Riven (1997)

I expected a Myst-kind of game where you travel across worlds, solve puzzles to move further, and uncover mysteries. But most of the time in Riven I found myself completely lost in a huge world with a few places I could interact with. I had to look into guides to understand that I missed some object or path. I liked the puzzle with the platform rotating around the sphere in three dimensions, but slow movement, slow animations, and long cutscenes made me bored.

While I love and have fond memories of Myst, nothing beats Riven on pure immersion alone. The game world is beautiful, beyond imagination, and feels so real despite being a game released in 1997 with a pixel count less than 1k. The fact that they were able to do all this and still have it be an even better puzzle game than Myst is truly a feat of design excellence. Myst was fantastic. Riven is unforgettable.

I never finished this game as a teen when it came out and I regretted it ever since. It's a delightful puzzler and more than anything I was absorbed by the art and especially the audio that holds up surprisingly well (relatively speaking).

If there is one problem I have with Riven, it's its movement scheme. The world is pre-rendered, so you don't have free movement, and this feels clunky. Sometimes you can miss things because you can't turn the camera where you want, or you don't notice that a path exists that woud be easy to spot if you could just turn. Worse, often I would click on something to interact with it, and either because I misclicked or because it wasn't interactable, I'd inadvertently move to a new location, which is frustrating. I haven't played the remake yet, but this would seem a big reason to get it instead. If there is a second problem, it's the puzzles. They are HARD. Admittedly, this can be part of the appeal. Too many modern games hold your hand too much, and that's not an issue here. When you solve something, you can rightly feel smart and proud. But you'll almost certainly need a guide. At least the game is fair; I don't think you can make it unwinnable, so you're free to try your ideas. In principle, everything can be solved. The difficulty is that at the beginning and for some time after, you get no guidance as to short or medium term goals. For the first hour of my playthrough, I was able to make progress not because I knew what I was doing, but because I was clicking on what was interactible and seeing what happened. When I relented and looked up a walkthrough, it was in no small part because I wanted an idea of what I should be trying to accomplish. Despite these issues, I enjoyed myself with Riven, playing it for the first time in 2024. The story is slow to start but quite deep. The world is richly realised and imaginative. It takes the small hints of worldbuilding from Myst and adds layers and complexity to them all. And there's some impressive acting, especially from the main antagonist. I'm glad I took the chance and pushed through the early issues.

Patience fortitude and a little help from the internet walk throughs make this game an adverture. Terrific!