Favorite piece of Riven trivia:
If you've played the game you might remember the one spot where there's a giant sword sticking out of the ground. Since this place also appears in one of the game's FMV cutscenes they had to use a real giant sword prop for filming. The person that made the giant sword prop was Adam Savage from Mythbusters.
Cyan, by the time they got Adam's dagger prop, figured out they could do the whole thing in CG and so did not use the prop. They still thought it was cool as hell and hung it up on the wall. It was only after MythBusters started airing that they found out it was Adam's work, because he mentioned it in an interview. As shown, it now has a place of honor today in Cyan's lobby.
> Your reaction to Riven when approached in “gamer” mode will depend on whether you think this kind of intensive intellectual challenge is fun or not, as well as whether you have the excess intellectual and temporal bandwidth in your current life to go all-in on such a major undertaking.
There's a period of time between the nineties and mid 2000s when ubiquitous and fast internet access wasn't easily accessible, and so games like Myst and Riven had the space and time to be digested and savoured. Now it seems this just isn't feasible anymore. There are of course games in the same category, e.g. Outer Wilds and The Witness, but these have much more concessions to the internet age
To me, both Outer Wilds and The Witness were absolutlely savourable, and I made a point of never looking up anything on the Internet while playing these games. That would rob me of the feelings these games were designed to impart.
Tunic is so good. Although I'm yet to complete it, I've gotten like 90% of the way I think after runs of 20-50%. Maybe I'll finally complete it this year because I adore the aesthetic, vibe and that little fox.
Definitely the game opens up and becomes more deep/mysterious than I thought it would get, super cool.
There's definitely games in this category and I do still think they work even in a digital age. It's a relatively niche microgenre though, and I think in a sense that is why it works.
Immortality and The Signifier are both solid games where most of the enjoyment is interpreting the world.
They aren't hypercard-esque puzzle games like Myst and Riven, but what they share in common is that the enjoyment of the game is figuring out the somewhat ambiguous world major beats occur in the negative space of what you are explicitly shown and told.
The former has sort of Lynchian undertones that slowly emerge over the course of the game, and the latter benefits from at least a cursory understanding of Freud and/or semiotics.
Any Daniel Mullins game, Noita and Animal Well are excellent high depth and intellectually stimulating puzzle games. I highly suggest them all if you're looking for a puzzle box to rip apart.
I love the environmental simulation and deep secrets in Noita but it's not quite like Riven. Riven had me filling out pages and pages of a journal with notes and drawings. Many of these notes and drawings were my observations ended up being extraneous details about the visual design and lore of the world, because in Riven it can be very difficult to parse what is and is not relevant to progressing in the game. It's a very unique experience, I love a lot of puzzle games with secrets and meta layers, and I love Outer Wild's knowledge based metroidvania design, but no other game has had me scouring and mulling on every detail of this virtual world like Riven.
I haven't played the latter, but The Witness avoids, as one example, a common problem in games like Riven or many other old adventure games. That is, The Witness understands that huge challenge is completely fine, so long as it's isolated to a specific virtual space, such as a given panel and room. Instead many old games give a strong sense that a solution may be found anywhere in the game so far, or anywhere on any random bitmapped area from a set of 10+ screens. I think the "concession" The Witness makes is to focus itself in order to ask the player to focus. I don't think it's possible to ask the player, like Riven does, to be comfortable living in the world for extended periods. Riven does so by unfocussing and spreading itself out over everything: anything might be interactable, anything might be a clue and important.
Today, people want progress, and if they are stuck, they want to know exactly where. The sense of anxiety created by totally open confusion is not acceptable. For me, personally, that's the moment I open a walkthrough: for example, the moment I feel like I missed something important and I have no idea where.
Totally open confusion is how I would describe Outer Wilds, long periods where I was lost and making no progress, and it was absolutely one of the most amazing games I’ve ever played.
Well first I think that Outer Wilds still does a great job at nudging the player in a direction and making them feel like they are doing important stuff, though sometimes this fails. Ironically I saw how much Jon Blow got lost and hated Outer Wilds. I think an aspect of making the player feel like they're doing something important and not just wasting their time is that for Outer Wilds the game world itself is so interesting and unique that it feels fine to be lost in it.
Riven is a series of paintings, Outer Wilds is a beautiful and serene real time fully simulated solar system. I think that is a concession the poster was referring to: Outer Wilds has to have a wow factor in order to make it okay to be lost and confused. If Outer Wilds was a series of static images, people would not persevere.
One huge benefit Outer Wilds has is that its fans are like "No! Don't watch this spoiler - Play the game" which is definitely the correct advice. If you're not sure, play the game.
