It's almost unbelievable that this game is from 1997.

It's so ahead of it's time. Everything is so intriguing: the story, the feeling of mystery around every corner of those islands, the inhabitants, the places, the puzzles... Ah the puzzles! Thats probably the pinnacle of the puzzle concept in video games. I still haven't played something that compares to Riven in this specific aspect.

I remember trying to play it as a kid, back in the days cause it was my dad's but it wasn't suitable for children. The difficulty is real in this one. Even though I remember just getting astonished with everything about that islands, its people, its wildlife, the events. This feeling of fascination hit me so hard that I had nothing but love for this game, even though I couldn't go too further in this first attempt.

Many years later, after being a little grown up I decided to revisit Riven with a mix of curiosity and fear. Curiosity because I remembered the fascination I had but feared that this wouldn't stand to the test of time.

Oh, but I couldn't have had a greater surprise. It definetely standed still and I went though all of it by myself. I still have this playthrough as one of my greatest achievements in my gamer life. It is a hard amalgam of puzzles and mystery, but totally worth every neuron burnt.

The gameplay by static photos could seem a little aged, indeed, but as soon as you get used to it, its a trip down the apex of immersion.

"I am at rest, understanding that in Books, and Ages, and life... the ending can never truly be written"

Outstanding! The sequel takes the elements from the first game and cranks them up to 11. The result is an adventure full of mystery and wonder.

The best part of the Riven is... the Riven. The islands of the first Myst were quite barren. Like I wrote before: "mostly rocks with occasional buildings, plants and machinery to serve as decorations for the puzzles". Maybe I did it a disservice, discarding the bits of quite interesting aesthetics. But unlike the first game, Riven is full of it to the brim.

Right from the beginning of the game I was met with an interesting piece of the local lore. Then I was shown a local temple with a secret behind it. Immediately the picture started drawing itself in my head: what happened, who are the inhabitants, what are they doing. Then I was shown a variety of different locations, buildings, mechanisms and trinkets. No place was empty: bits of narrative design, parts of a puzzle, levers to move or just a beautiful view of this mysterious place. And every new place is encountered with nothing but an awe. The land of Riven is anything but barren.

And it was a delight to explore this world. Unlike the first game, where you travel by books, as in "poof' and you are there, in Riven you use a series of transport machines. And to add to the immersiveness, you are basically winding them up manually: enter, rotate the lever, turn the handle, flip the switch. This pseudo-hands-on really builds up the anticipation of the ride. And it does not disappoint: you start moving inside of the machine, you build up speed and you are already flying to the next island. The feel of wonder and adventure is through the roof.

And do not forget the complexity of its logic. Like in the first game - the meat of the game is its complex system of puzzles. All made of 3 main elements: observation, finding a pattern and execution. You need to understand the whole mechanism in order to make it work for you. And sometimes the keys to understanding lie elsewhere. In the first game you needed pen and paper to write down the hints. Here you need to record all you findings: symbols, patterns, colors, sounds. In the end your notes might look like a small adventure journal. And sometimes you need to connect the dots and deduce how to use this new information (figuring out the numbers was my favorite).

And again this sense of understanding is strengthened by the pseudo-hands-on mechanic. As if you not just watched it, you also turned it, poked it, pushed it, pulled it. As if you were holding the puzzle in your own hands. For me it was a delight to pull all these levers and contraptions. And when the result unfolded before me - it was the best "aha" moment.

But unfortunately the size of this world has a drawback I was afraid of: at some point it turned into "where am I supposed to go". The islands of the first Myst were small. And it was hard to get lost or miss a part of the puzzle. But here you've got a whole world of Riven with puzzles spread out across the islands. Sometimes you need to visit different islands to figure out the answer. And as a result it can be hard to receive positive feedback from advancing with the puzzle. And the worst part is that sometimes it is not obvious where can you go. I have spent hours trying to find out where to go next. Found all the hints, used all the mechanisms, but no idea where to advance next. At this point the "wonder and adventure" turned into fast-click, skip cut-scenes and "WHAT THE F@#$ DO I DO NEXT?!!". Turned out I had to close the door behind me to see the small corridors in the corners... when previously most of the doors closed behind me by themselves. facepalm hours... Also some buttons or levers can be hard to notice. Be it too dark or being somewhere on the edge of your view.

