either. Okay, so the clues fit together, but they weren't cluesthat crept in subtly throughout the game; they were a handful of thingswhich stood up in stovepipe hats and tailcoats and said 'Hello. Please move along.' Solving it was a nice bit of exercise, but Ifelt no sense of revelation (as I did in many earlier parts of thegame), and that was rather a letdown.The storyline closes itself off well enough.

The Bad Guy (a creepywacko, played by Brad Dourif, now typecast after his roles as creepywackos on Voyager, B5, Dune, etc) has hisfinal scenes, with a few variations to fill out some variant endings.Unfortunately, the writing, which is passable through most of the game- okay, better than passable compared to most game dialogue - turnslaughable at the end.(Particularly if you leave the subtitles on. We were overtaken bygiggles, watching Dourif beat his head against the floor and groan 'No!No! As the subtitle text appeared: 'No no no no no!'

'Okay, it's a mean pleasure we took, and most of the game reallywasn't that bad. But it was an unfortunate final impression. Ihope Dourif enjoyed it, but he did a much better job on B5.)Way back in myRivenreview, I invented the term 'wedge-chocking' (which I promptly failed toever use again) to describe the sort of plot contrivance that keeps youmoving forward, not wandering back or into unsolvable states.

Closingoff options after they're no longer important, you see. Well, Myst3 does a lot of this too, but it's a bit less subtle than it was inRiven. Many puzzles (though not all) lock up once you solvethem.

Quite often, when you gain access to a new area of an Age, youcan't get back to the previous area. I can't exactly say this annoyedme, but I think it made the game feel more simplistic; it reduced mysense of exploration of a real world. Or, not my sense of exploration,but my sense of. Challenges were presented to me one at atime, or three at a time, but someone was following me around to tidy upthe used ones.It comes back to the problem of making a living subcreation, a worldthat exists on its own terms, I guess. The Ages of Myst 3 existfor the benefit of the explorer.

Yes, every computer game world existsfor the benefit of the explorer, but Riven concealed it fairlywell. (The original Myst, mind you, concealed it very poorly.This is one way in which Riven was an improvement.) Thisinstallment doesn't even try - it says 'Here are puzzle worlds, builtto be puzzles' - and while that certainly solves the problem, it's theeasy path to take.

Designers should aim higher.Okay, I've belabored that point to death twice now. Onwards.I was rather amused that one goal of the game is to collect pages. (Dejavu: 'More white pages!'

) They're pieces of a diary, which is a rathermore common-sensical reason for collecting pages than Myst had.On the other hand, the deja vu went both ways: as in Myst, thepages don't really tell you much of importance. You get more backgroundon the Bad Guy, which is interesting, but does that knowledge tie intothe action of the game? The storyline is more or less on holdthroughout the middle chapters of the game. This is another area inwhich Riven improved on its predecessor, and it's sad to seeMyst 3 backsliding.The interface is an anamorphic-panning view (the Myst series catches upto 1994 technology!) with a bit of a twist. Most panning-view games useone of two control schemes. Either the cursor is fixed in the center ofthe screen( ),or the cursor can move freely in the center region, with the screenborders acting as drag-here-to-pan zones. (Nearly everything else.) Inthis game, Presto has chosen an odd hybrid: the cursor is normally fixedin the center, but you can use the right mouse button (or shift key) tofreeze the panning and let the cursor roam freely.

(This is the only wayto get to the inventory bar, which is at the bottom of the screen.)It's not very awkward to use, but the modality is a minor nuisance, Idon't see it as a great improvement over the other two schemes either.The drawback of the Amerzone fixed-cursor system is that youneed a keyboard command to pop up an inventory (since the cursor can'tgo down to it). The inventory is rarely used in Myst 3, so thiswould not be a big deal.