I actually only played a few hours of Outer Wilds and decided to watch others (and particularly Thor) finish it instead because I'm bad at flying the ship and I found it too frustrating to die unsure whether I was bad at it or what I was attempting is impossible.
But I know I'm weird, I think the Penn & Teller things where they explain the trick are the best, clearly Penn himself doesn't agree because you won't see too much of that in their newer work. My favourite bit of Portal 2 was playing with commentary on just before "The Part Where He Kills You" where there's a frantic portal fling and in testing they realised it's not fun if the player accidentally flings the wrong portal. Like, sure, if you actually did that you die, but so what? So - if you hit the wrong button you get the correct portal anyway, as a special exception to the game's rules. So yeah, I'm weird, I like to understand how it works.
Outer Wilds (less so the DLC) has a lot of opportunity for you to completely misunderstand and I think it's actually overall nice that the game doesn't finish by insisting on correcting you. You can keep believing whatever it is, and maybe you eventually realise you were wrong or maybe not. Life's like that.
SPOILERS - Stop reading if you haven't played Outer Wilds and think you might
It's very possible to "win" Outer Wilds not understanding why the visitors died. Maybe you never visit the asteroid, maybe you don't understand what's happening there and never go inside, maybe you see what happened but never understand it. This is especially likely if you haven't noticed that they're clearly right in the middle of everything, they actually have just discovered the Sun Station doesn't work at the time!
If you understood why they died, it's even more possible to not see why Hearthians were spared. Video game protagonists are used to miracles that save them, but your whole species is here and yet other species were annihilated in seconds. Was it so long ago? Well, yes and no. It was a long time ago, but your ancestors were amphibians and like radiation the death is abated by water's density so that's why you're here.
It's also really possible to not "get" how the "Quantum" rules work. To "win" you don't need to actually go meet the last "living" alien although ideally you will, and so you don't need to grok the rules well enough to go there. So you can get to the "end" of the game without ever really knowing why the weird rocks move or that there's a coherent explanation for how and why they do that.
Ooh, edited to add the biggest I forgot - it's easy to not realise this game takes place at the End Of The Universe. The stars are dying! Unrealistically quickly, but that's what's happening. You aren't seeing more supernovas just as a hint (although it is a hint) or because of where this happens, but because everywhere the stars are dying.
To be fair to The Witness, I think it does spread itself out across its traversable space in a similar way. In both games, there's often a locked device or closed door or puzzle which you try to solve, but cannot. You explore other places on the island to discover the mechanism which allows you go back to that puzzle and complete it.
Riven manifests these discoveries as changes to world state stored in computer memory, whereas The Witness manifests them as an acquired skill residing in the player's brain.
I don't know if that's a concession so much as an evolved understanding of what is fun in an adventure game.
Pixel hunting and moon logic puzzles where you're more or less expected to brute force the puzzle and groan at the answer (e.g. the infamous monkey wrench); that shit was never fun. It ended up in games because the genre was still immature and game designers didn't know better.
Modern adventure games are much better at ensuring that the key is never far from the lock... for the simple reason that softlocking because you didn't pick up a single pixel that was an important rock 4 hours ago isn't fun, and neither is backtracking across the entire game to talk to the pigeon you missed because it only briefly flies past in the background once every 4 minutes.
> The Witness understands that huge challenge is completely fine, so long as it's isolated to a specific virtual space, such as a given panel and room
What about all of the puzzles that use the environment? There are all sorts of challenges that use the island/features. Really enjoyed that game. Good sense of progression and learning without teaching.
As I said in another comment, those are not necessary and really for people who feel compelled by them. I personally ignored them. You can’t ignore them in Riven
Technically you can skip to the end of the game in the opening scene, so I guess you can ignore all of it. Very weird credits!
I was trying to find all the answers. Afaik, you had some way of knowing how many puzzles were remaining? Eh, both great games. Myst and Riven definitely have more of the "if you can't solve this you're stuck" vibe, I'd agree.
If you haven’t played The Talos Principle 2 (which came out around 6 months ago), I highly recommend it. They put a ton of effort into it, and it shows.
Excellent comparison. I would consider those both Riven-Tier games in terms of awe and wonder. There are a few factors affecting emotional appeal, including phase in life, age, how much you're used to games, and your main point but...
I will say I had nearly as much of a good time with those two games as with Riven. For all three, I had this sinking feeling while playing "I will rarely find works as lovely as these in my life".
I recall the graphics of titles such as Myst and Donkey Kong Country were in itself newsworthy.
