Cyan Worlds Just Released the Teaser for Project Anglerfish, a Cancelled Myst Game We Will Never Play

There is a particular kind of cruelty reserved for puzzle fans, and Cyan Worlds just served it on a silver platter. The studio behind Myst published a video this week called A Path Not Taken: Project Anglerfish, and the title does most of the heavy lifting. It is a teaser trailer for a brand new game set in the Myst universe, the kind of thing fans have begged for across two decades of remakes and spiritual successors. The catch, buried in the first seconds of the footage, is that you will never play a single second of it. Project Anglerfish is cancelled, and Cyan clearly knows you are going to be sad about it, which is precisely why the team released the trailer anyway.

What Project Anglerfish Actually Was

According to the video, development director Hannah Gamiel and creative director Eric A. Anderson walk viewers through what the prototype was meant to be. Over a year ago, a small team at Cyan spent roughly four months building a playable prototype for a new Myst universe title internally codenamed Project Anglerfish. The trailer shown was never meant for public eyes at all. Gamiel is upfront about that, opening with a disclaimer that everything on screen is not actively in development and will not be released in its current form. This was a pitch reel, the kind of internal proof of concept studios build to convince a publisher to write a check.

The footage itself leans hard into what made Myst click back in 1993. Players explore subterranean pathways and hidden crevices, hunting for a mysterious book on behalf of a well-dressed and, by all accounts, extremely passionate benefactor. It looks gorgeous, dense with the kind of environmental storytelling and tactile puzzle design Cyan has built its entire reputation on. Then the video pulls the rug. For what the pair describe only as a variety of reasons, the project could not move forward at the time, and that was that. Four months of work, sealed in a vault, until this week.

Why Cyan Is Showing a Game That Is Already Dead

Most studios bury cancelled prototypes and never speak of them again, so the obvious question is why Cyan bothered to polish off a trailer for a game that will never ship. The answer the team gives is almost disarmingly honest. They were proud of the work. Rather than let four months of effort rot on a hard drive, they cut the publisher-facing trailer into a public send-off, a small memorial for a project the team clearly loved. There is something genuinely refreshing about a developer treating its own cancelled work with that much respect instead of corporate embarrassment.

Anderson also made a point of softening the blow for anyone worried Cyan is done with Myst altogether. He stressed that the studio is still working on new games and experiences set inside the Myst universe, so Anglerfish is not the death of the franchise, just one road not taken. That framing matters. It positions this less as a failure and more as a fork in the path, the exact sentiment the video title spells out. Cyan is telling fans, plainly, that more Myst is coming even if this particular flavor of it never made it past the prototype stage.

Thirty Years of Myst and a Studio That Cannot Quit It

To understand why a cancelled Myst prototype still carries weight, you have to remember what Myst meant when it landed in 1993. Built by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, the original was a slow-burn puzzle adventure that became one of the best-selling computer games of its era and a genuine cultural touchstone. It spawned sequels like Riven and a long tail of imitators, and it defined what a cerebral first-person puzzle game could feel like. Cyan Worlds, the Spokane-based studio that grew out of that success, has spent the three decades since trying to recapture that lightning, sometimes under the Myst name and sometimes not.

The modern era of Cyan has been a mixed bag of remakes and original bets. The studio shipped a polished VR-compatible remake of Myst in 2020, which is the version currently sitting on Steam, and it has chased original ideas through crowdfunding with titles like Obduction in 2016 and Firmament in 2023. Both of those carried the Myst DNA without wearing the brand name, and both landed with a devoted but modest audience. That pattern is the quiet subtext of Project Anglerfish. Cyan clearly has the talent and the appetite to keep building in this space, but the economics of niche puzzle adventures remain brutal, and a publisher backing a brand new Myst entry is a harder sell than a remake.

The Reaction Is Quiet, and That Says Something

Community reaction so far is best described as limited, which is its own kind of telling. The story has been picked up by outlets including Eurogamer and PCGamesN, and one German outlet framed Anglerfish as the first new Myst entry in twenty years, but the broader conversation has stayed muted. Part of that is timing, since the footage dropped on a quiet stretch of the news cycle while much of the industry attention is still glued to comic book movie trailers out of San Diego. Part of it is the bittersweet format. It is hard to build hype around a game whose own creators open by telling you it does not exist anymore. The fans who do engage tend to land on the same note, a mix of admiration for the craft and frustration that another Myst will stay locked behind glass.

The CriticalPixel Take

Here is the thing about Project Anglerfish that sticks with me. It is a four-month prototype that never had a real shot, and yet it looks more like the Myst sequel longtime fans want than almost anything Cyan has shipped in years. That is not a knock on the 2020 remake, which is lovely, but a remake is a tribute act by definition. Anglerfish was the band writing new material again, and watching it get shelved for a variety of reasons is a reminder of how risk-averse the publishing side of this industry has become. A studio had to beg for permission to show its own fans a trailer, and the answer was apparently no, not with money attached.

So watch the trailer, because it is genuinely worth four minutes of your day and it might be the closest we get to a new original Myst for a while. Cyan deserves credit for treating its own scrapped work like something worth sharing instead of something to hide. And if Anderson is telling the truth that more Myst universe games are in motion, then Anglerfish is less an obituary and more a proof of concept that the studio still has the goods. The only real tragedy is that the people who would have loved this game are the exact people who will never get to touch it. For now, the teaser is all we have, and for a franchise this old, that is both a gift and a small, familiar wound.