Contrariwise, the drawback of the border-pansystem is that the view jerks whenever you yank the mouse down into theinventory bar. This has never been a big deal either.In fact I spent a lot of time jerking the screen around anyway,and it took me a couple of days to realize why. When you click amovement hotspot, the view changes very quickly, but there's a smalladditional delay before the game actually gives you control again. (It'sloading sound, or animation, or something.) During that time, the viewis frozen.

And you get no feedback about when that tiny freezeends. No cursor change, nothing. The only way to tell is to move themouse, and see if the view pans. So that's what I do. But - all themouse movement during the freeze accumulates; and theaccumulated movement translates to a wild spin when the freeze ends.The whole system quietly conditioned me to whirl madly around, afterevery step I took! The spinning and recovery was actually lessannoying than waiting an uncertain interval for that tiny freeze-upto end. Well, less annoying to me, anyway.

My friend, watchingme play, almost assaulted me physically.Feedback, children, is more important than you think.(Actually I can see another way to solve the problem: don't accumulatemouse movement while the game is withholding control from the player. Orlimit the mouse movement, or reduce it to a fraction of its normalauthority. Then I could move the mouse during the freeze, and I'd stillget the feedback of a view-pan when the freeze ended, but it would onlybe a small pan, not a disorientingly fast one.)While I'm mentioning tiny interface flaws, let me mention a large one:the game uses cursor changes to indicate pick-up hotspots, andmanipulation hotspots, but it doesn't change the cursor toindicate movement hotspots. I find this decision frankly bewildering.Why should I not know where I can walk? How does it serve the game toobfuscate this?An anamorphic pan is a fairly immersive interface, yes, but it's notperfect. You have no true depth perception or parallax; you cannot usethe tiny head movements that let you judge distances in real life. Youhave no sense of scale.

An anamorphic view, in short, can bemisinterpreted by the viewer, and hotspot feedback is the best wayto compensate for that. If a path looks like a vertical wall, or atunnel looks like a decorative knothole - and I suffered both thosevisual errors in this game - then I should at least be given the hintthat clicking there will do something.I cheated exactly once in Myst 3, and it wasn't because apuzzle was too hard. It was because one environment was such a gloriousorganic mass of twisty vegetation that I missed seeing a side path. Imissed it every one of the eight or ten times I walked past it. Thatwhole area was so confusing that I had been clicking through it blindly,and it did not occur to me that I had missed an invisible hotspot.

I washit with a jarring loss of faith in the designers' ability to conveyinformation; and since I was nearly finished with the game at thatpoint, I never quite recovered it before the end.I seem to be harping on flaws now. Okay, consider this: you can't startthe game unless CD 1 is inserted. So if you're playing an Age on CDs 2,3, or 4, and you quit for the night, you'll have to swap discs twice tobegin playing again. Is that dumb or what?That's in the PC port.

The Mac port doesn't suffer this problem, but Macowners shouldn't feel too smug. When I first installed Myst 3on my Powerbook, I chose the desktop as the install destination. Theinstaller promptly stuck its head up its ass and began to chase its ownintestines in manic circles.

More precisely, it created a desktopalias called 'Myst III Exile' (did I ask for a desktop alias?Do you think I'm too stupid to create an alias myself?) and then triedto create a folder with the same name, in the same place.Naturally, it failed. After the smoke cleared, I had a completeinstallation of Myst 3 - in an invisible folder in the Trash.I only discovered that by accident. If I hadn't noticed.

The installerwould have appeared to have failed silently, without error or warning,without any symptom aside from (1) a non-functional desktop alias and(2) two hundred megabytes of free space missing from my hard drive.Look, I'm not trying to grind down on what is, really, a single minorbug in the Mac installer script. My point is that someone with Macexperience should have caught that. Installing a game to the desktopisn't such a weird idea in the Mac world.(And I won't even mention the idiocy of an installer that says 'If youdo not have QuickTime 4.0 installed, you should install it. Do you wantto?

