Riven (1997)

Cant stop playing it over and over

After playing Myst (or, more specifically, Real Myst) for the first time, I quickly downloaded Riven. While Riven does have some lovely areas to explore, some great puzzles, and fantastic music, the game itself grows very tedious very quickly. The game picks up where Myst left off: you are to do a favor for Atrus, and then go home. The gameplay begins with the player character aimlessly exploring a series of islands. Unfortunately, this aimless wandering doesn't let up for some time. Pixel hunts are found often, and clues for puzzle solutions are often obscenely vague. Particularly horrendous is the "eyeball puzzle." While Myst did have one or two tedious puzzles (the underwater maze was poorly implemented), it still had some of the greatest puzzles to be found in a game from beginning to end. Riven, on the other hand, does not. Furthermore, Riven has a seemingly non-linear nature: the player can explore several of the aforementioned islands without solving a single puzzle. While this may be nice for the casual crowd, those that actually want to beat the game will find the obscure puzzle solutions and labyrinthine level layout to be headache-inducing. To add insult to injury, this non-linearity is, for the most part, an illusion. Most of the puzzles must be completed in a specific order, and the player will doubtlessly spend many hours wandering about in order to figure out what to do next. Some may find this to be fun. I do not. There is a huge bright side to all of this, however: the presentation. The graphics are great, even in 2010. The entire island seems to come to life with vibrancy and The sound is brilliant as well, and the music is atmospheric and wonderfully composed. It's just a shame that there is no "skip sequence" button, because the player will find himself/herself viewing the same mine cart sequence about fifty times. Nevertheless, the FMV in this game really is great, and the live-action acting is actually pretty good. To conclude, get this game if you are a die-hard fan of Myst clones or a casual gamer looking for some pretty scenery. Otherwise, stay far, far away.

I would gave Riven a 2.5/5 stars. Among the Myst like games it is one of the strongest - the environments look awesome, the sound design is great and the puzzles are as complicated as it says on the tin. Thing is... it is not a kind of game that I like, because I dislike backtracking and all the Myst games consist on backtracking via clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking more to relate some clues to puzzles. There is lot of trial and error, there are many instances of pixel hunting, and in general it consists of puzzles that can be resolved via an algorithm, and if a puzzle can be resolved via algorithm I rather have machines do that puzzle or be paid to code that algorithm. Reviews are generally positive as very few people who disliked Myst got to play Riven, so you know what you get in here. Personally I am more fond of some less ambitious clones like Rhem.

asdf

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.