Myst – The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Written by Vetinari

Last time we were finally ready, after solving most if not all of the puzzles on Myst island, to embark on a journey to a different age.

I've decided to tackle the four tomes in the order that we discovered it, so the first one is the book which was hidden inside the cogwheels.

The flyover animation of the island is very nice.

After the usual sound effect of entering a new book (the same as when we load the game, incidentally) we find ourselves in a very similar environment to what we left, i.e. some opened cogwheels, but with the book gone.

The background is different though.

Looking around, it would seem that I am in what Atrus called the Mechanical age, with a center fortress surrounded by three small islands.

Is that a weathervane on the rooftop?

The islet where I have appeared has some cogwheels, and a panel with buttons, rotating between different symbols.

Gee, I couldn't imagine what this could be for.

Crossing the gangway to the middle fortress, I can enter and there I find some metal corridors with tiled floors. The corridors split into two, going on to the right and left sides of the compound.

Not very hospitable, but then again I know this has been built for defensive purposes.

Following the right corridor, I arrive in a room which is really creepy. Lots of weapons and metal implements everywhere.

Definitely not my style.

Chains and a throne, which doesn't bode well for whoever was the user of this room.

Doesn't this scream “evil” to you?

On one side of the room there is a device which when activated says "Fortress Rotation Simulation Calibration" and then displays a diagram with some lines and circles.

This would not be out of place in something like the cockpit of Wing Commander.

When I pull the left lever, the brown line detaches from the bottom arrow, and when I pull the right lever all of the central part rotates counterclockwise, taking the brown line along with it. When it is near another one of the arrows, if I pull the left lever again the brown line re-attaches to the nearest outside arrow.

From my understanding of mechanical engineering (and from what I read in Atrus' diary about this age) I deduce that this is a simulation of the mechanism which allows the fortress to be rotated, most probably so the outer gangplank can reach the other two islets that are nearby the fortress.

I expect that a contraption similar to this will be used to actually rotate the fortress and that I will find it further inside the compound.

Continuing past this room and along the corridor, at the farthest point from the entrance of the fortress I find a small corridor which goes towards the center.

That's how I imagined the cryo chamber from Suspended would look like.

Unfortunately the middle cylinder is not accessible. However, when I press the red button, the corridor transforms into a staircase.

Hidden stairs are a leitmotif of this game.

In the basement room there is a simple device which allows to rotate two C shapes on a display. When both openings are aligned they turn red.

Not the most clever puzzle.

Going up again, the central cylinder is revealed to be an elevator.

Hidden elevators, also. Stairs and elevators.

There are three buttons which are up, down, and the middle one that is apparently some "delayed activation", where there are some beeps that countdown until the elevator activates.

The upper floor.

Exiting at the top, there is a sort of dais, upon which there is a contraption with two levers. This to me smells strongly like the equipment that must be used to make the fortress rotate, but unfortunately I cannot access it from down here.

Outside of my grasp, for now.

Getting back to the lower floor and continuing our exploration of the other side of the fortress we find another room which is completely different from that on the other side.

I thought this was a war fortress?

Lavish furniture, paintings, all kinds of luxuries. And a throne, here too.

Has this been stolen from the Hôtel des Invalides?

The room is full of interesting things, like some crystal shapes that light up when I hover the mouse on them.

This would seem to be extremely interesting...

...as in, maybe a hint for a later puzzle...

...but is instead completely useless.

There are also various trinkets, like a telescope (which cannot be rotated and just points to an undefined landscape), and a mechanical bird.

These two I've already seen in life size.

By examining the various things, I randomly click behind the throne and find a secret panel.

Blind luck in action.

This goes to a secret room full of loot, gold and fine wines. Inside it I find one of these elusive red pages, and also a letter from Achenar to Sirrus.

Not the best of friends, it would look like.

Then the corridor after the room goes back around to the entrance. Since I found a secret compartment behind the throne in one of these two rooms, I get to the other one to check if there is something similar, and lo and behold, there is.