(YES) (NO)' Why, that would insult the intelligence of Macdevelopers everywhere, who know how to test for the presence ofQT4 and skip the dialog box. Not to mention the fact that 'Yes' and 'No'should never be written in all-capitals on a Mac button label. I mean,everybody knows that.)Slipshod work. I find it sad.But that's me focussing on specific, fixable problems. I enjoyedMyst 3, you know.

I don't want you to get any contraryimpression. I (and a friend) spent three long evenings pounding it flat,and we did not get bored, angry, or frustrated. (Except for thatnavigation problem in Edanna.)I'm comparing this review with my four-year-old review of.I see that, back then, I wrote a lot more specifics about adventure gamedesign and the challenges facing an author. Maybe I'm getting old. ButI think it's because this installment doesn't push many designboundaries.The short form is:it's gorgeous, entertaining, well-designed, diverting, satisfying, andabsolutely worth playing.

But the title suits it, in the end: the gameboils down to a third big helping of that familiar Myst.Availability: everywhere.System requirements: 233 MHz Pentium, Win 95/98/ME, 64 meg RAM, 200 megdisk space, 4x CD drive, 16-bit color display. For the Mac, that's 233MHz G3, and MacOS 8.1 or higher. A faster machine, faster CD drive, andbetter video hardware are strongly recommended; I found my 333 MHzPowerbook rather sluggish even at lowest display quality.

Myst III: Exile - Walkthrough/FAQ Myst III: Exile - Walkthrough by Allia - v1.1 finalTable of ContentsI. Revision HistoryIII. IntroductionThis is my first attempt at a walkthrough. Unfortunately I didn't have thetime to do subtle hints first, then detailed hints later. It's all detailed.Insert disclaimer here about not responsible for typos, errors, orommissions.

Yada yada yada. Originally it was just for a friend, but I'vefound gamefaqs.com so useful in the past I thought I would give somethingback.As with previous Myst games, hints can be found by relating sounds, shapes,colors, and sequences.About the interface, you have an almost totally free range of vision when youmove the mouse around. If you want to make your view stationary and move thehand icon independantly of your view, click the right mouse button once. Youwill need to do this to open the journals in your inventory below. Right-clickagain to resume free-look mode.II. Revision Historyv1.0 - 05.08.01 - Complete through introduction age, Tomahna, and first realage, J'nanin.v1.1 - 05.10.01 - All ages complete to end of game. Minor spelling and namecorrections.III.

'Tomahna'Just listen to Cathrine chatter about Atrus then head forward into the study.You can browse around Atrus' desk on the right. Read the letter thereabout 'Nara padlocks'. The linking book behind his desk is not functional.On the other side of the room is the Releeshahn book in a glass sphere. Walkover to it, inspect it, and Atrus will walk into the room. He will hand you ajournal of notes.Meet the freak, Saavedro. He will chuck a molotov cocktail type sphere atAtrus and make off with the Releeshahn book. Follow him with the linking bookhe leaves behind.B.

'J'nanin'When you first enter this age, you'll see Saavedro escaping around a corner.No use chasing him. He's locked himself in the tower in the middle of theisland.Survey devices:Each device has a colored gem on top and 3 view portals. You can rotate themby clicking below the portal area. Connect the dots, lalalala!From the red survey device at the start, go left down the ladder andcontinue 'west' to the yellow survey device.

Look to the left of it foranother device. Rotate the handle on this new device until the opening shineslight. You want to connect the survey devices with the beam of light startingfrom the first yellow one. It connects around the island in a counter-clockwise direction.

Yellow, blue, green, red, another yellow, purple, andanother red.This will bring the light to a device pointed at a door and emit a rainbowspectrum. This we'll call the Rainbow Door as it will be referenced later.Spore Bridge:On the north side of the island, go down a spiraling walkway. Enter a stained-glass building. Use a lever on the wall to open the iron grating. Next room,push button on left to open door to the freak's room on the right. Ignore thefreak's room for now.