There was definitely something appealing in these lower-resolution rendered graphics for the way they hid the imperfections of computer graphics and conveyed more detail than was actually present. In a way our minds filled the gaps.
A good example of this are the trees in Myst in this image (https://i.ytimg.com/vi/E9ZtXtFXE84/maxresdefault.jpg). They're just textured cones with a central cylinder, but as composed they look far more richly detailed.
I've never played Riven nor Myst, because I just can't find a version or remake that wouldn't suck technically, but I just loved Quern, and one or two similar games I found since.
One that stood out to me is "Odyssey - The Story of Science", which is a Myst-like with focus on teaching basics of math and physics through its puzzles.
I've played Quern for several hours but couldn't bring myself to care as much about the puzzles or, more importantly, walking around the world.
It was not too bad, but my memory of Riven is so much stronger. Maybe I should replay it instead, just to walk through this beautiful world again, even without solving all the puzzles (the puzzles are IMO not why you play it). Riven evoked this constant feeling of wonder with the sounds and short cut-scenes adding a lot to the atmosphere.
There was this place where you walk down towards the water with a beast sitting there in the sun, and that scene almost has a smell to it. Or maybe my memory is colouring it all rosy now.
> because I just can't find a version or remake that wouldn't suck technically
the recent myst remake is probably the pinnacle of them... that said the original is well worth playing still and i've played it through a few times now.
I tried it, and it plays atrociously. Extremely inconsistent FPS, sound choppy and cutting off during movement as new assets are loaded, graphical glitches, just horrible. I refunded it pretty quickly.
I totally agree. The thing about Myst and Riven is that they really are full of the kinds of things that players will naturally try to circumvent by looking up solutions: non-obvious interactable objects, branching paths, easy to accidentally backtrack. Basically, full of ways to feel like you are wasting your time. The concessions that Outer Wilds and The Witness make are naturally related to this. Particularly with the latter, Jon Blow stated how much they changed the game to make it clear that the panels were the only thing that needed to be interacted with, and the game makes it very clear from the beginning that each panel can be approached independently. It's only with the game's environmental puzzles that this starts to devolve, but they are not necessary by any means. Outer Wilds also does a great job of making you feel like you are getting something significant from each time loop.
But I must agree with you, the ship has sailed with this kind of game. You can of course go back and enjoy it but you do so with the knowledge that you can be doing other things that feel as meaningful but without the feeling of frustration.
Another similar example are MMOs. When I was a kid, my dad and I were really into Star Wars Galaxies. Well, people made emulation projects to go back and play it, but it's just not the same for various reasons. I feel the same way with World of Warcraft. It is almost more stark than Riven, because you not only miss the word of mouth and lack of easy "cheating" aspects, but you also feel the distinct lack of open socialising in modern online gameplay.
A good example of the opposite would be old Nintendo games. Super Mario Bros 3 is still one of the best 2D Mario games of all time, and in no sense when playing it do you feel compelled towards a modern experience.
I had a similar experience when I bought an iOS remake of legend of Zelda three… Within an hour I found myself circling the border of the accessible area of the game looking for the door or NPC interaction I was missing. Absolutely Not fun. I chalked it up to gameplay of a bygone era and gave the rest a miss.
There's another thing about hyper-prevalent internet: there are wikis and guides documenting every detail, every nook and cranny, detailing every optimally min-maxed strategy. Exploration is dead.
It was one of the first PC titles ever to enjoy that sort of traction with non-gamers. I know a couple of people who actually bought a home PC just to play it on.
Whatever your opinions of the game, it definitely played an important role in opening up gaming to a wider audience. Myst is an important artifact in the history of gaming.
Now... were I not more restrained, I'd hope here that you step on the sourest of your grapes.
You reminded me that when the CD drive kicked out the disc for the first time and asked for the next, you knew that you had broken through and that some new shit was about to land.
Riven is why I got a CD drive (Plextor) that used caddys rather than a tray. I knew that I was going to be swapping discs fairly often and the caddy gave them more protection. Every time I went to a new island, it was a furious sorting of caddys to find the right one, then slam it into the drive to avoid wasting time out of the game.
What a story, and what a game. I remember being thrilled receiving this as a gift. Thankfully, my parents already had our PC upgraded to accept CD-roms; a technician had come to our home to replace the Floppy B drive with a CD-drive. I was confused about how the CDs would fit and mechanically operate in such a slot, but it all worked out. Let us play The Lost Mind of Dr Brain, which talked!
Regrettably, Riven still wouldn't run, as it required display hardware that could display thousands-of-colors. Bummer.