As for the story. You do not find a wall of text near the beginning like in the first game. You start with it. But unlike the "abstract stories of the past" from the Myst, here the texts relate closely to the events of the game. And later you find texts from other characters, letting you to explore their side of events. As a result it is better paced and does not feel boring. Also the puzzle hints are better interwoven into them.

The sound. Here is nothing new actually. Mostly it is ambiance. It is actually working towards the adventure feel, when you explore the island and digests your surroundings. The music is used when you discover a new place and it really adds to the feel of awe, when you uncover new mystery of the Riven.

In conclusion, I love the game. Unlike the first one, I had my frustration moments, bit it is all compensated with a feel of adventure. It was interesting to uncover new places, new lore and new mechanisms. Deducing the solution and drawing bigger picture of the world felt delightful. And touching all this machinery filled me with wonder and excitement. And nothing can replace all these "aha" moments, when I found the pattern of a puzzle instead of brute-forcing via "moon logic" item.

I'm very conflicted here. On the one hand, Riven's worldbuilding and ability to create an natural and cohesive environment is extraordinary and even more impressive considering its age. Even playing nearly 25 years later, there is genuine value Riven has for informing and inspiring other game creators today.

But alas, not everything is so great. The visuals, while impressive for the time, have aged very poorly and cause numerous problems when that conflicts with the gameplay. Routinely, I'd be unable to see switches, buttons, and other interactables that were right in front of my face because of how they blend into everything else.

And for a game that excels with its environmental storytelling, its awful just how much of the story is written in long diaries with nearly illegible cursive writing. Had this been entirely optional it may have been forgiven, but there are actual puzzle solutions hidden in these diaries thus forcing you to go through long blocks of hard-to-read text instead of actually engaging with the world.

Finally, the puzzles themselves are a mixed bag. Those that test your knowledge of the history, culture, and other details of the environment are excellent and really help to make the world of Riven feel like a genuinely cohesive entity. But there are plenty of others that fail to live up to those heights. Plenty of puzzles require pixel hunting, interacting with pieces of the environment in an absurd way, going along a path that had absolutely no visual indicators, or by forcing you to watch several seconds of animation for each step of the process making even the right answers take forever to actually input. There are no shortage of puzzles that feel designed more to frustrate the player than to test them on their understanding and engagement with the world.

Is Riven worth playing? Kinda. There is brilliance here that still offers lessons to developers and enjoyment to players even today. Yet, much of that brilliance requires trudging through a swamp of outdated, tedious, and frustrating design choices that can make much of the moment-to-moment gameplay feel like its not worth your time or effort.

I hope to God that there will be a remaster of this game at some point that will address some of these issues. There is so much to love about Riven that even in its current state there is still a strong case to recommend it. But the flaws run deep and any recommendation has to come with a plethora of asterisks attached.

A little ways into Riven, you stumble upon an impossible village of huts haphazardly slapped across a cliff face. Although you catch stray glimpses of its inhabitants from a distance, it seems deserted by the time you reach it. If you knock on one of the hut doors enough times, however, a peephole opens just long enough to glimpse a face before it quickly shuts again. It doesn’t sound (or look) like much, but in the moment this struck me as one of the most arresting images I’d seen in a game for some time. I don’t think I’ve entirely fathomed out why this image is so seared into my cortex, but I do think it embodies what makes this game special and what sets its vibe apart from the one elicited by Myst

