Uru Live rant incoming...

[BellosTheMighty]

Okay, so lately I've been spending way too much time playing Uru Live, the online Myst sequel. Earlier this evening I booted it up to run through one of the early ages, one with a kind of "ancient ruins" feel. It starts out fairly easy- I solve the first puzzle fairly easily due to discovering that all the Age's puzzles have hints embedded on them in a museum-like room elsewhere in the game. I take some pictures with my gizmo's camera function, figuring later puzzles will follow suit. They do, but it's not much help- although you can snap almost anything with the camera, I can't figure out how to blow the pictures back up to the size of the screen, so I have to either use my trusty notepad instead, or keep running back and forth to the clue room.

Adding to the trouble, I get stymied rather seriously on the next puzzle. It seems to be lighting up areas of the ground so as to form a path to a door, but I solve it, walk the solution, and nothing happens. Turns out the devs tricked me- I had the right solution, but the wrong interpretation of it. A hint from a walkthrough website reveals that the door is a red herring- what you really have to do is walk the *darkened* path where the light *isn't* to find a hidden passage.

Okay, so that's a bit annoying, but it's a fair enough bit of misdirection. If I had been smart, I would have made a mental note to prepare for more sneaky puzzles. But I didn't. Next puzzle- hexagonal square tiles on the floor with symbols on them. Obviously it's another "walk the right path" puzzle. I recognize the symbols from the clue room, and spend an hour and a half pouring over my pictures and other notes to try and make sense of it. Finally, I give up and check the walkthrough again. Turns out, the puzzle has nothing to do with the clues I was poring over! You simply had to step on the trees. Even granting that I could figure that out with no clues and no feedback from the game, there are dozens of trees, and you have to take a very specific path. The HELL?! How on earth was I suppossed to solve that WITHOUT the walkthrough?

But anyway, next problem I spend time trying to make sense of the clue, smack myself after figuring out the solution is dirt simple, and then groan as the solution opens a path which leads me right back where I started! >_< At that point, I've had enough and walkthrough this puzzle and the next one (last in the age). Finally, after much frustration and tribulation, I reach the Obvious Door beyond which lies Some Very Important Thing. I place my hand on it. Open it slides, revealing a dark corridor. I march through, ready to face whatever revelations await me, and...

*BANG* I here the "exiting age" sound, and then the whole screen goes black and doesn't come back up. I manage to quit to the menu, and I can't log back in. The server has crashed.