Zarf Updates

Another Mysterium has arrived and then faded silently away. Or, I suppose, faded away with its characteristic reverb-y "vrrrwww-WONK-wonk-wonk" noise.

This year's event was in Portland, Oregon. I did not attend in person; cross-country travel feels like too much of a stretch right now. (And I visited Portland just a couple of years ago for XOXO.) But of course I watched all the streamed talks and presentations. Now I bring you the annual report -- in two parts.

Part 1 is the stuff about Cyan itself and what they're doing. Part 2 will be fan activity and community contributions, including the Myst documentary.

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.

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State of Cyan

I'll start with the big finale wrap-up event of the conference. Cyan has posted their own news post. This went up simultaneously with the Mysterium talk. But I have more detail, mwah hah hah.

Hannah Gamiel and Eric A. Anderson, the studio co-heads, attended in person! This may be the first time Cyan head honchos have travelled to a non-Spokane Mysterium.

They apologized for not giving a State-of-Cyan talk last year. Here's the two-year news catch-up:

• Lots of awards for Riven.
• Released the age of Rime in March 2025.
• Two rounds of layoffs. Suck.
• Firmament on PS4/PS5/PSVR2 in July 2025.
• Console ports of Myst and Riven.
• Myst novel trilogy re-released as an ebook.
• Updates for classic titles, plus Steam Deck verification: Myst Masterpiece Edition, Riven (1997), Myst 3. ("We are not officially the people maintaining the source code for Myst 3", but they were able to make the update happen.)
• Obduction updates and ports are sadly roadblocked by being on a very early version of UE4. Updating to a modern engine release will take more work. No announcements there.
• Set up Steam promo bundles with Blue Prince, Outer Wilds, and other cool games.
• Office cleanout drive! There was thirty years of cruft behind some of those tantalizing locked office doors. Junk junk, not historic junk. "Think chili pepper flakes from 25 years ago." They had a dumpster party and cleared it all out.

Also, an account named "spyder" posted recently on the #riven channel of Cyan's Discord, hinting about a link to an ARG teaser page. Cyan does this now and again. I'll be honest: I don't follow these discussions. I prefer to wait for actual announcements. But you can catch up on the #cipher discussion channel if you like.

So what's next?

Cyan never announces anything big at Mysterium; it's too small a crowd. In fact -- remember my 2019 report? When Rand gave a whole planned timeline for the next five years? Promises that got rearranged and overturned within a year?

EAA: [In 2019] Hannah and I had just stepped into our new roles... you can see me standing off to the side with my jaw open, like, "Rand, what are you doing?"

So Eric and Hannah didn't try to make any promises this year. Instead, they gave a presentation called "Paths Not (yet) Taken: Scraps from Cyan's Development Past." Or, as Eric joked, "You guys wanna see a dead body?" They showed concept art and prototype shots from all sorts of projects that never saw the light of day.

This was fascinating. I enjoy trying to guess what's behind Cyan's curtain, but they really don't let much of hard info slip out. This was a first glimpse at many, many things that I had no idea existed.

They were very clear that none of this stuff was in active development. (With small exceptions which I'll get to.) But of course Cyan never cancels a project. As you'll see, even the most moribund proposal goes on the shelf. That which is shelved shall eternal lie. Who knows what form it might reappear in someday.

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Latus (2004): (Pronounced "lattice", btw.) An experiment by Rand and Ryan Miller in linear narrative. An episodic spy series. The concept sounds like a mosaic story; you could browse many woven-together storylines about many characters, but it wasn't interactive in the game sense. Only got as far as storyboards.

Obduction v.1 (2005): Pitched as "Myst meets Halo". Concept art is a creepy alien and a guy in a storm-trooper breath mask. "Rand really wanted to take a swing at a shooter-style game with a Cyan twist." The point was to sneak narrative twists into a shooter game. Something about the player's breath being toxic to the aliens...?

EAA: Over time, the idea morphed into a more light-hearted game about a farmer named Lemon rescuing his dog (named Jake) who was abducted by aliens.

From there it morphed even further into a scenario where the whole thing was a televised intergalactic game show where aliens would kidnap humans and make them compete for prizes.

All of this was just pitch documents; there was never a playable prototype. The Obduction Kickstarter, of course, reworked the concept from scratch.

DiSC v1 (2006): Apparently the Cyan crew were big into disc golf. (Apparently all the back windows of the office have scrape marks from stray Frisbees.) They started planning a disc golf game for the Wii, with powerups and wacky Cyan-style environments. Again, no prototype.

Lift / Lyft (2007): Ambitious adventure game about flight and exploration. A huge game world with massive floating islands. You'd switch between third-person exploration on the ground and first-person flying combat. Customizable characters and customizable vehicles.

EAA: This actually did get very far along in discussions with a publisher, but thankfully the deal never closed, because in 2008 the financial crisis happened. Had [the deal] gone forward it would have been disastrous.

Origami (2007): This was a much smaller scope. Top-down action game about fighting paper monsters. Screenshot is subtitled "The Seven Daughters of Origami".

Both Lift and Origami were built in a Plasma 3.0 engine. At this point Cyan still saw Plasma as a strategic asset. (Later they dropped Plasma and pivoted to Unity, then settled on Unreal.)

Latus v.2 (2010): Reworked the Latus story into a timeline game in a 3D world. You move up and down the timeline, making small changes and seeing their ripple effects.