Continue forward and exit the other side of the stained-glass building.Outside, go to the left. Touch the plant on the right. Push the top of theplant on the left and a creature will emerge and feed off the plant to theright. Notice how the plant reacts when the creature chirps.Go back to the path intersection and continue forward to a ladder. Halfway up,get off to the left. 'Tune' the huge plant here in the direction of thelittle creature until you can hear it the loudest.

This will make the sporeson the wall here swell up.Continue up the ladder to find the bridge the spores made.Freak's Room:Go back to the stained-glass building. Enter the freak's room via the middlepath inside. Get the journal on the hammock. Notice the drawings of gears atthe end of the journal.Walk behind the red elevator. Get inside and pull the lever on the right side.Take a ride up and get and earful from the freak. Press the green button togo back down.

Get out of the elevator and pull the lever on the right side ofit while standing outside. Crawl into the hole where the elevator was.Move the 4 gears on each side into the positions shown in the journal.

Thefirst ahead, set the left weight all the way down. The middle and rightweights half way down.Turn right. Set 2 of this gear's points with the coiled end pointing out, onepointing in. Rotate the gear by clicking in the upper middle area to accessthe other 2 ends.Turn right. Move the lever so it is touching the gear teeth on the bottom.Turn right. Rotate the left gear until the missing tooth is lined up with thegear on the right.Climb out of the hole. Pull the lever to get the elevator back.

Get into theelevator and pull the lever. If you've set the gears correctly, the elevatorshould turn 180 degrees before going up. This will let you open the door intothe freak's inner lair.Freak's Inner Lair:Go around and pick up the journal on the floor.

This will add 2 pages at thebeginning of the freak's journal you already have.Push the blue button next to the imager. This will open the 3 portals aroundthe room.

Watch the freak rudely interrupt Atrus' speech and tease youabout 'finding the symbols'.Go to the first portal behind you. The object is to line up the image withit's identical image somewhere on the island. The left lever zooms in andout. The right lever focuses.

You can grab and drag the view in the middle.Each symbol is on one of the giant tusks on the island in the dark windowedarea. I'll refer to the symbols as the circle, bird, and rabbit (it'sprobably a plant but the Playboy Bunny profile came to mind first time I sawit.)When you line up the symbol correctly, note the dots around each portal. Theirpositions corresond to the dialing locks inside each tusk. I'll call theouter-most dot #1 and the inner-most dot #4 and reference their postion asthey would be on a compass.Circle: #1-NNW, #2-ESE, #3-SSE, #4-WBird: #1-NNW, #2-WSW, #3-S, #4-SWRabbit: #1-SSW, #2-W, #3-S, #4-ECircle Tusk:The circle tusk is near the beginning of the Age at the first red surveydevice. Go past the tusk and down the ladder to the right.

The object here isto use the two levers to tilt and roll the barrel back behind the ladder.Once you succeed in doing this, don't forget to leave the ladder straight soyou can climb down it.Go up the ladder and down into the hole a few steps in front of you. Open thedoor at the end of the walkway and head back to the two levers. Now you needto tilt and roll the barrel to the other end to fill the hole inside theroom. Again, remember to leave the ladder straight after you succeed.Go back up the ladder and down the hole again.

Go into the room and postionthe dots as stated in the Freak's Inner Lair section. Press the centerbutton. Down comes the linking book for the Amateria Age.Bird Tusk:The bird tusk is where you made the spore bridge. Again, follow theappropriate dot pattern given in the Freak's Inner Lair section. Press thecenter button. Down comes the linking book for the Edanna Age.Rabbit Tusk:The rabbit tusk is at the Rainbow Door. Remember the sequence in which thelight hits each survey device and each survey devices color.

Press thebuttons above the door in that order. Yellow, blue, green, red, anotheryellow, purple, and another red. Again, follow the appropriate dot patterngiven in the Freak's Inner Lair section.

