Sometimes you just want to chill out. Sometimes, surveillance cameras triggering floods of armed guards, or slavering demons from hell jumping out at you from around every corner, is just too, well, stressful. You can get that at the local supermarket. You don’t necessarily want to recreate the experience at home. I have on occasion compared the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s description of the new-fangled cinema to the potential of videogames: he wrote in awe about a form that enabled the spectator to “calmly and adventurously go travelling”. But there’s nothing calm about Riddick or Far Cry, great games though they are.

Videogames that trade on something other than fear and/or adrenaline are relatively few, and I think it’s no coincidence that they are also the games that are usually looked down on by the self-elected “hardcore” fraternity, because those are the gamers - for reasons of age and sex, among others - that favour crude hormonal responses. But you only have to look at the enormous success of the Sims and now its sequel to realise that there is a huge audience for something more contemplative in tempo - which doesn’t necessarily mean less sophisticated.

Now, I wasn’t thinking along these lines as I installed Myst IV: Revelation onto my shiny new liquid-cooled G5 one evening. I was, rather, yawning complacently at the prospect of bland point-’n'-clickery, a kind of digital postcard for people who don’t really like videogames. But when I next checked the time, still puzzling over how the heck I was going to counterbalance a floating ship made of rock with the right electromagnetic forces from above and below, it was three in the morning. Maybe there’s something to this after all.

It’s easy to list the objections first. A three-dimensional exploration game that doesn’t allow free movement is, in this day and age, a prehistoric notion, a throwback to the halcyon days when “CD-ROM” was the next big thing. Inevitably you spend much of your time in Myst IV patiently scrubbing the screen with your cursor because it’s impossible to tell just by sight which objects are deemed interactive, or in which direction the game will allow you to travel next. Essentially you are forced to engage in random activity in order to discover the next link in an entirely predetermined sequence. This is hardly an advert for the kind of dynamic, reactive experience we have been taught to expect by truly “experimental” games (by which I mean, those in which you can conduct fruitful experiments) such as Deus Ex.

And yet this maddening old-school style has some interesting effects. For a start, obviously it escapes the kinds of glitches in “real” 3D games whereby you can feel you are fighting against the interface and the movement mechanics more often than you are engaging with the spatial problems of a well-designed environment. And more importantly, perhaps, it forces the player to privilege looking over moving. In many games where you are hellbent on moving and fighting with fluidity and precision, the most gorgeous environment may be relegated to a pretty backdrop. In Myst IV you stand in one place and look. So a kind of optical pleasure is privileged, a concentration on enjoying and then analysing the view. And there is no denying that Myst IV is visually beautiful. Sunlight streams in through summerhouse windows, palm fronds wave gently in the breeze, dark emerald caverns glint and glitter. The wealth and detail of design and animation are extraordinary.

Another interesting virtue of the point-’n'-click interface is that its precision allows an unusually strong tactile, haptic sense. Using your disembodied-hand cursor to grab levers and twist dials invokes an experience of really interacting with arcane machinery that is unmatched by the legions of first- or third-person games which tell you “Stand here - no, here! - no, two pixels to the left! - and click X to operate this pointless console.” With its enormous variety of grabbable contraptions, Myst IV thereby offers the closest mechanical analogue to a true steampunk aesthetic. The tortuous logic problems which these machines embody, meanwhile, can often make you feel as though you are being subjected to some bizarre multimedia Mensa entrance test, but in their intellectual rigour they clearly shame what pass for “puzzles” in the vast majority of games.

I don’t think Myst IV is a great game, but I don’t think it’s flatly dismissable either. The conventional videogame-fan wisdom which avers that Broken Sword, say, is good and Myst is bad seems to me incoherent. If you want to calmly and adventurously go travelling, to take an intellectually engaging holiday inside your desktop, Myst IV does it rather well. The videogame artform is a broad church, and there is ample room for things that cater to all casts of mind.

Now, however, my trigger finger is itching, and it’s time for a quick blast on PomPom’s SpaceTripper, a glorious fusion of Defender and Uridium. Ah yes, shooting stuff is good too.

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