URU: Complete Chronicles

Taken as a regular game, in the state it exists now, I can't call Uru an objectively good game. It's still my favorite in the series after Riven. Why? I can't even explain it fully, but Cyan pushed the boundaries of gaming and narration with Myst, then Riven, then Uru... except this one didn't hit. Uru is the single player part of what was supposed to be a huge MMO experience in the Myst universe. Not stats, no leveling, no grinding, no quest logs. Just you and the world inside the game, like Myst, except this time you would do it with other people! Friends, strangers, all coming together to unravel mysteries and fulfill an unknown purpose. Uru: Complete Chronicles is best experience as the prologue to a story that may exist in a different, better timeline. Like archeologists uncovering the foundations of ancient temples, we only have the first stones to imagine the monument that could have stood there. Interesting, since the story is about uncovering and restoring the city of a ancient mysterious civilization. Was the turn to 3D handled well? Not that much, some puzzles rely on it but they are quite counter-intuitive. Some other Ages have good puzzles and are pretty impressive h…

Note: Although Steam only counts twelve minutes, I played the game for over 40 hours. Although I think Uru fails overall to be a good adventure game, it has some good qualities, and I'll mention those here first. The game has impressive graphics for a game from 2003, and its clear that the people who made it had a talent for making the most of real-time 3D graphics capabilities of the era. In 2026, I also find the graphics kind of nostalgic, and I love seeing all the tricks the game plays to make the environments feel much more real without exceeding the compute budget. I also appreciate the sound design of the game. There are loads of small environmental noises in many of the ages that give the impression that the world is constantly changing, with or without the player's input. When things do change in response to the player's input, the sounds are loud enough that you can tell you've done something, but they never sound out place within the environment. Similarly, the soundtrack works very well for the game. Some of the tracks made me feel like I was in an exciting adventure movie, while others felt like something out of a horror film. The game is really good at giving a fee…

Play the free online version, this one has game breaking bugs.

Good game but there are too many bugs on the Steam version compared to the cassette version, there was even a point where I couldn't progress at all in the game ;-; it was probably after a month that I finally managed to finish the thing with the chair. (plus my playtime isn't counted)

There are essentially two versions of Uru: the offline one, and the fan-made officially endorsed online one. The latter has custom worlds and many QoL features, but it also is completely open (you can go where you want, meaning there's no real way to know what to do next) and has puzzles that require multiple people to solve it. That is a problem, because it's not very activate. Sure there's a Discord server, but in the end I opted for the offline version. One that at least has some guidance on where to go and something I can solve on my own. Maybe I'll try the online one some day. This is the first truly 3D Myst game, built in an era where people were still experimenting with controls and engines. As a result it feels very clunky and janky to move around, both in first and third person. It also has that 2000's kind of 3D look to it where things are certainly getting a lot more detailed, but we're not quite there yet. I love that era of games, it's what I grew up with and it brings me back to the days of 3DFX powered video cards. The worlds are big and fun to explore, but the puzzles are very hit or miss. Some are perfectly fine, some are once again (continuing the Myst 4 trend) …

Game breaking glitch makes entire section of the game unreachable. Glitch has existed for nearly 10 years. Abandonware.