Pattern recognition in action.

This secret room is completely different from the other one. There is an electrified cage which seems like a torture implement, some mysterious liquid bottles, and other various unsettling tools. There is also a blue page.

Ever heard of inventory limits?

Here is the point in which I discovered something, i.e. that the inventory of this game is limited to one item. If I take the blue page, the red page is immediately discarded and goes back to where it was before. This is something which irritates me to no end, since if I want to take both the red and blue pages to Myst island (and who wouldn't?) I will have to make two separate trips.

Anyway, since I now finished the exploration of the fortress, I concentrate on how to access the rotation implement on the upper floor. Since the middle button of the elevator seems like a delayed activation, I press it while I am at the top and then exit the lift. This allows the elevator cabin to go down, and the top of the elevator to become level with the upper floor. Since the levers that I saw before are right on top of the elevator roof, they now become accessible.

Nice puzzle, if a little bit on the “classic” side.

As expected, the device allows the fortress to rotate, in order to access the various islets, and it works in the same way as the fortress rotation simulator that I saw before.

The user-friendliness of this device is close to zero.

Since from here in the middle of the fortress you cannot see anything, you have to rely on other methods to know how the fortress rotates. This is where the fortress rotation simulator comes in.

In fact, any time the fortress rotates and then get attached to one of the islets in one of the four cardinal directions, there is one of four different noises that I, after careful consideration and deliberation, have managed to univocally and categorically classify as follows:

bip, whrup, swoosh and thunk.

When using the simulator I can see that when the gangway is at the top there is always a "bip", when it is at the bottom there is a "thunk", a "whrup" when it is on the left side and a "swoosh" when it is on the right side.

The first thing that I ruminate is that the noises are related to the position of the gangway, so "bip" is when the gangway is pointing North and so on.

Unfortunately this does not work.

This is not where I meant to go at all.

Then I try the approach that maybe the noise measures the rotation, so "swoosh" is a 90° rotation, "bip" 180° and so on.

This works even worse.

Somehow after various tries I manage to get to this islet.

And this is my reward.

I spend 2 hours on this f***ing puzzle.

In the end I have to rely on timing the activation of the right lever, since between 2 or 3 seconds seems to be the time for the gangway to do a quarter of a rotation.

I finally manage to get to the only islet which I have not yet reached.

This one.

And on the cogs there are the two missing symbols to input in the rotating wheels device at the beginning.

Finally!

Which means that I still have to rotate this damn fortress again to get back to the start.

Luckily this took only one or two tries.

In the end, I know what they expected the reasoning of this puzzle to be, if only because of another puzzle which will happen later and that shares some information with it.

The idea is that "bip" is north, "thunk" is south, "swoosh" is east and "whrup" is west.

Unfortunately, at least in this version of the game, this does not work at all.

Many times I have heard different sounds and when I got outside the door to check I found myself in the same place where I started, which was obviously not where I wanted to be at all.

From what has been posted in the comments to the introduction, it would seem that this a bug which exclusively haunts the first Mac release of the game, and was solved in the PC port and other subsequent releases. Still.

This part of the game was exceedingly frustrating, compounded also by the fact that in order to check if the direction of the gangway is right or not you have to get down from the dais, call the elevator, go down in the elevator, go down into the corridor, bypass one of the two side rooms, continue along the corridor and arrive at the exit door. This was such a frustrating experience that really soured me completely on this part.

Let's get out of here quick.

Anyway, the correct symbols open a staircase down, at the end of which there is a Myst book, which allows me to get back to the Myst library and put the red page in the red book.

My ticket out of this place.

And then I have to go back to retrieve the blue page.

Also, the satisfaction of doing so is minimal, since the two d**ks trapped inside the books don't give me any new information and just tell me again that they need more pages, more pages, more pages, like some kind of gluttonous bookworms.

Let's just hope that the next ages will be less frustrating than this one.

Session Time: 3 hours 00 minutes
Total Time: 6 hours 40 minutes