Myst’s atmosphere hangs heavily on its smothering sense of solitude. It feels relentlessly foreboding being in places that bear so much fruit of past human labor, yet contain nary a soul beyond your own. Riven carries on this legacy but delivers it with a twist: the islands on which you mosey are presently inhabited, but you catch only fleeting peripheral glimpses of these people. 99% of the time the game is just as devoid of human life as Myst, but because of that other 1%, you now feel like you’re being watched by unseen eyes every step of the way. It’s marvelous

Riven’s other interesting departure from Myst is the scope and inscrutability of some of its puzzles. Myst kept its puzzles localized to smallish areas, and though I had to internet my way out of a couple stumps, it never felt obtuse. Solutions to Riven’s most important puzzles must be pieced together across the entirety of its game world. To see it to its (good) end, a player needs to grow intimately familiar with these islands, investing a sizable amount of time just walking around, soaking it in as you slowly piece it all together—or who knows maybe you just need to be smarter than me. This is to say I relied heavily on guides to make it through this game. The Wellesian fakeout of this review is that I didn’t even witness the memorable image from above while actually playing the game (I didn’t think to knock on the door more than once). I encountered it while watching a video walkthrough of the game. Part of the magic of Riven is the experience didn’t feel cheapened seeing it this way. It still felt like an extension of playing the game itself. I’m fully at peace with the puzzles of this game being as inscrutable to me as the nature of these islands themselves

Oscuro, tétrico, y mucho más adulto que su predecesor. Riven lo conseguí hace poco, gracias a Steam y sus ofertas. En esta ocasión, el padre de Artrus, Gehn ha secuestrado a Catherine, esposa de este (Jope y que familia tiene el amigo, como para juntarlos en navidad) y por eso no estaba presente en Myst, y fuimos nosotros quien encontramos la carta de ayuda y no su esposa… Gehn engañó a Catherine diciéndole que podía salvar a sus hijos y que los tenía con él (por muchos crímenes que hayan cometido, una madre es una madre y haría lo que fuera por salvar a sus hijos)
Diferencias: El juego se basa casi por completo en la ciudad/isla de Riven, un reino devastado y casi destruido por las ansias de poder de Gehn. No hay Eras solo la Isla…
Una recomendación: jugar con el volumen a tope o con auriculares, la mayoría de sus puzzles se basan en sonidos y música y son muy difíciles.

While I was previously aware of Riven: The Sequel to Myst, I did not know until just recently that there were four more sequels, or that the story of Myst has now been told in full. Knowing there is a definitive conclusion to the story in Myst V: The End of Ages does make me want to do a full series playthrough, but that's going to have to wait a while because Riven has burned me the hell out.

I know it doesn't help that I also played this for the Sega Saturn, which is curiously absent from Backloggd's list of consoles. Riven only saw a Saturn release in Europe and Japan, and I feel this may be why it was overlooked. As it happens, a lot of my complaints about Myst's Saturn port carry over here. Riven is made more clunky and slow than it ought to be due to limitations of the hardware, and there's a significant loss of image quality over its PC counterpart as well. To be fair, it still looks pretty damn good even if it may be compromised, which just goes to show how much time, money, and pure artistic effort went into rendering the Age of Riven in the first place. Myst fit comfortably enough onto one CD, but Riven is broken into four discs, a necessity considering how much more animation is present. There are fewer static shots than the previous game, and even something as simple as seeing waves crash or flies buzzing around adds a lot more ambience.

The five islands that compose the ruined Age of Riven are also gigantic. There are multiple ways to and from each island, and much of the puzzles you solve span over multiple regions, requiring far more meticulous note taking. It's quite easy to get lost, but the Riven is fun enough to explore that navigating its world never gets too frustrating. You've been sent here by Artus in the hopes of finding his wife, Catherine, who now leads a rebellion against Artrus' father Gehn, a tyrant who has started his own following in a desperate attempt to free himself from this world in which he's been trapped. Gehn has mechanized much of the island, constructing strange steampunk inspired machines to create new linking books, though his methods are flawed, and repeated failures fill him with madness and regret. The story is communicated both in the environment (and quite effectively at that) as well as large info-dumps (which are a lot less effective.)

