Ah Myst, the game that gamers can never agree on. Is it a gorgeous hallmark of minimalist adventure gaming, pitting your puzzle solving abilities against an alien land or is it nothing more than a glorified slide show where random switch pulling has as much to do with success as actual skill? Whatever you may have thought about Myst before, both fans and detractors of the series alike can now come together in agreement over the latest port of Myst for the Nintendo DS as the game fails to impress on so many levels, when it isn’t crashing, that it can be universally disregarded.

Back in 1993, when Myst was first released for the Mac, if all you had been playing was SNES or Saturn games, the lush visuals of Myst, spun from a disc, seemingly from the future, were a real treat. Even though there was little more than a blur when moving from one picture to the next, seeing such visuals and the promises of a new age of glorified graphics they promised, was a breath of fresh air.

Unfortunately, whatever graphical spell these images had 15 years ago is completely lost when the same images are shoved onto the DS’s screens. The environments are nothing special to look at, and using the magnifying glass to delve deeper into the visuals results in nothing more than a blocky, pixilated mess.

Even if the graphics were superb, they wouldn’t make your job any easier. One of the hallmarks of Myst is that the game just throws you into the story with no indication of what to do next. At least the original version had a cursor that changed when hovered over something that could be interacted with. Not so here. You’ll just be randomly tapping things on the screen, hoping that it’s a switch, or some other interactive MacGuffin. If what you’re clicking on isn’t a switch, you’re usually brought to the next environment, requiring you to backtrack and start clicking anew.

The game has some tools to help you on your journey, but like everything else in the game, they’re so poorly implemented that they’re rendered useless. The camera can only take and store one picture at a time which doesn’t help when you don’t know what you’re doing, so you don’t know if what you’re taking a picture of will help you with your next task.

Despite being ported to a system with a touchscreen, and plenty of handwriting support, the game utilizes a 1940’s era typewriter as its note taking device. Pecking out letters with the stylus is an exercise in frustration, especially given that you can’t use the stylus to place the cursor back in a previous note. Any corrections are made at the expense of deleting everything that comes after the mistake. Along with the frustrations of typing, the typewriter is useless for diagramming maze routes, or any other non-verbal puzzle clue. Who carries around a 70 year old typewriter anyway?

If you can get past all of the bad design choices, the game’s many bugs will make your quest to unlock the secrets of your mysterious destination even more daunting. Collected pages will disappear from your inventory, switches that need to stay flipped to progress don’t stay switched and random crashing is an ever present spectre.