Playing God, or one of God's low-order subordinates. Also RTS's haunt my nightmares.

City sim games don’t generally evoke memories of mind-blowing graphics or death-defyingly cinematic action set pieces. They tend to appeal more to those with a slightly obsessive personality, who enjoy seeing things come to fruition over time. With this in mind, here’s a game you should be playing: http://www.mobygames.com/game/afterlife. 

If you were to go over Lucasarts’ nineties-era back catalogue with a fine-toothed comb then certainly you’d find long-established hit titles like Day of the Tentacle or the Monkey Island series, but you might also notice this little-known gem which (then) represented a radical departure from status quo for the studio. Afterlife is a high-concept city-building game which cast the player as a Demiurge (an all powerful deity only a few office floors down on the quantumdimensional being pecking order from God himself, in this case collectively represented by the mystically aloof Powers That Be from which the player receives periodically humorous directives throughout) tasked with the responsibility of building a fictional Heaven and Hell for the mortal denizens of an alien planet many many light years away, but with a society and beliefs very similar to our own.

You could find out all of the above from reading the Wikipedia entry, though – what you wouldn’t is that it’s actually fun. Sure, there’s quite a steep learning curve and a veritable barnyard of highly specialised gameplay mechanics and rules to get your head around - at points it resembles an RTS but without the offensively brutal combative edge that more often than not takes all the hard work you spent building fifteen Carrier battle groups, crinkles it into a ball with the density of a neutron star and stuffs it into the wastepaper basket. However, that just makes it all the more satisfying when you do actually manage to navigate the minefield of early-game money struggles and get a respectable little Hades or Elysium springing into being before your very eyes.

Most importantly, though, what Afterlife has which so many contemporary games these days are sorely lacking is a) a sense of humour, and b) a tendency not to take itself too seriously. It does everything with a flourish and an overall sense of savour faire created through its low-key wit, not least among which features the relentlessly charming banter between the two player adviser characters, Jasper the demon and Aria the angel. And to be perfectly honest, I think that’s the main thing that offsets the mind-numbing boredom that usually comes from playing a game such as this which requires excessive micromanagement, such as an RTS. Have I mentioned RTS’s suck recently? 

There's such a variety of blatant and subtle references and in-jokes strewn throughout Afterlife that you'll find yourself actually wanting to unlock more expensive buildings just to read the amusing little description texts that come with them. Anyway, enough out of me: go play it, if you can find a copy.

I would have written "Myst-ified" here, but then I would have been summarily condemned to the ninth circle of portmanteau hell

On the subject of major game franchises that we haven’t heard so much as a blip on the sonar system from recently, the Myst franchise is a notably now-deceased example that managed to spawn four bratty offspring, a spin-off and a corresponding cult MMO before it flopped. Alright, point of clarification: the sequels weren’t bad. Actually, they were quite good, in fact, some going so far as to surpass the quality and timeless charm of the original. I’ve been trying to map out a point of analysis for the recurring formula of this game series for a short while now, and I think I’ve finally arrived at one.

What Myst, all its sequels and spin-offs (i.e. referring to Uru, Uru Live) have in common is that they rely on a primarily visual reward system. In return for exploring, completing puzzles and learning more about the story and characters, the player is allowed to advance further and thus behold the latest pretty techno-surrealistic vista the art department has managed to conjure out of its collective sleeve.

It’s by no means unique in this respect. Early 3D platform games such as Super Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie spring to mind as other examples that have operated using a similar mechanic. The latter even directly parodies this fact by showing the player incomplete paintings of worlds that must be filled in using “jigsaw pieces”, the game’s chief currency in trade, to unlock the entryway to that world.

Travelling back even further down the poetic oak-tree lined boulevard of memory lane we encounter the classic retro side-scroller 2D platformers blocking our paths like a police cordon around a crime scene. Because of the limitations of the technology and 2D perspective you could only display a percentage of the game world limited to the size of your monitor at a time, and the camera moved as your character did, so moving your character forward was directly linked to revealing more of the game environment. Spatial progress and visual gratification were, in this genre, completely synonymous. Therefore, many in-game obstacles were geared toward actually literally impeding the player’s physical progress, as opposed to more abstract and complex challenges observable in later 3D platformer titles (i.e. collecting parts of a dismantled space ship in preparation for the end-game confrontation in Jet Force Gemini).

This is why games with essentially (sometimes necessarily) repetitive or bland aesthetic environments usually focus on an alternative reward system for exploration and advancement. Consider some examples of non-visual player reward systems:

• Early FPS’s with low graphical capabilities: Wolfenstein, Doom etc: reward is the novelty of the introduction of new gameplay mechanics (i.e. use of new weapons, enemies etc) 
• Action RPG’s: Diablo, World of Warcraft: the game is player character-centric; therefore “levelling up” of one’s character is the reward as it records effort and time spent through a numerical syntax. I.e. the player character itself becomes a work in progress and a motivating factor for continuing play.
• First-person horror thrillers: F.E.A.R, Cryostasis, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Doom 3: reward is emotional stimuli i.e. the momentary cinematic shock and awe of the paranormal encounter.

Myst and its progeny are notable, however, for taking the visual reward system to its logical extreme. More specifically, here it has become a self-consciously parodied trope that is an integral part of the game world and backstory. This occurs through the plot device of “linking books” that are the only means for players to travel to and from in-game levels (Ages). In the Myst lore, Ages must be “written” by authors (read: surrogate level designers). Learning to write Ages is a closely guarded art which takes years to master. Each Age has a distinct atmosphere bearing the mark of its creator, comprised by any number of things: from a uniform colour palette, use of recurring geometric shapes, methodological consistency of puzzles, polarisation toward technocracy or the pastoral, and more often than not corresponding textural identities in the soundtrack vis-à-vis unusual or unique instrumentation.

Myst is unique in that it represents the characterisation of environment. This is a game where levels are given veritable personalities in their own right. When players achieve the objective of unlocking an Age by locating or activating the Linking Book, they are motivated by the promise of a unique aesthetic reality at least as much as that of discovering new plot details or the simple sense of achievement generated by the completion of an intellectually challenging task.

Here the game posits entire worlds as singular acts of authorial self-indulgence. Myst’s “Ages” are self-contained works of art within a single product. The basis for this probably lies in the series’ origins; Myst was at the cutting edge of 3D rendering technology when the original game was released back in 1993, and so the pressure of expectation has weighed like a poorly designed diving helmet on each subsequent entry in the pantheon to push the envelope in terms of graphical sophistication. And even though the developers have concurrently fleshed out the Myst universe and given it a sense of identity beyond that of a glorified tech demo, there continues to be this lingering association that hangs around the series as being a river barge for a comfortable tourist ride up the Amazon of fantastically surreal extraterrestrial worlds. But in this regard, it’s an interesting example of a game franchise that taps an often marginalised or underplayed function of games in general – transporting us to simulations of places we could never actually visit IRL, rendered with astonishing depth and attention to detail.