Riven (1997)

The best Adventure games I played! The puzzles are great fun, In an unforgettable atmosphere, Once you play a Myst game you always wish for more, you will hang around on line with URU live! And you will pass it on to everyone you know!

A great game.

Got it as a Christmas gift as kid when I was about 12. This is probably the game that got me the most interested in 3D art. I still have the game CDs from back then with their fantastic CD-sleeve art. Don't really know what to say about it except I was captivated by it's visually stunning surrealism and atmospheric music and sounds, and even today it's still one of the most memorable games for me. Even though the resolution isn't very high and it won't hold up that great on HD displays, I still think this is one of the most captivating Myst games, aside from Myst III, which was also very atmospheric and even more immersive with the addition of the new 360 degree camera. I am looking forward to the Starry Expanse re-creation.

Unfortunately I found my self having to use the walkthrough, some of the buttons are hard to find and places and clues, it would take hours of discovery to find them all, I was just as pleased to finish the game with a walkthrough. I just wanted to beat it! Great game!

The original Myst is wildly overrated, and I can't recommend it. Riven does better, by focusing (mostly) on a single world, with meaningful connections between the various things you'll see and do. It's a short game, but a slow game, that wants you to look around and think about the world you're in. It's frequently beautiful, its sound design is exceptional, and many of the puzzles are very clever. But while in theory there's a certain wonder in realising that object A on island B is actually the clue to puzzle X on island Y, the actual process of backtracking from location to location to solve these global puzzles is tedious. It's not fun to cross the entire world to re-look at a clue (or re-listen to it), and if you're on the wrong track entirely there's not always good feedback to set you straight. It's a game that doesn't sufficiently reward the player's experimentation, or respect the player's time, which leaves it as a promising and pretty diversion (and, again, better than Myst) but something which falls short of being called a classic of the genre.