EAA: The idea was to build a literal exploration game inside of a short-form branching narrative. New locations would open up as you progressed through the game, and new options would combine with previous ones, forming a super-complex possibility space... I did some light prototyping for this around 2016 as a VR game.

(Eternal Threads tried a similar timeline concept in 2022, although not that complex. I thought it was pretty good.)

Goldfish (2011): An adventure game in the D'ni setting, but not about Atrus and his family. "A love letter to the D'ni cavern." Some of the Age concepts (the "Chain Age" and "Caustic Age") were later reworked into Obduction and Firmament areas.

DiSC v2 (2016): Revived the disc-golf concept for VR! This did start turning into a prototype, but it didn't go anywhere.

Goldfish v.2 (2023-4): Revived the concept, made lots of design progress. This one is not entirely inactive but there's nothing to announce either.

EAA: I'm not letting go of this one. While it might not be in full-blown development, it's smoldering. Someday.

Adjacent to that, Eric said he'd been trying to construct a full-scale Unreal model of the entire D'ni cavern, including both Ae'gura and the main city. There's been lots of conflicting game maps, and then "reams" of further maps and designs that never got built in Uru. Reconciling them is a fun project. ("Backburner side project", he emphasizes. "Because it might come in handy someday.") This is only about layout, not texturing or visuals. He showed a few brief fly-mode clips.

Minnow: DarkPath (2025): A micro-prototype of a puzzle game under time pressure. You're on a runaway tunneling machine blasting through the earth at high speed. "Kind of like a high-energy escape room."

Minnow: WhoD'nit (2025): Another micro-prototype, a murder mystery visual novel. Screenshot shows a seven-day timeline. "Phoenix Wright crossed with Myst." Kadish appears (at least as a prototype character).

Anglerfish (2024-2025): This is the big one. You may already have seen the trailer which was posted this weekend. This was a D'ni-era game with a darker tone. Cyan was heavily developing it towards the end of Riven production. (It was teased as "PREFALL" in early 2025, before the layoffs hit.)

EAA: I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a horror game, but it's certainly a Myst thriller.

The concept is that you're sent to fetch a Linking Book by an untrustworthy and possibly unstable Guildmaster (named Damreus in the pitch). As the plot progresses, he tries to manipulate you by editing the Age you're exploring. So you're trapped in a world that's being turned against you.

They spent four months building a fully playable prototype. Note that the trailer above is a publisher pitch trailer. It has more storyline and gameplay spoilers than you'd expect from a Steam game trailer.

Anglerfish is not currently in production; they could not get it funded. But obviously everybody wants to see it someday. (The enthusiasm in the Mysterium event room was palpable, even over stream.)

Mudfish (2026): This is the project that is in current development, albeit in a very early stage and with a small team. They didn't give any specifics; they just said it was a first-person adventure in the Myst setting. Eric's description made me think of The Room:

EAA: Expect denser, more intricate game spaces... We're really trying to focus on the tactility of things.

Is that "Mudfish" codename intentionally connected to "Mudpie"? Yes, says EAA, yes it is.

They noted that they're not focusing on VR for the moment. Just not enough of a team to target all the VR platforms. (I always got the impression that Rand was the VR booster. Now he's retired so maybe that changes the balance.)

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So that brings us to the present. What is coming? (These are promises, or at least announced products.)

• Boxed editions of Myst and Riven for PS5, Xbox, and Mac/PC. The PS5 and Xbox boxes will have actual spinny disks. The PC box will just have a Steam code, or a "digital code" anyhow.

• Myst novel trilogy reprints. Boutique hardcover editions of the three books. More information to come this fall.

Harrison Pink (who has been working on the book re-releases) answered a question about the Book of Marrim, a fourth novel which has been a running joke at Mysteriums for decades.

HP: So the reality of it was that we had found the manuscript for The Book of Marrim, and we were real excited! Wow, we have it! It turns out that it was very incomplete [maybe two-thirds missing]. It was a first draft written in 1999, and the lore and story just didn't match the lore of the past twenty years. [...] So that particular Book of Marrim is a dead end at this point.

The other notable audience question was about going back to Kickstarter. Hannah said "TBD". Eric said "TBA". Which is a nice distinction!

The truth is, I think Kickstarter would be a rough road for Cyan at this point. As I understand it, they've never gotten enough funding out of a Kickstarter to do a complete game. It's always been a way to get into pre-production and then pitch publishers by pointing to a ready audience.

Now, publishers know what the audience is. Firmament and Riven sales figures are a better guide than Kickstarter results. Cyan is, like it or not, back on the board.

Plus, everybody's on the rocks at this point. I mean not everybody. A few rich people are rich. But not me. In 2013, I was thrilled to throw a few hundred dollars into a new Cyan Kickstarter. 2019? Sure, no problem. 2026? Um...

Look. I have a steady contracting gig. (Not just the Patreon, although I'm happy about the Patreon too.) I am not hurting right now. But in no way do I feel secure. Any spare dollar needs to be saved up for possible future catastrophes, and we believe in future catastrophes in a way that was unimaginable ten years ago.

(Which is one reason I started the Patreon. And one reason I decided not to fly to Portland this year.)

I don't mean to end this on a downer. I want to see Cyan succeed. I want there to be sources of funding for a forty-year-old creator-owned studio which has been doing genre-defining work that whole time. I just don't think that the fans can make it happen this time.

But look you, this isn't the end of the report. More tomorrow.