As you explore Riven you see brief glimpses of people in the distance, giving you the sense that this world is still very much inhabited. The lonely atmosphere of Myst is alive and well, now punctuated by an eerie sense that you're always being watched by groups with unknown intent. Are they hostile, or fearful? In truth it's a bit of both, but it leaves you with a sense of dread that you can't shake from the moment you set foot on the island to the second the credits roll. The fact that you're repeatedly told Riven is on the verge of total collapse also gives a sense of urgency that Myst simply did not have. It's great. It takes everything I liked about the tone of Myst and expands on it in ways that allow Riven to have its own identity without losing sight of what made the original work.

Puzzles are more of a mixed bag for me. On one hand I like that many of them span large portions of the game, at least in concept, but I also found it easy to lose the thread on a few of them because of this. It also becomes harder to see the solution coming together when you spend significant chunks of time away from a particular puzzle. An especially complicated one comes in the form of decoding the numeral system used by the inhabitants of Riven, which is needed to read codes written in Gehn and Catherine's journals. The in-game solution comes in the form of a game you play in the schoolhouse, which is tucked into one of the furthest corners of the game map. It's pretty easy to miss this, and I don't think I'd blame anyone for just looking up a guide to figure out what these symbols mean. However, doing so would rob you of the satisfaction of cracking the code yourself. Simply put, there's times where the game wagers your gratification against how long, winding, and complicated its puzzles are, and I don't think it always works out.

Riven's massive size and non-linear design also means a whole lot of disc swapping is required. I don't normally mind this (and might actually find it a little nostalgic) but the amount of times I had to pop open the Saturn did get kind of annoying, and it really doesn't help your immersion when you enter a room and get told to swap the disc out for the seventh time in a single sitting. God help you if you make it a couple rooms after a swap before realizing that actually you need to turn around. I understand this is the compromise Saturn owners had to make to play Riven, I'm not sure there was a more efficient way to spread data across all four discs. On the bright side, Riven didn't make it sound like my Saturn's disc drive was having conniptions like Myst did.

Ultimately I think Riven won't stick with me the way Myst does, likely due to not having experienced it at such a formative age, but it is a solid step forward and a much better game. There's some design elements that don't hold up to the test of time, and the Saturn is no doubt a terrible way to play it, but its atmosphere is just as strong today as it was in '97.

I couldn't beat this game without the strategy guide because I was like 11, and some of the game's puzzles would be overly esoteric for me even today. But still, my willingness to parse a confusing unofficial (non-Prima) strategy guide to unpack this confounding and achingly beautiful world simply made this masterpiece accessible to me, and thus changed my world forever. Thanks to that strategy guide I played through this game five or six times, each time in a single unbroken sitting. Oftentimes on my dad's laptop in the back seat of the car on long road trips. It was, in 1997, the most effective escape into a strange world that I knew of. One that didn't require me to be good at anything other than reading the instructions.

much more different than the original in its intentions than its given credit for, though to me its clear that riven is far more matured and ambitious than any myst game. in fact, the moments it relies too much on referencing myst and the book of atrus are actually parts of the game i dislike. because much of how riven itself works, as a place where people exist and do things, becomes so important for the player in a utilitarian gameplay sense that it makes some of the extraneous story stuff, having to do with places that /arent/ riven, feel tacked on by comparison.

riven is a tale of obsession and imperialism, a world suspended in an anxious ceasefire as its imminent death hangs over. this is communicated not so much through logic puzzles to solve, but from moving through spaces and interacting with machines and observing details. the key to progress in riven is, ironically, understanding that people in riven have interpretations of these details and reasons for these spaces and uses for these machines outside of progressing in a video game. THEN, through understanding this, is your knowledge tested, and even these couple of logic puzzles are brilliantly framed; one of culture and guerilla warfare, the other of tyrannical power and ecological crisis, dialectically opposed to each other. its pretty common to have """environmental storytelling""" games set after some big crisis or eerie abandonment of its world, but few if any have ever struck sharply into the blood of implicit conflict like this game does.

