Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (CAGAAV to his friends), invented the voltaic pile, what we call the battery. He lent his last name to his invention, as well as the volt, Voltron: Defender of the Universe, and the Voltaic Age in Myst III Exile. We can only wonder which of these he’d be most proud of, though I have to say that Defender of the UNIVERSE is damned impressive.

The Voltaic Age took me two and a half hours of play, not counting the time I alt+tabbed my way to a crash and had to redo fifteen minutes. The majority of this time I spent fiddling with red steam valves and wondering why I felt oddly attracted to the windows.

It’s the energy age, so the dominant imagery is mechanical stuff. How the original Star Trek portrayed future tech is how this portrays a hydroelectric, steam, and lava powered magnetic land floater.



I’m enjoying Exile so far. I’d forgotten that you could look around via the mouse and it’s vast improvement over the still images of Riven. There’s apparently an elaborate back-story involving the D’ni and the collapse of their civilization that I’ve missed – oh well. I vaguely remember reading a book about a woman from our world falling into a pit in the Sahara desert; apparently, the D’ni currently live under the surface of the earth. You’d think if you had magical books that could link you to hundreds of worlds, you might relocate your civilization to an Age that looked like Maui. Then again, this race neglects the use of locks, safes, and guard dogs for guarding their treasures, but instead constructs elaborate environmental puzzles. They’re a sort of dwarven Bond villain.

I talked about lower order vs higher order problem solving previously, and Exile has stayed firmly in the lower order end. One of the first puzzles you encounter is getting an elevator to work: there’s a notebook in the same room with pictures on how to arrange the mechanisms. The next puzzle is moving a giant ball via two levers. Then there’s one where light travels through a series of lenses. Each of these puzzles is a discrete entity – you either know immediately what needs to be done or it makes itself apparent after a bit of fiddling.

In Voltaic itself, I stumbled upon a puzzle that I solved without any thought: I went to one interface, moved a few pieces, then went to another other and while I was moving pieces, wondering if the numbers above the circuitry meant anything, the interface slammed closed and the device powered up. As there were five parts all together and I’d only touched two, I was a bit confused.

That said, the lower order puzzles are better handled than Riven’s. You tackle a series of manageable problems in Exile, as opposed to wandering around trying to get a handle on a few big puzzles while being tripped up by minutia. Neither approach is better, and in a way they reflect the natures of the men who built the puzzles: Gehn is a meticulous but brilliant bastard while Saavedro is an insane Brad Dourif in a bad wig.

Next I tackle the nature Age with the bird symbol.