With a new PC many years later, I finally played it. It was one of those experiences where I wish I could forget it, so I could play it again. I tried again decades later, (after having played and loved all the other Myst games; IV was my favorite; outstanding atmosphere and scope; especially the starting and starry worlds). Regrettably, I still remembered how to solve almost every puzzle, and remembered the map layouts in detail. However, I remembered absolutely none of the plot of dialog!
(The latest Myst re-releases are worth a play through too, as is Obduction. My favorites are still Riven and Myst IV though!)
I wonder if your memory is an outlier? If I play a game, read a book, or watch a movie within a year or two I remember the edges and themes but I’ll forget the details of the plot.
Myst is an exception which is probably a testament to how impactful it was to 11 year old me, but I’ve played Riven twice and I could barely tell you what it is about. If I play it again, I’ll start getting my memory jogged and it won’t completely be like starting from scratch but pretty close to it.
Dementia runs in my family so I am always paranoid about lapses in my memory (I’m 40). When I talk to others I don’t seem to be alone.
FWIW, I remember the games I was really into fairly well. I'm not sure if I'll ever forget the Red Dead Redemption 2 main quest line. Games like Halo 3 are a bit harder for me though, because it's a lot of the same grinding over and over.
I have bounced off of Myst so many times. It's just not my thing. I was in 8th grade when it came out, and the majority of my friends liked it, but I solved maybe 3 puzzles before becoming bored. The world felt sterile and uninteresting next to nearly every single adventure game I'd played so far.
As the digital antiquarian is happy to point out, most of the Sierra adventures were poor games, but few were sterile. And the Infocom games were almost overflowing with life.
"Myst" coming out on a CD at the time struck me as a very risky move as so few people had optical drives on their PCs. What I failed to appreciate (and why I must suck at marketing) is that everyone with a CD-ROM drive bought the game. You almost had to either to justify the device or perhaps to lord it over those who did not have one.
Myst's 1994 Windows release is pretty far into the CD-ROM era. I was playing Monkey Island with its great CD soundtrack in 92, and the talkie versions of Fate of Atlantis and King's Quest 6 in 93, for example.
For my friends, they lorded their CD-ROM drive with the purchase of Phantasmagoria. No time for those wimpy Myst games. My friends needed hardcore dramatic depictions of sexual violence.
My dad adored the Myst games. We would plug a computer into a big screen (eventually projector) and try to solve the games as a family over a Christmas break
Not enough can be said about the quality of the writing and worldbuilding in the universe. It's as pity that the format died around the game.
Highly recommend Obduction, also from Cyan. As a guy who had Myst when it dropped for PC (and spent 32 hours straight with two friends, chugging Coke, to solve it) I feel like it's a worthy addition to the genre.
There are some terrific point & click games on iOS (preferably iPadOS). The Room series, The House of Da Vinci series (superb Room knockoff), and The Eyes of Ara (personal fav) just to name a few.
Their latest game, Firmament was a bit of a let down. The puzzles were far too easy and the game was far too short. It felt like they spent a lot of time making it look pretty, adding VR support, etc instead of just making good puzzles.
The one before that, Obduction, was pretty great. I really loved it.
My intelligence level at the age of 14 was that I could finish Myst and loved it, but not Riven and had to buy a guide to help me with it. I think it might be the only game I bought a guide for. Never got over that.
Actually, I did phone the super mario 64 help hotline as I was missing level 10. 60p a minute!
Same. Riven was such a massive step up in difficulty from Myst.
Of all the 4 games (yes 4, I refuse to acknowledge the last entry) it is definitely the most difficult. I had to wait for it to come out on GoG and replay it as an adult to finish it.
Fascinating to compare the take on storytelling/worldbuilding articulated at the end of the article to a game at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Dwarf Fortress which has the explicit aim of being a story-generating tool, but creates worlds sort of as an accidental byproduct. What would it take to be able to generate a puzzle game with the kind of depth seen in Riven using a generative tool like Dwarf Fortress? A deeper question might be, is there any generative process that would produce the complexity of Riven without an explicit desire or demand to create such complexity. The complaints by the author in a sense echo the utter impracticality of creating such complex puzzles. Most of the time the practical solution is just to have a key, but that leads to boring bog standard gameplay. Maybe a virtual civilization that only allows initiates that demonstrate a certain persistence and curiosity, but how do you weed out those that simply follow the instructions that others have given? Well, if you have the ability to generate a whole new set of equally challenging puzzles that can't be rote memorized and copied, maybe that is sufficient.
> What would it take to be able to generate a puzzle game with the kind of depth seen in Riven using a generative tool like Dwarf Fortress?
You'd need AGI.
