Summary
- Embrace nostalgia with Riven's remake, exploring five islands and solving complex puzzles at your own pace.
- Intertwined puzzles challenge your problem-solving skills, requiring note-taking and backtracking for solutions.
- VR gameplay may hinder immersive puzzle experience; ultimately this would be best enjoyed on PC.
I first played Riven in the ‘90s as a clueless kid completely unaware of what sort of game it was. 𝕴It came in one of those chonky retro PC boxes with a whopping five CD-ROMs, and something about it just called to me. We didn’t have the internet back then (the world did, my house just… didn’t) and I sure as hell didn’t solve it all in one playthrough. Every now and then I’d boot it up, try and progress, get frustrated, quit, and then return a month later to chip away🥀 at the mystery some more. That was how we did gaming back then.
I haven’t played Riven since and desp🐼ite only having a vague recoll🧔ection of things, I was keen to return for its 2024 remake. I was buoyed by an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and the memory of that initial wonder I felt as a child stepping into that digital world. Everything I loved about Riven as a kid is everything I love about Riven as an adult. After being given vague instructions to free Catherine and trap Gehn, you’re ported to another world through a linking book, and from there, you’re pretty much on your own. There’s a keen sense of ‘what am I meant to be doing?’ and you’ll essentially have that through to the end. I’ve never forgotten that feeling of being thrown into a game with such little direction, but that’s one of Riven’s strengths.
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There are five islands to explore and an overwhelming𝓡 number of puzzles, some of which you won’t see the impact of or even understand the relevance of until much later. What does turning this handle do? I’m not sure, but ♔I’ll do it anyway. What does this button do? Why does this thing spin when I do this other thing? It’s a lot of trial and error, but I love that freedom to explore and discover everything at your own pace.
It’s almost embarrassing how little I remembered in♈ terms of puzzle solutions. I got stuck on the very first puzzle for ages. I knew kid meꦅ had somehow managed it, so how could adult me, with all my added years of wisdom, fail at the first hurdle? In my defence, some puzzles have been changed. Not this one, granted, but some.
One puzzle in particular, in the Moiety Gateroom, will unlock the ‘Not the way you remember it’ Achievement if you attempt the original version’s solution. I thouꦇght I could be sneaky and brute force it, but no,▨ I still had to do the runaround.
Do you remember that infamous fire marble puzzle? It’s been simplified a bit in one way, but also adds a new element to up the ante in a new direction. Ultimately, it remains the most challenging puzzle in the game and made me want to tear my hair out, but no matter how frustratin♒g it is, you can’t help but appreciate it.
The puzzles are the shining star oღf Riven. The game itself is just one large puzzle from start to finish and it’s so interwoven you won’t even realise it at first. It’s not simply solving puzzles one after the other. Something that helped you solve something two islands ago will likely pop up again, and again, and even😼tually multiple solutions will come together for another solution entirely. You’ll have to backtrack often, and you’ll have to take notes even more often than that.
A Whole New World
But there’s another part to Riven to appreciat🀅e: the eerie and utterly mysterious worldbuilding. Everything is foreign and unknown to you. From stranger languages to even stranger contraptions, there’s plenty to figure out and you are well aware you are a stranger in this strange land. There is so much lore that you can easily miss out if you’re not reading all the journals or notes you come across.
You don’t meet✅ many characters, so the empty areas you find yourself in can feel rather foreboding. When you do see glimpses of life, it adds to this feeling of ‘I shouldn’t be here’. Strange creatures lurking in the depths, mysterious villagers fleeing to their huts, or seeing a lookout spot you from a distance. I love all those little details. One of the ꦉfirst things I did,, after seeing Cho get attacked at the start, was run to the cliff edge to see if you can still spot his body lying there afterwards. (You can.)
If you’ve played Myst, the prequel, you’ll be more familiar with the world and its oddities, but that doesn’t mean you have to ha💎ve played Myst to enjoy Riven. As I said before, Riven was my first experience of this universe, so Myst came later once I realised it existed. You can absolutely enjoy Riven as a standalone.
