Like its predecessor, Riven is mostly a 'beautiful void'. Atrus has sent you to Riven to rescue his wife, Catherine. The catch: Riven is also the prison to which is father, Gehn, was exiled years ago. Oh, and there's no way back until we can summon Atrus. Riven is undoubtedly one of the more vexing games of the franchise. It's also absolutely /soaked/ in Myst lore. You'll learn about the D'Ni numbering system, the names of beasts and technology, and even learn about how Ages actually *work*. That said -- far too much of this game relies on that knowledge. If you can't get your head around Riven's D'Ni influences, you're going to be clicking without understanding. All of the relevant story is given in an info-dump right at the beginning, and then you're tossed into Riven with little context or clues as to what's going on. Which is kind of the point, I guess: the Stranger doesn't know this world, so the player doesn't either. You're both figuring things out as you go. Riven is a huge, beautiful, puzzle-and-story-rich game, but it's definitely not the one I would choose to introduce new players to the franchise.
Genesis: Alpha One is an ankle-deep roguelike sandbox -- entertaining for ten or twenty minutes, or for the obsessive achievement hunter/starship designer, but not substantial enough for more than a few hours. The roguelike elements are fun, but the game itself can be tedious: build a new module, run to the tractor beam pod to gather more salvage, then build a new module. Rinse and repeat. Occasionally, you travel to the surface of a planet (either alone or with an AI-driven companion -- there's no multiplayer option),and there you'll contend with alien baddies of various types while collecting resources. However, the resources are found in roughly the same quantity in space and on planets, so there's not a lot of variety. What variety there is lies in the crash sites: small planet-side shipwrecks, alien structures and broken equipment that grant new weapons, log entries to advance the story, and occasionally have ammo scattered around them. All with a camera that honestly feels like a low-friction skateboard. Which brings me to the biggest near-miss the game suffers: the difficulty. It can swing from mindlessly easy to aggravatingly hard, with little warning. One slip -- move too slowly between modules, or miss an alien infestation or ship incursion -- can undo hours of work. In the end, Genesis: Alpha One is a flawed gem. The game has enough content to be fun, until you figure out what everything does, and then it becomes a chore, especially when you start a new game and have to re-deploy and/or re-research all the modules you found on your last run. If that's your thing, this game will keep you going until something more polished comes along, but if you're easily bored, this will go back on your 'play-it-once-in-a-while' shelf fairly quickly. I rated it three stars because it *is* a fun game, but it could have used a bit of pre-release polishing to find out just what that means.
