Bloggy Blargle Blog 6

While running in circles around the Stoneship Age and Myst Island deciding which features to keep and which to alter for the latest chapters of Aitran, I realized a few things about the game of Myst that I'd like to share with you:
1. Despite the back-story supplied for each Age, the places were designed solely as puzzle-solving environments with little to no attempts to make the Ages seem like reasonable places to live. As I had Rainbow Dash note back in the Fortress/Mechanical Age, there's no way a single person, let alone the six that were there when Atrus first linked to the Age, could actually live in that rotating fortress for an extended period of time. Stoneship's not much better, especially with all the flooding. I could see intelligent entities living in Channelwood, but not if they valued privacy to any degree. Myst itself would be a terrible place to live, and it was Atrus and his family's home for who-knows how long! The Selenitic was never populated, so it gets a pass on this.
2. Atrus's Stoneship journal contains a map of the Age that reflects its present appearance, not what I'd expect it to look like at the time he would've drawn it. At the very least I'd expect to see the rock that the lighthouse was built upon and the rocks (if any) connecting it to the main one.
3. Speaking of that lighthouse, there's no door at the bottom, or any sign of one having been there and then blocked up to prevent the ocean from flooding in. The only entrance into the lighthouse is the window you climb through, which is pretty close to the top.
4. I'm pretty sure there's not a single puzzle in the game that you can't completely un-do if the mood strikes you. Except maybe making the bridge to the clock-tower, but I haven't tried reversing that one yet... This applies to the Ages as well- you can manually reset them to their original state before you arrived. But then you'd be unable to leave.

In writing Aitran, I have two goals: the first goal is to mix Ponies into the Myst universe and have it be interesting (And I'd say I've been quite successful with that so far ). The second goal is to make Myst and its associated Ages make more logical sense as places where people (or ponies) actually lived in at one point and not just as surreal backdrops for exploration and puzzle-solving, and also provide a solid explanation for why the stage is set the way it is when Twilight, Rainbow Dash, and you readers arrive.