Press the center button. Down comesthe linking book for the Voltaic Age.C. 'Voltaic'Here you will find a vault door in a stone building and a metal spherecontaining the linking book for J'nanin. From the start, turn around andfollow the path into the island. Once inside the rocks, find a path to theright. Follow this to an intersection, picking up a few more pages of thefreak's journal along the way.

Ignore the door on the left. It can only beopened from the other side.Turn right down the blue path. Halfway, picture on right wall showing symbolsconnected with dotted lines. Climb up ladder on left. Turn valve wheel toopen dam. Climb back down.Turn left, go to end of corridor.

Another vault door. Go down ladder to theright. Press red button to open door. Walk through and crank handle. Thisjacks up the hydrolic arm. Climb up and go back to the ladder leading to thedam.

One step towards airlock at end of corridor, look left. Click to extendturbine fins. Now notice two symbols are now lit up on the wall.You can now go back down the corridor and open the airlock. Climb down theladder inside, press the button on the imager to hear Saavedro talk about thehorrors Atrus' sons put his people through. Turn around and go to the end ofthis long hall.It opens into a large room with a huge cylindar in the middle. This is wherepower is directed throughout the island.

But the power lines on the sides ofit need to be reconnected properly. Go down the ladder and inspect the wallof the cylindar. Move the upper row twice to the right. Move the middle rowonce to the right. Move the bottom row five times to the right. Find somemore journal pages on the other side of the cylindar.Head back all the way outside to the long path where you started this age.Follow the long path into the island. Ignore the elevator on the right andcontinue to the end of the path, go down the ladder.

See huge airship on theleft and huge gear on the right. Follow through the doorway.Lever on floor, gauge, 4 wheels. Wheels turn right on, left off. 4th wheelwon't turn.Behind the wall where the lever is, valve wheel that won't stay open.Climb up ladder next to this wheel. Get more pages for Saaderov's journal.Click on the protruding sphere on the wall.

It will rotate to reveal a newpath. Go through and across a long, spine-like walkway.At the end is another sphere. Click to open the hatch. 3 stepsforward there is a hatch in the floor. Click to open it. Climb down.Ahead is the door that you could not open from the other side. Behind is acylindar with a red lever on the bottom right.

Grab and move this leverupwards to move a gear on far back wall. This will clear the lava from theroom below you.Climb down the ladder and press the button to open the door to the lava room.Inside, move the lever down once, then left, then down again.

Go forward andpress the button. Go back to the controls. Move the lever up, to the right,then up again. Exit the room and go back up the ladder.

Move the lever downso that the lava rises again.Head back up, across the spine-walkway, and down to the valve wheels near theairship.Close all three valves here. Pull the lever to your left forward. This willraise you up one level.

Close three of the valves so the needle gets in thered zone. Now pull the lever forward again, taking you to the top level.close one of the valves, then pull the lever backward, taking you back to thesecond level. Open one of the valves you previously closed. Pull the leverbackward to take you to the first level.

Open the far left three valves (youcant turn the right one, and don't need to), which should bring the needleright onto the red line. Go to where the ladder on the left is, and turn thevalve wheel there to fill the airship.Now head back up the ladder and over to the elevator we ignored the firsttime.

Head down and pull the lever and the end of the walkway. This will openthe iris shutter and allow the airship through.Hop inside the airship, make sure your seat is in the upright and lockedposition, your food tray is secured, and pull the lever on the dashboard.Thank you for flying Atrus Airlines.At the end of the line, get off to the left, pull the lever at the end of thepath. Get back into the airship, pull the lever on the dashboard again.Get off to the right, open the vault door.

Climb down, turn the valve on thefloor. Receive the symbol of Voltaic. Open the green shutters to reveal thelinking book for J'nanin. Head back and place the symbol on the imager.D. 'Amateria'Go straight ahead from the start. You'll pass the J'nanin linking book on theright.

