Riven

so much more than improved graphics, challenges your current thought and your memory

I wish I could put into words how much I despised the experience of playing this game. I never played the original, so maybe I don't have nostalgia to see me through, but honestly it just became torture. Some parts of the world were very pretty to look at, some of the atmospheric audio was nice, and the brief musical moments were cool too. But I utterly loathe exporing Riven. I felt like I could figure out the logical puzzles quickly, but I got so sick of missing tiny details or hotspots over and over, which made me backtrack again and again looking for something I missed. And there were a few moments that seemed like potential softlocks, where I wasn't sure if I hadn't broken the game state. There was no indication of whether I was making progress. I just kept moving into new areas, seeing things, not knowing if I had seen everything, and then moving on. I found information, dutifully saved it, screencapped it, or wrote it down, but then never found ways to apply the vast majority of it. It got to the point that I didn't even want to use a walkthrough to complete the game. I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of the aesthetic, sick of the endless wandering, and sick of never feeling like anything significant has happened. This honestly ranks up there as one of the worst gaming experiences of my life. I'm so irritated that I wasted my money on making myself miserable for an entire weekend. I hope to never think of this game again.

I got the game for 30% off and played through it, I don't understand why they're charging so much for the game. There are games that offer much more content for the same price. The world is lovely, but as someone who hasn't played any of the other games, I’m not sure why I’m meant to care about the "good guys" or dislike the "bad guys". I read the books and journals in the world. I also have no idea how I know the "good guys" and why I’m helping them or WTF the ending is meant to mean and why that happens to me. Too often, controls are janky, buttons are incredibly hard to see and you just start whipping your cursors around all the items to see it change shape and indicate something is interactable. This is clearly a game that was designed for a different time and I think if you don't have history with the franchise, simply skip it and find something that respects your time better.

I'm sorry but there are too many changes from the Original one. The game starts with on a bad note with the changes of Atrus monologue text and tone... For the rest, I wanted to explore Riven in real time, not another world. Some puzzles disappeared, like the spheres with animals sounds one, and other ones appeared. Some rooms changed location or disappeared, like the one where we could summon the Wahrk. Where is it? I'm so disappointed... But I suppose that's a great game for anyone not knowing the original.

The minimum requirement GTX 1070 just turned 9 years and the GTX 1080 TI is more than 8. Compared against modern tech my GTX 4070 Super is close to twice as powerful as the GTX 1080 TI and the current cream of the crop, the RTX 4090, is nearly FOUR TIMES the card. It's insane to expect technology to never progress and keep your 15 year old integrated graphics cards valid forever. The fact that this and many of other modern games can even still be run adequately on a 1070 already gives it substantially more of a shelf life than the console generations, so to then still complain that you might have to update your computer once a decade or so in order to keep playing games on it is, in my opinion, quite delusional.