YMMV / Myst IV: Revelation

• Accidental Innuendo: Atrus and Katran have a security camera in their bedroom (because that's the way to the Haven and Spire Descriptive Books).
• Ass Pull: The trap books suddenly bearing full living worlds. This was never implied in prior games, as the only trap books seen were linked to bottomless nondescript voids as far as the player could see, and the multiple provided story explanations don't address this detail ^note One out-of-story justification that makes at least a little sense is that they felt it would have been distracting to give the player a full age to explore when they got an undesired ending, but even so, what little we do see is still a blank void, without even so much as a single room to prove this counterpoint.
• Broken Base:
  • Serenia, and everything associated with it. It's either a fun, fresh, new kind of level for the series, or an out-of-place bit of New Age gibberish rife with unnecessary genre changes and Waggle. The Stunt Casting of series fan Peter Gabriel doesn't help, with fans, again, either liking or hating his performance.
  • The locket. Either a fun way to get more acting out of the diaries and see flashbacks that wouldn't have worked in diary form, or a useless trinket that encourages the design team to abandon the storytelling-by-environment subtlety of previous titles. Its associations with Serenia don't help.
  • In general, depending on who you ask, the game is either one of the best in the series, with decent storytelling that forms a great ending to the saga of Atrus's family, lavish production values, fun, lush, and vivid worlds, and new mechanics that enhance the classic experience rather than change it altogether like the tablet from the next game... or the worst in the series, with Loads and Loads of Loading slowing down the exploration, a distinct lack of subtlety in either the environments or the acting, a bare-bones sequence of puzzles that can be torn through rapidly via Sequence Breaking (something it shares with the original Myst), and the general New Age-i-ness of Serenia.
• Memetic Mutation: Known among the fans of Myst is an often-said infamous line said by Atrus, when the in-game AI cannot give the player a suggestion to solve the dual-waveform puzzle using the currently-chosen signal wave that's changed by the player.
  Atrus: "Try moving the slider."
• Moral Event Horizon: All pity for Sirrus drains away when you decode one of the conversations at the end of Myst IV. Hearing the way he's taunting his child sister about how he's going to suck out her brain and murder her parents is... well, it speaks for itself.
• Narm
  • Sirrus has his moments, especially after discovering how futile it is to attempt to reach the surface of Spire. Sirrus is a master of subtlety.
    "Noooooooooo!"
    "I, am Sirrus...and I WILL NOT BE DE-FEAT-TID!!"
  • On similar note, in his journal, Achenar starts sounding less like Santiago and more like DeceasedCrab playing through Hell Temple.
  • Catherine's actress in this game can come off as a whiny British housemaid for some, compared to her other roles in the previous games. Lampshaded in one of Sirrus' memories mentioning that his spider throne sounds worse than his mother's caterwauling when out of tune.
  • Dream is clearly trying to act like a deeply spiritual experience but it comes off as just plain weird instead. The unexpected song number doesn't exactly help.
• Player Punch: The final part of Sirrus' memory sequence on Spire. We begin seeing Sirrus raging against his imprisonment, then deciding to escape and discovering he can't get down to where the linking book must be, and deciding maybe if he can get to another of the structures he can see, he might be able to climb down from there. We see Sirrus working on a way to get across and beginning to wish so much he could show his father what he was achieving. We see him beginning to miss his family, and grow closer, and closer and closer to repentance, thinking about what his family might be thinking or doing. Then we see him complete his efforts, get below the cloud layer, and discover the surface of a burning ball of magnetic gas that the stone structures of Spire float over that has obviously incinerated the linking book below. ...And then we see him snap.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The highly animated hand cursor. In a series where you are often on a Pixel Hunt, it's very counter-productive to make the cursor elaborate to the point that animation cues you need to see are delayed and slow. It's especially annoying with the "touch" variant that hardly looks any different from the relaxed variant (the relaxed version looks like two fingers pointing but the touching one has one finger instead). Sure, having the cursor instantly change the old-fashioned way may look rougher on the surface, but sometimes less is more and there's a reason computers continue to use this form of feedback in spite of all our technology advancements.
• Tear Jerker: Achenar's death.
• That One Puzzle: This game undoubtedly has some of the most infuriating puzzles in the entire series, but some of them still manage to stick out:
  • The Mangree puzzle in Haven. You have to shuffle four different Mangrees across five huts in an effort to get the Camoudile to fall into the pit of the poisonous plant. Every single Mangree has a unique call (so you have to keep track of which monkey is in which hut by call), can't be called to move twice, and worse yet, the puzzle isn't even done yet when you trap the Camoudile — you also have to call one of the Mangrees to throw a fruit at him to make sure he gets trapped for good, which can only be done from one specific hut. AND you have to make sure one specific Mangree is in that hut, as the others won't throw far enough, and there is extremely little feedback to convey this information. Did you take too long to do all of this in rapid succession? DO THE ENTIRE THING ALL OVER AGAIN.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • In addition to the bigger ones, this game features some of the most subtle examples ever. Tapping random everyday objects produces realistic environmental effects. Sound effects of awesome too, since they produce different sounds for all sorts of different materials, and anything that's in reach can be tapped. It doesn't sound that impressive, but for a game that came out the same year as Half-Life 2, it's incredible.
  • Better yet, when you turn around, you can actually hear your feet shuffling on what you're standing on. It changes depending on where you are too, with specific sounds for metal grates and wooden bridges. They even had the foresight to use sliding sounds for when you're sitting down, as you can hear your clothes sliding on the surface as you shift your body.
• The Woobie: Possibly Achenar.