if you're vaguely familiar with myst as a franchise, you may have heard that riven is the brutally difficult older cousin -- it makes you engage deeply with the world around you, it was a master class of immersive atmosphere design, and most of all, the puzzles are insanely hard to figure out because you don't even know where to start -- what are the puzzles in the first place?

this is some bullshit that people who are bad at puzzles will tell you. this game was trivially, brain-numbingly easy when it comes to puzzles. maybe the only interesting bit was the revelation that the number system was actually base 25 instead of base 10, a neat twist. literally every single other puzzle is just "hey have you heard of this concept where we take two distinct sets of symbols and/or objects and find some way to map the two together?" it's not even fucking done well. it's the most straightforward possible implementation of mapping sets together: often it literally just hands you a device where you slowly click through the animations and get every single object pair between two sets.

occasionally the game is "difficult". by difficult, i mean it's designed like shit -- you can't blame it too much for this, given that it's from the 90s, but the bad UI drags the game down anyways. i suspect that if the game highlighted interactive objects (or changed your cursor on hover) then the game would not have nearly the reputation it does. the animal symbol puzzle is the closest the game gets to non-trivial puzzle design, but it ultimately just reinforces how bad the puzzles in this game feel -- making every single conceptual leap and picking up/understanding all the relevant information (seriously, after i finished my playthrough i went and checked full guides to make sure i hadn't missed anything) and still being fucked over by ambiguous symbols just feels like shit.

a brief aside: holy FUCK i am glad modern games offer plain text transcripts of collectible written objects because reading the handwriting in this game fucking sucked.

ultimately riven was not a very good puzzle experience. the most frustrating thing to me is that i had heard so much about it being brutal but fair and rewarding, and so i wrote notes on literally every single area and possible puzzle i encountered in excited anticipation of the masterpiece i'd heard so much about -- and ultimately all the puzzles were incredibly trivial or the answers were literally written down in journals that you were given. what a fucking waste of my time and effort.

Reviewed on May 21, 2023


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