In the two examples mentioned earlier, the Bahro also take your slate and return it to the nearest pedestal, leading the player to feel that these creatures are less inclined to render assistance than they are concerned about their tools lying about the landscape. This forces you to travel back to retrieve them once again; thus the hindrance. I can only guess the developers planned this as a sort of attenuated obstacle, but it's uselessly frustrating, and served little purpose but to force a muttered expletive from me each time it happened. At other times, you will have to track down your slate again because you've unintentionally dropped it, as apparently the stranger is rather uncoordinated, and can't hold a small rock slate and turn a door handle at the same time. Having said that, the puzzle implementation felt organic and relevant, within a game that requests the player to involve him or herself emotionally as well as intellectually.

The format of the game is pleasingly simplified and customizable. Move the cursor to the top right of your screen and down floats your menu, reminiscent of the original Myst. Early on, you will gain access to a journal where you can take pictures (which also serve as game saves, as many and as often as you want), and write your thoughts down in a very cool script font that you will wish your own penmanship even remotely resembled. You can also access collected pieces of Yeesha's cryptic journal, which you will gather from entries found throughout the Ages.

The graphics are an area in which the Myst games have always excelled, as their focus is on the scenic, imaginative wonders of each world. EoA is no exception. It is a beautiful game that retains the diverse surroundings and familiar first-person perspective of its predecessors, but is rendered in real-time 3D this time around.

Exploration is a pleasure with the responsive engine that breathes life into the environs around you, and offers a full complement of control options. A mouse/keyboard combination allows for completely free roaming, but mouse-only gamers are also accommodated with intuitive node movement, point & click control. A right-click will allow a panoramic look around, while left clicking will propel you along a real-time cinematic track. It is possible to continue clicking to move fluidly and continuously. This is excellent for backtracking or moving yourself through familiar spaces.

Unlike previous Myst incarnations, live actors weren't utilized due to the graphical changes in the game, as EoA opts instead for characters also rendered in 3D. One thing this means is that you can look around when someone's talking to you and hear the difference in the ambient sound of their voice, though often you aren't free to actually move around until they've had their word with you.

While longtime fans may lament the loss of FMV characters, I don't think I've honestly seen such an effective and emotion-eliciting amalgam of motion-capture, lip-synch, and voiceover in computer animated characters before, in any game. Both David Ogden Stiers (the voice of Esher) and Rengin Altay (Yeesha) do an excellent job of evoking the mystery and melancholy that has always been the underlying characteristic of Myst. This applies not only in their voice work, but also in the way they punctuate dialogue with thoughtful and peerlessly timed gestures.

There are times when Esher seems rather glitchy (too much D'ni espresso?) through his monologues, and others when it is smooth sailing, leading me to believe it might be some odd engine differential and not my PC's graphic capabilities. And at one point a Bahro took my dropped slate but failed to carry out what my crude drawing required, standing prone as though he'd had a particularly frightening epiphany that rooted him to the spot, forcing an exit and some backtracking.

The cinematic score lays the framework for fascination and intrigue in End of Ages. While not pervasive throughout the game, it lends the right nudge, and where the music ends, there is always a lush ambient soundtrack to test the boundaries of your sound system. From the reverberation of various underground caverns and interior rooms to the exterior aura of an assortment of creature (those creepy Bahro) and environmental sounds, the Ages you visit truly feel alive. Those with the sound capability will definitely want to use the Hardware+EAX option for best results.

While the use of the slates with the Bahro is an excellent (if uneven) format for puzzle resolution, the puzzles aren't limited to this litmus test. There are also the usual mechanical puzzles that require your mental prowess sans Bahro assistance. These puzzles are fairly typical Myst fare, and for those times a gentle push may be of some help, the menu offers a Prima online help option that, when selected, will pull up your browser showing a hyperlink with up to three levels of hints for each of the four Ages. Of course, for more you'll be required to purchase the official Prima game guide. Many may want to have this, however, as it's chock full of supplemental information about the Myst universe. The game itself, with its substantial level design and epic length (I ticked off about 25 hours myself), is certainly good value for your gaming dollar.

For fans of the franchise, the ending may leave more questions than it answers, but I think any game or cinema experience that ties everything in a tidy package has sold out to an assumed lack of imagination. Go where your world takes you, where you would have wanted things to end, and it will vitalize the endgame experience. After all, that's always been the real goal of Myst: to give you the tools and the means to experience new worlds through the eyes of their inhabitants. In that, Myst V: End of Ages succeeds admirably, providing a memorable finale to a series that will never be forgotten.