Genres have an unfortunate habit of dying out - when the lights dim at the movies we're not expecting a silent, black and white feature to appear on screen, and similarly when we browse for new games we're not expecting to stumble across a text adventure or a side-scrolling shooter. When a genre delivers its impact on the industry and then leaves us, we must take a minute to think about how we feel about it. Did it leave a great impact, affecting our view of the media, or did it simply fade into obscurity? Gamers have been on the verge of declaring the classic adventure genre deceased for quite some time and they have certainly lost their mainstream appeal. However, they won't quite let us be and continue to spring out in all their splendour, right when we're least expecting it. Last year's excellent Fahrenheit did this, demonstrating to us many of the forgotten virtues of adventure games. Now we're greeted with another attempt to revive gamers' interest in adventure games - a PSP remake of the Miller Brothers' classic PC game, Myst.

Myst starts out with a spectacular intro, a monologue showing us the world we'll be exploring, and after a brief loading time you find yourself standing disoriented at a dock on the Island of Myst. You have no idea who you're controlling, what you're meant to do and, generally, know very little. However, a short search of the island sets the story for our adventure - two brothers, evidently the offspring of a chronicler named Atrus, are trapped inside two separate books, and they both ask for your help to bring them more pages of their books. Apparently they'll be set free once you have collected enough pages for them - so off you go, searching for these pages that are so important, travelling to vastly different worlds (or Ages) and back again, gradually uncovering the truth of the brothers' imprisonment and the sad tale of their family.

If there is one thing adventure games have featured strongly over the years it's puzzles, and Myst is definitely one of the main contributors to this development. To access every Age you have to solve a puzzle. To find each page, you have to solve a puzzle. To return to the Island of Myst, you must, again, solve a puzzle. Myst serves brain fodder like Halo serves aliens and making your way through the entire game without the help of a walkthrough is a demanding challenge for even the most hardcore adventure gamers (one that I failed miserably!)

In terms of visuals, Myst has always been impressive. Consisting entirely of pre-rendered pictures, Myst is indeed eye candy, but the glamour fades a little when your PSP is wheezing and puffing to bring each new frame up as you move from one preset view to the next in this pseudo 3D world, often creating a few seconds of loading. You also have to wonder why the original version of the game was ported to PSP, instead of the realMyst version released in 2000. I believe the PSP would have been able to support the full 3D and it would certainly have created a more immersive experience for its new PSP audience. That said, aside from a few glitches and bugs, the thirteen-year-old technique of moving around a pre-rendered world still manages to get the job done convincingly.

Creating the atmosphere for Myst must have been one of the toughest jobs back when the game was still in development for its 1993 release, while creating the visuals is a relatively straightforward task. A more complex assignment is the game's audio, comprised of natural sounds, machinery and a stunningly beautiful soundtrack. Throughout the game you encounter the streaming of water, rustling of leaves and the whining or screeching of heavy machinery, and it all creates a more believable edge to the surreal setting. The only drawbacks come from the PSP itself, as the audio is sometimes cut when a new frame is loading, starting over when it arrives.

As you might expect, emulating the precision of the mouse has obviously been one of the greatest difficulties in porting this PC classic to PSP. You move the cursor with either the diagonal buttons or the analog stick, both of which offer reasonable precision for pointing out your direction. However, when small objects such as levers, buttons and other mechanisms must be targeted, the system certainly shows its drawbacks, being not nearly as precise and fast as you would like. As such the game would probably have fitted better on the DS, with the stylus control. It does only figure as a small annoyance from time to time, but the interaction could have used more attention during development.

Being one of the most influential and popular games of all time, it's wonderful to see Myst brought back to life on a new platform for a new audience. You can't blow up Nazis or aliens, but if you've never tried one of adventure gaming's greatest classics then this remake of Myst is definitely a good place to start, even though it suffers slightly in being confined to its new portable home. Once again players have been kept from hosting memorials in honour of the point 'n' click genre and I wouldn't be surprised to see portable versions of the other Myst titles should this one do well enough. The original classic has certainly found firm footing with the PSP and if you're tired of all the action oriented games of today then Myst on the go is definitely a palatable and refreshingly different cocktail.

Reviewed by Niels Jakob Kyhl Jørgensen for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).