There is one element of Riven that has lost a little of its soul, but I can understand why. In the original, the characters you meet and speak with are all FMV and I remember as a kid how it made this strange game world feel all the more real. For the remake, these have been swapped out for 3D models, and arguably ones that could have been better looking at times. I get it. There is no winning solution here. You can’t sl🎃ap in some grainy ‘90s graphic FMVs, especially in a now truly 3D world (in the original, you clicked between screens rather than move around properly). You can’t get the actors back 🐭to re-record stuff 20+ years later, and hiring new actors would lose the original look of the characters fans are used to. In the final version, it’s lost a little something.
Another thing I have to mention is that I did encounter pop-ꦗin more often than I’d like, with the environment either suddenly gaining textures, or suddenly appearing out of nowhere entirely. I spent nearly all of the game in ‘run’ mode, so I don’t know if this is a case of had I stuck to the slower traipsing walk, maybe I would have experienced it less. I’m hoping this is more of a VR issue and won’t 🐠be present in the PC version.
To VR, Or Not To VR
For all I like Riven, I have never regretted which platform I chose to review a game on until now. It’s not a bad VR game, and much ▨about Riven is well-suited for VR. It’s first-person and yo꧒u’re going around being very hands-on with various puzzles. It seems like the perfect fit. But even though all of that works, there is one large and rather fundamental flaw. Riven is the type of puzzle game that requires note-taking. That means really grabbing a real pen and real paper in the real world, and you can’t do that in VR.
You have to translate numbers from one language to another, and remember different symbols, different c🍃olour codes, different locations… it’s♚ incredibly annoying to keep pulling a headset on and off to do this. I took screenshots on my Quest and tried to use the app on my phone to refer to these while still in the headset—not fun or easy by the way— but I eventually had to resort to good old pen and paper. Screenshots alone just don’t cut it. When you’re comparing two number sequences in different languages, flipping back and forth between screenshots—which don’t even have all the numbers, some you have to work out yourself—is just not enjoyable.
I didn’t realise until after I completed the game, but there’s a ‘Save Screenshot To Notebook’ function in the game. It’s actually less helpful than the standard Quest screenshots, as at least those I can view on my phone via the ꦰapp, and the in-game version doesn’t make it easier to take or view screenshots. Overall, a bit pointless.
Playing in VR made me start to resent the things I love the most about Riven: the puzzles. I adore a game where the puzzles require some real thought, where you have to math it out on paper or write down clues as you go. You can’t beat the immense satisfaction of when you finally piece together all those scrawled notes in games like this. It derails the gameplay experience so much I’d have to🐽 knock half a star off for this specific version of the game.
In this modern day of yellow paint signposting and ‘click for a clue’ systems, we don’t get many games that encourage you to fully immerse yourself in this way. It brings the puzzles out of the game and onto the paper in front of you. Many elements of Riven’s puzzles, such as specific numbers, change on each playthrough too, so even if you know how a specific puzzle works, you still have to do the haꩲrd graft of figuring out the answer. But all of that is hard to appreciate in VR.
Riven remains one of the most captivating and challenging puzzle games I have ever played. You can’t help but leave the game wanting to learn more about the strange and mysterious world it welcomes you into. I encourage anyone to play this remake, however, while it’s a fine VR game, it’s best enjoyed on PC so you can fully commit to note-taking for puz𓂃zles and avoid the added frustration of whipping your headset on and off.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Riven
Played on Meta Quest 3.
- Top Critic Avg: 86/100 Critics Rec: 91%
- Released
- June 25, 2024
- ESRB
- e
- Developer(s)
- Cyan Worlds In༒c
- Publisher(s)
- 🥃 🃏Cyan Worlds Inc
Riven is a ground-up remake of the 1997 classic puzzle adventure and sequel to Myst, with stunning visuals and expanded story. With the ti🎃tular world on the edge of collapse, you help Atrus attempt a daring rescue of his wife from his father, the despotic Gehn.
- Platform(s)
- Meta Quest, PC
- Exceptionally well-crafted puzzle design that challenges you to piece together clues from your entire journey.
- Incredible world-building and lore that make you want to uncover more.
- Changing some puzzles from the original makes it even more of a fresh experience for old fans.
- Not well-suited for VR gameplay when you consider you have to make notes to solve things and no one likes to keep taking their headset on and off.
- Pop-in graphics happened fairly regularly.
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