this alone makes riven great, but experiencing it comes with very interesting questions that im not sure i know how to fully answer yet: if riven is a place with history and people, why does it feel so deserted most of the time? why does the ~immersion~ they were going for with the admittedly remarkably well-aged CG visuals feel almost intentionally undercut by huge striking symbols that inexplicably dot the landscape? why does this anthropological bent of the game essentially only go so far as framing the information necessary for logic puzzle solutions as culturally significant onto itself, as if someone took the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy's answer to the question of the meaning of life, "42", as deep enough on its own? why does this game about seeing things from other's perspectives ultimately take the form of a puzzle game with correct answers?

honestly these questions make me believe riven harnesses the uncanny valley more enchantingly than any game ive played. myst was an amusement park mish-mash of pre-rendered aesthetics that tries to be "real", but felt too comically at home in the 90s (the 50s cartoon rocketship next to the columnated greco-roman building for example), but riven's elements that would arguably break its "even realer" versimilitude instead give it a more geniunely alien atmosphere. things left unsaid, like how lonesome this populated place feels, and the massive weapons littered around, and that one element of this game that always reoccurs but is only profound /because/ it reoccurs, get the imagination going when not expounded upon. its a game in which its lore is actually important for gameplay, yet the lore only goes so far as that much of the time, putting its gameyness starkly at odds with its realism in interesting ways.

i think there is even a beautiful meta-narrative layer to this with gehn's inability to understand how his own works reflect himself in their instability, constantly unnatural out of his staunch belief in "a natural order of things". the idea of being immersed into a strange world that cyan always tries was executed in riven with an almost unsettling self-awareness of the limits of making a virtual world that cannot truly feel alive. whether intentionally or unintentionally, i think riven best reflects both the fallacy of trying to make games real and the tendency to make them unreal, and the tension of those contradictory forces existing in the same instance becomes so alluring to me. a game of conflicts through and through

Small hint that will save you some headache: don't forget to close the door once you're inside.

Riven has been a marvelous gaming experience. Althought there are some differences, i think it just parallels Myst's overall quality. Can't really decide which one i like the most.

These kind of games showcase a unique way of relating map design with puzzle design. Myst had more variety in it's location design and the whole thing was filled with puzzles of all kind. On the other hand Riven feels like whole single space, and actually you're not really solving random puzzles (because that's how they feel in Myst at times) but, instead, you're kinda solving just one or two big puzzles which involve a lot of exploration and some careful observation. So i guess in that sense, Riven feels a lot more cohesive and homogenic than Myst. But i'm not saying that as a pun for Myst: They are just two different beasts, two different models.

When it comes to the story, i definitely prefer Myst minimalism, but Riven is also fantastic.

Don't ever think of playing Riven without playing Myst first.

Bar none the greatest strength of the Myst series was always its ability to convey the human mind's fascination with deciphering the unknown and making sense out of the alien and illogical. Myst's cold, empty and artifical island filled with misplaced familiarity beckoning you to interact with its clunky buttons and mechanical contraptions was all about finding meaning in its dreamlike language, which while a fruitful and inspiring endeavor as the series first step, was something that its sequel Riven managed to slightly iterate and expand upon to deliver something much more profoundly alluring.

Masterfully intertwining its worldbuilding with its puzzles, Riven presents a cohesive and tangible world filled with enigmas within enigmas, where understanding the solution means understanding the people, culture, rules and symbols that govern its world, and preceeding titles like The Witness or Fez, it offers a singular idea to the player that progresssively and beautifully flourishes into revelation with each new discovery of its meaning, exposing its crucial purpose and importance to every facet of Riven's existence.