Standard procedural generation, even the most advanced versions, aren't any good at consistently making interesting things. Procedural generation is only good for making things that probably haven't been seen before, and the vast majority of what gets spit out via procedural generation will be bland and uninteresting.
In other words, there's a reason that 99% of any given Dwarf Fortress world's legends mode will be mind-dullingly boring, and a reason why Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has an autoexplore key.
But if you're willing to tolerate somewhat-bland open-ended procedural murder mysteries in a highly simulated film-noir setting, check out Shadows Of Doubt.
Shadows of Doubt actually sounds quite interesting, seems like the sort of game where dipping in and solving one case, then putting it down for a few days/weeks, might keep it feeling at least somewhat fresh.
A game that fits between 'hard puzzles' and 'action' and will always have a new puzzle available to me might be really nice.
(I am not certain of this enough to buy it -yet- but I'm now definitely considering it)
I'm not sure that holds anymore, since that article is 6 years old now and Obduction is coming up on 8... Better to compare it to the upcoming Riven remake: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1712350/Riven/
> Cyan was likewise disinterested in pursuing other solutions that would have been even easier to implement than panning rotation, but that could have made their game less awkward to play...
I disagree with this paragraph.
I think back then, I thought this was intentionally helpful. Thinking on it now, I also think it was part of the character of Myst that would be too risky to lose for Riven.
Yeah, I agree: I think there are a bunch of little details that would have been VERY hard to find in a truly open world navigation setup. I do remember being bailed out by clicking around to find paths at least once.
My hometown is also home to Cyan, who made Myst/Riven. I've been to their offices a few times, just to nerd out with some of the devs and play random open source FPS games (the name escapes me). Their offices are really cool, they've got a lot of physical stuff from the games in various display cases around the entrance.
It's... weird to visit, though, because they're like the high school quarterbacks we all know. They had some great years when they were younger, but they're continuously trying to relive those glory days while yelling from the bar stool about that one time they threw the game winning pass. Most of their cash comes from remakes or ports of Myst/Riven, and half the time they aren't even the ones making the damn ports (third parties have paid them for the rights to do it, if you buy Myst on GoG then you got a version that was ported by GoG themselves).
They recently put out Obduction, which on paper seems to be a commercial failure (though I haven't sold seven figures worth of games so who am I to say), raking in like $5M total. Saving the fact that there are just a handful of dudes left at the studio... I don't know, it feels like the oft referenced online version of Cyan (which again, is 30 years old now) and their current reality are completely divergent.
I have some nostalgia for getting trapped in a book in Myst and feeling that fury, but I also struggle to see how they're relevant in today's gaming landscape. It feels like if Super Mario Bros was a one hit wonder, would we still be getting this pumped about crushing turtles three decades later?
To me, it sounds similar to a once popular band who still make records together.
Maybe their style is progressive rock and they had one hit that still plays enough to keep the royalties flowing [1]. Decades later, audiences have mostly forgotten about prog rock, but does that mean the band should abandon what they know and enjoy, just to maybe try making a Rihanna-inspired album instead? Nobody wants that either.
It sounds like a chill lifestyle to be honest, doing what you love on your own pace, sometimes delivering something new to a dwindling but dedicated audience. Degrowth is anathema to start-up culture but it might be good for the aging human mind.
- -
[1] A lot of people who have never actively listened to prog rock could hum “Eye in the Sky…”
You're completely right, and if the shoe was on the other foot I'd probably do the same. I'd be happy to be a one hit wonder if it paid the bills and let me keep on rocking in the free world.
But at the same time, Norman Greenbaum doesn't release a new version of Spirit in the Sky every few years expecting to get a pat on the head. In fact, that'd be an insane choice to make. Cyan is making their new albums, but they're also releasing Myst[club-remix].mp3 and Riven[feat-shiny-bs].mp3 on a regular schedule, and part of you has to wonder when it's ok to embrace the one hit and maybe quit beating the dead horse (apparently there's money in the horse, instead of organs and horse meat, so they CAN beat it but why?)
Let’s take somebody I actually really respect, the Pet Shop Boys. (They’re practically a one-hit wonder in America but had numerous hit records in Europe.)
Within the past month, PSB has released a new album “Nonetheless” to favorable reviews, but they also released an EP called “Furthermore” with completely new recordings of some of their best-known hits. Recently they also collaborated with British post-punk group Sleaford Mods on a cover and remix of “West End Girls.”
There’s an audience who enjoys all this. Why shouldn’t they both put out new material and work with others to rejuvenate the old? For someone who never liked their brand of melancholy synthpop, it’s beating a dead horse. For the fans, it’s keeping alive something that deserves it.