Go all the way to the end, down a flight of stone steps. At anintersection, turn right and go up the red elevator.

You'll find some journalpages behind you. Go back down, turn right and continue down the path.You'll come to a radiant green pool. Enter the hut on the other side. Put 2brown parts and 1 black part from the bench onto the sphere.

Go back out tothe set of controls. Pull the lever on the far left to raise yourself up.Slide the top lever so the gear on the hut moves to the far left. Pull thelever on the right. A ball will roll across the hut and continue out ofsight. The control panel will close and you will see a vision of the railsnear the start of the level.

Note the pattern of hexagons on the control panellid.Pull the lever on the left to lower yourself down and head all the way back tothe start.Continue past the start point, through the giant crystals, until you come toanother house. Halfway around the house, turn right into an opening betweenthe stone columns. Go through the gate and grab the journal pages on theright.Pull the left lever at the controls to raise yourself up.

On the left dial,place a peg in the upper hole and upper right hole. On the right dial, placea peg in the upper left hole. Press the lever below the dials.After the control panel closes, lower yourself back down and head back out tothe house.Turn right and continue around the house to a series of curving walkways withshimmering portals. Next to each portal on a post is a dial, which lookssomething like this:BA ^ C DEWalk to the center hut, then towards the house.

Climb down to the right, walkinto a cave, past a painting. Climb up the ladder to the left. Go to thecontrol panel, pick up the journal pages on the ground to the right, pull thelever on the left to raise yourself up.

This will give you a view of thecurving walkways and shimmering portals, which are diagramed below.32 41 0 50 is the junction where all the walkways intersect. Set each portal dial asfollows:1-B, 2-D, 3-A, 4-C, 5-EThen back at the control panel, raise yourself up and pull the other lever torelease a ball.Pull the left lever to lower yourself back down. Go back to the ladder anddown, head back to the start of the age.To get to the end of this age, you need to input the hexagon patterns into thepanels at the start of the age. They are as follows:X = pressedX O XO O O O O X X O O X X OX X X X O O O X OX O O X X O X X X O O XX X XOpen the hatch and enter the house. Go up the stairs, click on the chair, havea seat. Watch Saavedro rage on the imager.

Pull the ejection handle aboveyour head.On this control panel, numbering the circles as follows:1 2 34 5 67 8 9press these in this order: 2, 3, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9. Turn around, press the bluebutton on the ceiling. Nananananana!You get the symbol for Amateria, step down and use the J'nanin linking book.Place the symbol on the imager.E.

'Edanna'Head down the path into the tree. Walk up the spiraled stem. Walk towards theopening in the tree with the view of the ocean.

A bird will come flying inand land in its nest. Continue down the path to its end.Press the button next to the palm fronds on the right. They will move toreveal the J'nanin linking book. This will also allow the sun to shine on theplant behind you. Go to this plant and aim it at the sphere to the right ofthe spiraled stem.

It will explode and water the stem. Go back to the stem andwalk down it.Turn right and go down the angled path past the stingray creature. Downfurther, press the button on the plant to the right.

This will suck thestingray down into the plant. Pick up some pages on the left and continuedown the path.At the bottom, turn right and cross the bridge. At the end of the path, pullthe vine to make a bridge. Grab the blue vine on the bridge. Turn around andclick to swing up onto the ledge with the white dome. Crank the dome up inthe air, click the pink fruit bush to shake a piece free. Click the fruit whenit's on the ground to roll it out from under the dome's landing area.

Walkpast the crank to slide back down. Go back to the dome trap. Pull the handleon the side of the ledge to drop the trap. It will miss the creature, makingit run off. During its escape, its noises will cause the spores in the firstbridge to explode and collapse it.

