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 experienced 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 …

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

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…

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

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)

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