Riven (1997)

Most of your time will be spent watching traversal cinematics. Each area in the game forces you to watch a 15-60 second long cinematic before transitioning to the next area. A ton of backtracking is required, so you will be watching these cinematics a lot. Maybe it was a good time in 1997, but it makes the game nigh unplayable in 2024. The puzzle solutions are very obtuse as well. The puzzle difficulty forces the player to make logical leaps and experiment to test their solutions, but the time it takes to test your hypotheses makes this prohibitively annoying. I used a guide for the second half of the game, and I'm glad I did. Absolutely not worth playing in 2024, imo. Go play Outer Wilds, The Witness, or The Case of the Golden Idol.

The game is broken. - It took 6 hours to download. That is unacceptable. I have am amazing internet connection. - The sounds are out of tune and constantly go mute, - The entire intro to the game is missing and it immediately sends me to the prison cell in Riven AFTER the death of that NPC. - Regular movements of objects are removed and instead it fast forwards everything. Either fix this game and put it back to its original intended state or give me a damn refund.

RIven is impossible to complete without diligent recording of your surroundings, including sounds. And you'll have to learn absurd base-25 numerals of D'ni. Graphic design is interesting however performs poorly on modern screens: blurred, pixelated, moving objects playing in obvious rectangular boundaries, perspective skewed, spatial awareness (crucial for game) - difficult. Puzzles range from trivial to unsolvable. If you admire games which challenge your brain, Riven is not for you. It will challenge your patience mostly. Clues are not difficult, just scattered all over the world without any logical connections. They prefer trials and errors approach rather than mental effort. You need to travel back and forth a lot, waiting a lot for pixelated animation to complete. Over and over again! At the beginning it's forgivable but after three days becomes annoying. Contraptions in Riven's world, which look mysteriously at first glance after seeing them for 98th time are obvious absurd. And yes! you will have to see them plenty times. But hey! D'ni mixed magic with steampunk and oilfield equipment so nothing to complain about. I've played the game for 16hrs when stumbled upon geometric animals stonehenge puzzle. Spent 6hrs (six!) to solve the puzzle before I gave up, went to internet. When I found out solution to the stonehenge puzzle I got infuriated and deleted the game as I got really sick of growing lack of logic and pretentious, unsubstantiated story. Did I mention that intro video and dozens of pages written in old style hand-writing font are mostly irrelevant for the game?

Gave up after about half an hour. I think this game has aged very badly indeed. At the time of release its main draw was its graphics, which now look terrible. Panning up and down is particularly ugly. I managed to progress to the second island without finding anything that really interested me.

I wanted so badly to play this game again. Unfortunately I couldn't even install the thing. There is some support under the Support tab - read through that before you buy this game. Otherwise you will be as frustrated as I am.