Interesting how the „up to date“, or should I say „generic“ production of Furthermore robs them of their charm. They had an instantly recognizable sound.
I mean, do whatever the hell you want. I'll call you out as a hack for doing it, but if someone out there enjoys it then more power to them.
Personally I think that if Nintendo eschewed new games, and kept releasing the original Super Mario Brothers (a beloved game from almost four decades ago) bit-for-bit on other devices, maybe with better graphics, they'd be irrelevant idiots today. Sure, there's SOME market for that, but what's much cooler is making new stuff that holds up in the current year. Nostalgia is a powerful tool, but porting code from 30 years ago to my smart fridge with upgraded graphics is a poor use of it (this is barely hyperbole for the franchise, which says a lot).
That all being said, I know the Cyan offices haven't collapsed into rubble so they're still doing OK (though their workforce is TINY now, compared to 'back when'). And if that's what floats their boat, great. I'd rather suck start my shotgun than release the same software for 30 years (same as in verbatim, no less, someone else is porting it to modern stacks) but to each their own...
But Cyan does release new games with no connection to the Myst IP. And Nintendo has re-released the original Super Mario Bros on different platforms over the years.
> kept releasing the original Super Mario Brothers (a beloved game from almost four decades ago) bit-for-bit on other devices, maybe with better graphics, they'd be irrelevant idiots today
But they do that all the time. New Super Mario Bros had like 5 different releases across multiple platforms with little to no changes. Hell, the entire SMB lineup is basically the same game with a new gimmick and fresh graphics tacked on every release.
Super Mario All Stars it's a remake of the classic Mario Bros games for the NES but with SNES' Super Mario World graphics, they stil hold up really well today.
> part of you has to wonder when it's ok to embrace the one hit and maybe quit beating the dead horse
Lots and lots of musicians play all their 20yo hit records every concert. It’s expected, not “beating the dead horse”. I don’t see how this is all that different.
I like that your go-to for prog rock is "Eye in the Sky." I really can't fault it; my first thought was that technically Yes is more iconic of the genre, but it's probably less-known by younger people; if only for the Bulls oddly using Alan Parsons as their intro.
Now THAT I thought was a strange choice... Alan Parsons Project for a bombastic sports-stadium entrance.
The sad truth is that capturing lightning in a bottle is exceedingly rare, let alone twice or more. Cyan made at least 2 massive hits, which is 2 more than almost all game studios manage. Even their contemporaries Id Software didn't make that many more hits (Quake 3 was their last outright hit, releasing only 2 years after Riven).
There are almost no Bethesdas/Blizzards/etc that continue releasing hits for decades at a time.
Fair point, and I sort of understand the nostalgia that's involved. A large part of my disappointment probably comes from the fact that the endless remakes never quite live up to the hype.
I was a big Diablo 2 fiend, it was one of my formative online games. So a few years ago there are rumblings about D2 Remastered, and I'm obviously pumped. Come launch day, Blizzard has my money and I'm deep into the thing I used to love, but it's just... meh. There was a time and place that made the original D2 fantastic, but it turns out that's not here and now. I feel the same thing for Myst/Riven, they were SO GOOD but who actually gives a shit about doing the same thing again with better graphics?
I can't write off the fact that those dudes made a few great games, and that's a crazy accomplishment. I think Myst is the first "real" PC game my family ever bought, and I still remember my mom staying up late at night to click around the world and figure out what the hell was happening. She wrote notes on those yellow legal pads, reminding her of lore and other important shit. But the lightning in a bottle thing works both ways, and that lightning is basically static electricity in todays world :P To borrow your example, id software didn't release the same version of DOOM 30 years later, we got DOOM Eternal. It's not a reskin of their (by today's standards) shitty game, it's a whole new experience that's a damned (hah) blast to play. That's not what's happening with Myst/Riven, unfortunately, but I'd love to see that level of innovation come out of the studio that was once great.
They did make new games tho, most recently Obduction and Firmament (the latter released in 2023). I think their style of games just fell off the zeitgeist.
Anyway I do empathise - my favorite games are fallout and fallout 2 and I was looking forward to Bethesda’s sequels but I never manage to stick to any of them for more than a couple hours, it just doesn’t feel like fallout to me - and I think a big part of it is because I’m not longer 14 years old playing a new game (with very little other commitments on my time and attention).
I know they made newer games, I played Obduction in person in their offices before it was released :)
But you're on the same page as me, there was a time and place for these FANTASTIC games, but that's in the past. And it feels kind of silly to watch them push the same games onto new platforms in a futile attempt to stay relevant (and cash the nostalgia checks, even when players end up NOT feeling the same things as the OG release).
