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Riven is what I expected Myst to be. Is that a good thing?
Riven is significantly more technically advanced than Myst – you even have an inventory! More seriously, if the graphics were greater than somewhere around 240p, I could see this being released today and be acclaimed for its detailed world and well-realized environments. Gone are the repeated sound effects and mirrored cutscenes to save space. Almost every (important) screen has motion, and cutscenes are aplenty – to the point that I’m not entirely sure I’m not playing a stealth remastered version as they did more obviously with Myst (my copy says “25th anniversary edition”). This is a point and click with serious style.
Unfortunately, not everything is perfect in Myst-land. As far as I can tell, the focus has shifted from world-hopping between small islands to fleshing out a single, massive island/archipelago. Already, this makes the worldbuilding and main concept established in the first game almost incidental. Now, it’s a very pretty island – don’t get me wrong – but it lacks focus. Because there isn’t really a clear start and end to the places you go, you end up walking around almost aimlessly and getting lost in the scenery. Over time, I’m sure the island would shrink and I’d be able to get a solid map in my head. The trouble is both that getting from point A to point B is still remarkably slow thanks to the numerous cutscenes and the sheer quantity of interstitial points – areas with nothing interactable, only to show you transitioning from one place to another. Thankfully, many (but not all) cutscenes are skippable now, but it’s a shame that I find myself wanting to skip them.
Because everything is far apart on Riven, it’s hard to tell where the solvable puzzles are – or if what you’re looking at is even a puzzle or just some set dressing. And because it’s hard to tell where the puzzles are, I found myself quickly entering the “push buttons randomly until something happens” mode – which quickly drops my engagement to near zero. Near the end of my time, I ended up looking up where to go only to discover that I had missed a side passage behind a door – which made me realize that I’d likely need to comb over every frame if I wanted to find the way forward. While I could be wrong about this, Riven seems to have fewer puzzles than Myst even with the greatly expanded map size; they’re instead smeared across a much larger area and have more “stages” to them. Not only that, but there are a lot more times where you’re figuring out how to control a vessel of some sort – which is fun once or twice, but gets boring quickly and really just adds time as you push random controls to discover their functionality.
I was very close to putting Riven in Tier One at first, but as I kept playing I just found myself lost on an island with no real goal – I kept opening up shortcuts to earlier locations (which was admittedly quite cool), but there weren’t any locked doors I wanted to get through or a island in the distance I couldn’t get to. As a sequel, Riven succeeds fantastically in making a larger and more engaging world – which is impressive given the depth the first game had. However, it fails in the adventure and puzzle portion as I kept moving forward without much to show for it.
Tier Two for now, though it dredged up a pleasant memory of playing Mysterious Island II which came out four years after Riven and looks … far less good.