A meticulously designed gameworld that perfectly parallels the antagonist's obssessive imperialistic dreams of divinity and supremacy over the world of Riven, and whose vision is ultimately and inevitably undone by the same reverence he bestows upon the devices and symbols he created in his tyranny. And just as his unsustainable dream crumbles apart, so too does the player's, as figuring out Riven means the destruction of its mystique, leaving nothing but a virtual space of beautiful static pre rendered backgrounds, and while the awe of enlightenment is something that I will never be able to experience ever again in Riven, the joyful smile I get while looking at my notebook filled with scribbles and doodles of its world is proof that I was truly there.

Refrain from resorting to a guide, click anything and everything, close and open every door, observe closely, and take a sip each time you have to endure a grueling slow animation, and I promise it will be worthwhile.

It's hard to rate this, the set pieces are easily some of my all time favorite and a lot of puzzles are great and also I really like how the puzzles are cohesive with the game's world and story, which is also very interesting even though the story is told mostly through reading journals, but that kind of minimalism works very well here as you go interacting with the world searching for clues and learning what you can.

My real problem is the backtracking for several of the big puzzles. While the original Myst puzzles were contained in their own small worlds, here the whole game is linked and often you need to backtrack several times with no idea if you are on the right track. Add to that the fact that the big puzzles here are harder than the ones in Myst and it gets frustrating pretty quickly. Because of that despite Riven improving pretty much everything, I still like the original Myst better.

Peter: But since we're all gonna die, there's one more secret I feel I have to share with you. I did not care for Riven: The Sequel to Myst.
Lois: What?
Peter: Did not care for Riven.
Chris: How can you even say that, dad?
Peter: Didn't like- didn't like it.
Lois: Peter, it's so good! It- It's like the perfect game!
Peter: I- This is what everyone always says. Whenever they say...
Chris: Gehn, Catherine, I mean, you never see, Atrus!
Peter: Listen, I know, I- Fine. Fine. Fine character, did not like the game.
Brian: Why not?
Peter: Did not...couldn't get into it.
Lois: Explain yourself. What didn't you like about it?
Peter: It's too hard, Lois.
Lois: What?
Peter: It's too hard.
Lois: And you liked Myst?
Chris: Because it has good puzzles, it's allowed to be hard!
Peter: It takes forever getting anywhere; you spend like, you spend like six and a half hours riding minecarts. You can't try anything new without wasting a ton of time watching bridges lower or doors open... You know, I gave, I looked up the solution to both the animal stone puzzle and the marble grid puzzle.
Chris: You looked up the solution?!
Stewie: How can you say you don't like it if you haven't even played it properly?
Lois: I agree with Stewie. It's not really fair.
Chris: It's outrageous.
Peter: I spent two hours at the start of the game, marooned on Dome island with no clue where the hell I could go or what I could even do. I wrote down two pages of notes-
Lois: Yeah, that's what makes Riven good. I loved jotting down notes.
Peter: I eventually got irritated enough that I googled a hint guide. I had missed a lever at the side of one of the screens. Missing a lever is not a fun or interesting puzzle. It's an "everything is brown or gray" problem.
Lois: You know what, Peter,
Chris: You're supposed to use your eyes!
Lois: Riven is a masterclass of subtlety and immersion; it's something you don't understand.
Peter: I loved the part where you figured out the numbering system. That is my answer to that statement.
Lois: Exactly.
Peter: Well, there you go.
Lois: Whatever.
Chris: I liked that part too.

Nun, die meiste Zeit war ich damit beschäftigt, umherzuirren, den Walkthrough zu lesen, an komischen Rätseln zu verzweifeln, mich zu verlaufen und erneut den Walkthrough zu konsultieren. Wie man auf die Platzierung der farbigen Murmeln oder das Zahlen-Symbol-System kommt, habe ich auch mit der Komplettlösung nicht verstanden. Das Spiel sah aber sehr schön aus, nur leider war es viel zu verwirrend.

Ich habe mich nach 5½​ Stunden aus Versehen selbst im Gefängnisbuch eingesperrt und der Abspann kam. Natürlich habe ich vorher nicht gespeichert, aber technisch gesehen ist das Spiel damit durchgespielt.