Part of why I didn't like D2 again is exactly what you said, I'm not a teenager with endless time to spend online gaming. But another huge part is that I've been there and done that, and a nicer, newer version of that fun just doesn't hold a candle to the fun I had years ago when it was fresh. I'm saying the same holds true for Myst/Riven, release it on my smart fridge for all I care, it's not the same :D
The original D2 is still one of my favourite things for LAN play (especially with the Ancestral Recall - Skills Enhanced mod), I think the friends plus pizza plus beer combination helps bring the nostalgia back more than a graphical overhaul would.
Yeah I agree we actually agree! Another complicating factor is that there’s a significant subjective component to it - I have an acquaintance that works at Cyan (after growing up with Myst and Riven) and is extremely happy working on their newer games.
Ultimately they’re getting money from players (not investors), so the test of “is there a reason to remake the old games” is ultimately if people are buying them (and I wonder how many of them haven’t played the originals? Considering they came out almost 30 years ago).
I had the same experience with the Fallouts. These were the last PC games I played obsessively. (In my late teens I decided I wanted to be an artist, while gaming was moving in the opposite direction with always more guns and 3D and less story and less art. So for a long time I never played another game after Fallout 2.)
In 2016 I was very impressed by the advances in VR, and so I spent thousands on a gaming PC and HTC Vive and the VR edition of Fallout 4. But one hour into the game it was clear that the magic just wasn’t there. I had this expensive setup to put me directly inside the world I enjoyed as a teen, but it was totally “uncanny valley.” The overwrought game design had lost the mystery, and the 3D VR rendering just made everything look cheap and fake. Engaging the player’s imagination is a delicate balance.
It's not just you. Bethesda's Fallouts are like cargo cult versions of the classics. Oblivion set in a retrofuturistic postapocalyptic world just isn't the same thing.
On the contrary, Obduction is probably their best game. The puzzles are well thought-out, hints are signalled in clever ways, the environments are detailed and gorgeous, and the storyline is pretty interesting
They recently released Firmament which was successfully backed on Kickstarter. (I'm eyeing my boxed copy on my shelf right now.) I'm partway into it, so I can't yet say if it's better than Obduction, but it has been an excellent experience so far
I don't think it's fair to slam Cyan for being so proud of Myst and talking about it all the time. It was one of the most influential and successful video games. It got kids into technology, puzzles, and sci-fi. Myst is not merely remembered. It is still an ongoing franchise with an active fanbase. Why do they need "hits" when they are still a successful company?
Wife and I played Obduction last year and really enjoyed it. She may have known, but I had no idea it was a Cyan game. Or I'm getting old and forgetting that I did know.
Just heard about Firmament, I guess we have another game to add the the "Winter Doldrums" playlist.
My most replayed game is Traffic Department 2192, as much to re-experience the 70,000 words of script as anything else (it became freeware a while back, and I'd endorse anybody reading this firing up your DOSBOX to try the first mission - if it's your sort of thing, the dialogue will almost certainly hook you by the time you're ready for the second).
It's at least 25 years since I first played it now and I'm always pumped to replay it.
Oh right! Nice. I've only played it once or twice, but now I'm kinda thinking I should give it another try -- forgot how good it looks. People at Cyan were playing this (and you joined up)?? That's awesome haha
Incredible game and atmosphere to this day. I would love to see the original models and maybe even try to render them in real time on today’s technology. Or maybe that would ruin the magic.
My understanding is that it would, to some level - I remember reading about how they put effort into every pixel, which child-me took to mean that after the rendering, they went in and modified it to exactly match what they wanted. That can only work with a fixed perspective, which I think was proven out in the later full 3D Myst games.
I've got all three books but only got the hardcover of the Book of Atrus (and a recent anniversary edition reprint of it, just for fun). Wish I got hardcovers of Ti'ana and D'ni!
I thought the books matched the atmosphere and quality of the games very well. They didn't read to me at all like merchandising, but rather as an expression of the same artistic vision in another medium. I remember reading one as a teenager, and was deeply taken with the message that as an artist and an engineer (and those are deeply related), a commitment to beauty and proper function, indeed the integrity of honoring what you are and what your creations properly ought to be, demands doing things right, which in turn demands deep study and doing the homework. It is a philosophy that was formative for me, and which still heavily influences me today. I hadn't thought about that in years...!
There were three books in total, and I loved the first two. Particularly if you can get hold of the hard-covers, as they are beautiful.