Grab the blue vine again and swing throughthe void where bridge once crossed.Head down to the bottom of this path. You'll find the bird trapped in a planton the left. Turn right and head outside. This will curve around to the left,back into the tree. Click the plant near the painting on the wall to bringthe stingray down into it.Follow path to the right from the painting. Go to the lily flower at the veryend.

Aim it at the far left lily flower. Go to this other flower and aim itat the leaf bridge on the left to extend it. Go back to the painting andfollow the left path down this time.Find another plant on the right near the bottom. Click it to bring thestingray down to here. Continue around this plant and across the leaf bridge.You'll find a sunflower plant aimed at the plant with the stingray. Go to thelily flower above and aim it at the sunflower.Go all the way back to the first lily flower you aimed.

Aim it at the lilyflower just to the right of the currently targeted one. The plant holding thestingray will explode and free the bird.

Re-target the far left lily beforeleaving here.Head back up towards the sunflower (not lily) that just destroyed the plant. 2steps before reaching the ledge where the sunflower is, turn left and headinto the darkness there. This was the hardest path to find in this age.At the bottom, look for your hand icon to change to a vine icon when you passit over the open sky area to your left. Click to drop down a level in thetree. Go down this new path to a large blue plant.Follow this path to the end where a lily flower is. Aim it at the top of theblue plant. Go back down and turn right towards the plant with flies buzzingaround it.

Go to the right of this plant, click the plant at the end of thepath to make it cover the sunshine. Go back around the opposite side of theplant all the way to its base. Click the pod on the ground.Enter the blue vine behind you. Pick up the journal pages and continue to theend. Inside the plant, turn around and touch the blue stem in the middle.Take flight to the nest.Click on the open space where you see the spiraled stem in the distance toslide down and obtain the symbol for this age. Go forward and return via theJ'nanin linking book.

Place the symbol on the imager.F. 'Narayan'Welcome to Saavedro's home world. Notice the symbols on the walls to yourright.Go forward and right up the stairs. Meet Saavedro face to face.

Flip theswitch on the right after he leaves to turn on the power. Go back downstairs.Turn the handle between the two spheres so its facing the left one. Click onthe left sphere to open it.You need to create symbols by clicking on the individual lines in this puzzle.Atrus' journal has the following set of words in bold.energy powers future motion - put in top set of circlesdynamic forces spur change - put in bottom right setnature encourages mutual dependance - put in bottom left setThese need to be created according to the symbols that represent each word onthe walls.

Create them starting with the first word in the top circle andcontinue in a clockwise direction. When you complete a set of four wordscorrectly, they will all change white.When all 3 sets are complete, go through the door where the forcefielddisappeared. Go down the stairs and find the symbols for the following set ofwords:balanced systems stimulate civilizationsTake the Tomahna linking book on the left, but don't use it. Upstairs, turnthe handle between the two spheres so its facing the right one. Create thenew set of symbols. The outer forcefield disappears.Saavedro will come downstairs and ponder the current situation.

He goesoutside and offers you Releeshahn in exchange for turning the handle betweenthe spheres. Instead, go upstairs and turn off the power. Back downstairs,talk to Saavedro through the gate and he will give you Releeshahn. Turn thehandle between the spheres and restore the power upstairs. Saavedro rides offinto the sunset. Now use the Tomahna linking book to return to Atrus andCatherine.

Game Over.Note: If you want to see some of the alternate bad endings, just deviate fromthe last outlined paragraph by like using the Tomahna linking book early orswitching the forcefield handle before getting Releeshahn.IV. Misc.If you find any corrections that need to be made in this FAQ, please email meat tremoir@rocketmail.com. I will gladly credit you in the FAQ.FAQ's written by me:-Myst III: ExileMystery Of The Nautilus, TheSyberia This document Copyright 2002 Allia If you're gonna share this on any other sites, just give credit where creditis due by leaving this statement in.Look for these and future FAQ's of mine at:Neoseeker.com -Over -Code Central - Adventure -http://faqs.ign.com.