This is going to be kind of a triple review, where I talk a bit about Myst (1993), Riven (1997) and Riven (2024). I think it's both useful and necessary to talk about older media in their original context, AND in the context of modern times.
Myst is... I mean for its time it's certainly impressive.
The atmosphere of desolate solitude, the player left alone with these machines and these abandonned islands, there's an spectacular level of detail put in these worlds. I feel like if I played the original in 1993 it would have been mind-blowing.
For context, 1993 was the year that Day of the Tentacle, Doom, and Link's Awakening came out. Exploring a full 3D world with that level of realism was unheard of. There is a reason why Myst stayed the best-selling PC game for nearly a decade.
Myst was ahead of its time, which is both a compliment and a critique. For all its atmosphere and environmental storytelling, there are a lot of quite obvious game design flaws, too.
Which makes sense, developpers weren't used to making puzzles work in a 3D environment, even without free-roaming.
There's a lot of backtracking with slow-moving animations, a lot of hidden passages, clues and levers that are hard to see, a few leaps of logic... Myst suffers a lot from 30 years of evolution in puzzle design.
Also need to mention the horrendous acting for all 3 characters in the game.
Riven, on the other hand, blew me away even by today's standards.
By 1997, devs were becoming more familiar with 3D. SM64 and Quake 2 were out, so the lack of free-roam was becoming outdated, but even then, the open nature of Riven's world feels breathtaking as soon as you open the game.
The decision to switch from small and contained puzzle-worlds to a big open island was certainly risky, and it does cause some problems, but the feeling of freedom it provides makes it worth it. Riven feels huge, both in terms of exploration and story.
Where Myst was about a small family drama, Riven ups the ante and opens the door to a lot of worldbuilding.
The environmental storytelling is still very strong, but what surprised me in both games, is how great the writing is.
Reading the lore books was such a pleasure, which I really didn't expect.
Reading the lore books was such a pleasure, which I really didn't expect.
The times I felt stuck were more because of me than any fault of the game, but there are still issues with hidden levers, passages, and leaps of logic (albeit a LOT less than in Myst).
A flaw of the open world: sometimes you don't know if you can solve what's in front of you or if you should come back later, and navigating between the different islands of the archipelago takes a truly inordinate amount of time.
A big difference between Myst and its sequel : Riven feels incredibly alive.
Myst was grand and imposing, but also really empty and desolate. Riven, in contrast, almost immediately assaults you with life, animals and culture. It feels a lot more like a tangible place, which is neat.
Something to note in the remake : the character acting and modeling is honestly incredible. The faces show a lot of subtle emotions, and it feels SO fresh compared to the over-the-top "acting" of the two brothers in Myst.
However, for all of the great changes and quality of life the remake added to Riven, I am pretty pissed about how they simplified the final puzzle in the golden dome. This was by far the coolest part of the original game, even if it had some flaws.
(Spoilers ahead for both the original Riven and the remake)
In the original game, the final puzzle asked you to connect the dots on a lot of different parts of the game, and to understand the topology of the world. It made the whole game feel like one giant puzzle, instead of a series of small and disconnected ones.
The puzzle in question asks you to place 5 marbles on a 25x25 grid representing the entire archipelago. Each marble has a color that ties it to one of the 5 islands, and you are supposed to place them at the location of the golden domes that are present on each island.
The original puzzle in Riven (1997)
This is helped by a map you can find on one of the islands that shows the topology the entire archipelago, and the locations of the domes on each island.
The puzzle asks you to understand the geography of Riven, and to tie together multiple puzzles, which I thought was really cool. The puzzle did suffer from a lack of guidance, making it pretty hard to figure out on your own, but the changes in the remake shoud have fixed the lack of guidance, not the puzzle itself.
The updated puzzle in Riven (2024)
Instead, they replaced the 25x25 grid by a 5x5 one, and made you place the marbles in the same position that they were for a previous puzzle with a similar grid, which I though was incredibly lame.
It transformed a really complex puzzle about understanding the topology of the world you've been scouring for hours into a simple memory exercise.
This puzzle is THE culmination of the entire game, the climax of every other puzzle, it SHOULD be complicated, it SHOULD ask you to backtrack, think, and visualize the entire archipelago to solve it. The new version barely requires any thinking and feels incredibly anticlimactic.
Just take a screenshot, boom, you solved the final puzzle of the game, no thinking necessary.
Aside from that specific issue with the remake, and a few other smaller flaws in the puzzle design, I can say that Riven is one of the best puzzle games I've played, and I recommand it to anyone with any interest in that type of experience.
Playing both Myst games back to back FEELS like a big step forward, and I can see the DNA of Riven in a lot of the puzzle games that have come out in the 20 years after its release (The Room, Blue prince, Outer Wilds, Submachine...).