As for the stories themselves, the world building and atmosphere are fantastic. As a teenager/young adult, they captivated me in a way that very few books could. I continued to read them about once a year up into my early thirties. And I never played the game!
The paperback also had a texture to them as well. It was hard to find them a decade ago and I don't regret the hunt. I'd agree that the first two books are great, the third is nice in rounding out the world but the story doesn't captivate as much.
I keep seeing comments like this on this thread: people who like the game or what it produced (it whatever) without even playing. It’s like me liking all things Alice in Wonderland without ever reading the books. Even though I have them in hot pink hardcover.
I loved reading then when I was a teenager. I remember enjoying how the books were used as portals to be worlds. The world building in general was great and I remember the story as quite clever. However, this just have been 25 years ago at least. So it might have been terrible lol
The author is David Wingrove, whose incredible world building is on display in his Chung Kuo series. Also highly recommended: a future where China has dominated all the continents. Originally 8 books, now 20 due to books splits and additional writing.
Only complaint is he could have used an editor. Sometimes his writing could have used some corrections or better wording.
I think you're confusing Riven with the original Myst. There have been full 3D versions of Myst since way back in 2000, but a real-time 3D remake of Riven has been a long-awaited pipe dream.
There was a long-running fan project called "Starry Expanse", aiming to recreate Riven in 3D. They got acquired(?) by Cyan a couple years back and their work got incorporated into the official Riven remake, which is supposed to come out sometime later this year.
It’s a few members at this point. I was on the SE team, very proud of my teammates (artists, musicians) who have gone on to join efforts with Cyan. The new Riven is going to be amazing.
Sorry, yeah, they didn't "acquire" the whole team in a business or employment sense, but my understanding is they got access to all the code and art assets they had created over the years.
Rivan was an insta-buy for me and at that point I hadn't even played Myst. The scenes, the music, the environment, the feeling of exploration were amazing. and there were no walkthrough videos to help back then.
To my young self Myst felt utterly brilliant, and when it finally arrived Riven self-indulgent, a cautionary tale that even the artist does not always grasp what made their work good.
It felt like they didn’t get that it was the unbridled creativity combined with no resources that forced them to make the experience itself good, rather than infinite resources indulging their misconceptions about where the value was
> My wife and I are inveterate hikers these days, planning most of our holidays around where we can get out and walk. Riven made me want to climb through the screen and roam its landscapes for myself.
I believe Myst, Riven, and Obduction all have VR versions now. Myst works standalone on Quest.
That was an amazing game (along with the rest of the series, there's 5 canonical games in total).
When they did try something more "normal" - the multiplayer online URU, a kind of Myst meets second life meets early social network, it wasn't a commercial success.
> Even in the late 1990s, there was the palpable sense that Riven represented the end of an era, that even Cyan would not be able to catch lightning in a bottle a third time with yet another cerebral, contemplative, zeitgeist-stamping single-player puzzle game. Both Richard Vander Wende and Robyn Miller quit the company as soon as the obligatory rounds of promotional interviews had been completed
I was an ultra-tourist. I just bought the game and a cheat book and blew through it with my mom in the fashion of watching a movie.
Because that is about as much time as I want to sink into any escapist stuff.
The other point is that I truly admire anyone ejecting at the top of their game, rather than and endless stream of weaker derivatives.
What a game, the main puzzle which tied all the islands you've visited throughout the story is one of the best in terms of game design, hard as nails too!
Anyone know of any Let’s Play of Riven that’s ideally done by someone who hasn’t played before, but is exceptionally bright as to make the LP move forward at a reasonable pace?
Maybe this is an odd request. I find that LP’s of games like this that I never finished as a kid work better than some expert playing it for the 12th time.
I agree it's tricky to find the balance of a truly blind playthrough, sans hints, and one that's also enjoyable to watch because the inferences are made reasonably quickly.
I never got around to playing Riven, but I plan to as an adult and have been waiting for a proper remake with updated graphics and such and it seems we are finally close to that reality.
Is there some kind of trick to getting the CDs to load? I've tried Firefox and Chromium, nothing seems to happen on either when clicking on the CDs, no console errors.
The Steam releases of original Myst and Riven are the ScummVM ports, which work great on modern hardware. You'll find it as "Myst: Masterpiece Edition". Masterpiece Edition is effectively the same as the original release, but with better color fidelity on the visuals. I think the one downside of Masterpiece Edition is that some of the audio tracks were cut short to fit on the CD. Still, I'd say the Steam release is definitely the most hassle-free way of playing the game today.
https://youtu.be/gcDCZ2TmTck?si=8J8A4ja1vRGDC9c6&t=150