<youtube=zCOV3OT8u3M&autoplay=1>
http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/16033/1482074-riven_coverartwork.jpg
<color=black>RIVEN (MYST II)
Do something really quickly: Find an Adventure Gamer from the 90s. Ask them what they thought of Riven.
Without fail, they'll get a misty look in their eyes.
Riven was the direct follow-up to Myst. It plays exactly the same way, it follows on the lore established in the previous game, and the story takes place literally hours after the first game ended.
<img_inline width=350 align=right>http://imageshack.us/a/img163/2607/c7pc.png
As before, the game functions with a node-to-node movement system. You click at the sides of the screen to turn 90 or 180 degrees (there's a different cursor for each), and you click on the hotspots on the screen to move to a new location or interact with something. Since this is a nineties point-and-click adventure game, there will be puzzles.
A lot of them.
And what glorious puzzles they are.
So what has changed?
Well, the game looks significantly better. Many fans maintain that they look "photorealistic" to this day, and while a few scenes are rough around the edges now, it's still mostly true. The stills for each node are exquisitely rendered, showing dozens of details in each scene. Many of them have animations in them as well.
Adding to the detail is a delicious sense of earthiness. While the original Myst was liable to throw you from surreal and impossible location 1 to surreal and impossible location 2, none of Riven's scenes look unreal (with a couple of wonderful exceptions). The surrealism has been reduced in exchange for earthy browns and gorgeous blues, and it works wonderfully.
The story, stakes and setting are also significantly improved over the first game. The series hook is excellent: A now-dead civilization have discovered a method of writing that allows one to literally fall into a book, through a link to another world. However, while this was the key plot point to the original game (as well as the later games), Riven is significantly more grounded in one age.
<img_inline width=350 align=left>http://imageshack.us/a/img201/2637/gigx.pngYou've been sent to a small group of islands to find and rescue Catherine, the wife of Atrus (who sent you). Standing in your way is a very hostile village, a rebel force, and the minions of a man who claims to be God... as well as the "God" himself. As you search, the world you're exploring is being revised and rewritten by Atrus, who presumably hasn't slept in days, and if he can't stabilize the collapsing cave systems of the islands, the entire world will finally sink into the ocean. And, most dangerously of all, one of the islands is sitting on top of a rift in time and space, held shut by a single seal.
Why yes, that seal DOES come into play later.
The details of the story are scattered through various books and journals in the game's world. You start with Atrus', and a few others will be found scattered throughout the world. The game manages to strike a near-perfect balance between sensible and surreal, with the villain's cold and analytic musings and theories balancing out the pure wonder and mystery of wandering through a crevice cutting a square lake in half, or Catherine's ramblings and insecurities counterbalancing the deity-level of admiration the natives have for her.
<img_inline width=350 align=right>http://imageshack.us/a/img191/3715/j4af.pngThe islands themselves are amazingly distinct and gorgeous. Originally all part of one island that's been shattered and dragged apart, they're now five distinct segments used by the villain for very different things. One is the "public" island where all the locals live in a spectacular cliffside series of huts overlooking a salty inlet beside a strange forest with giant grasses. The villagers' architecture is very distinct and different from the metal walkways seen elsewhere on the islands, and it adds immense character to the island. The other islands are off-limits to the villagers, and are used for very different purposes: One is crowned with an awe-inspiring gold dome crouched over a temple, used to power things on other islands. Another is used as a giant paper-factory on a lake, one is used to take topological maps of the islands (this one makes more sense when you actually see it) and the last one, not even in sight of the other islands, has been repurposed as a prison.
While Myst was notable for invoking feelings of intense loneliness, Riven is notable for invoking feelings of intense paranoia. In Myst, your only company was two unstable men talking at you through unstable links. Here, if you ever want to see signs of people, you merely have to go back to the village to see signs of life everywhere. Sure, the natives hide from you and won't speak to you, but at least you know they're THERE. However, when it becomes clear that the villagers aren't allowed anywhere else (there's a memorable moment where a woman catches sight of you on the wrong island and breaks into a dead run, mistaking you for one of the antagonists), you realize that by extension, YOU aren't supposed to be on these islands either. Add in the signs that you appear to be missing antagonists by mere seconds (another memorable scene leaves absolutely no doubt that the bad guy knows exactly where you are, and puts him within a ten second walk from you), and you suddenly begin jumping at shadows and faint outlines in the dark. One of the few interactions you have with the villagers is a scene where you run into a small girl, who promptly runs off, but because of the foreboding and forbidden nature of everything you do and interact with, the encounter was enough to launch me clean out of my chair.
<img_inline width=350 align=left>http://imageshack.us/a/img17/7628/bfor.pngThe interactions with the various people is fairly limited (albeit miles beyond what you could do in the original Myst). The characters are played by actual living, breathing actors superimposed on the prerendered backgrounds, and the effect is seamless. This time around, the actors also have the opportunity to show off their acting chops. While there's a few somewhat awkward moments (one of the opening cutscenes contains a man being tranquilized, and the acting is pretty hilarious for the sequence), most of the acting is convincing, sensible and grounded in reality. The actors playing the villain and Catherine are notably good, and it's a treat when they're on-screen (even if the villain is shooting you in the face).
Whereas Myst had three bad endings and a good ending, Riven has a larger array of endings. There's still only one "good" ending, but the bad endings are more numerous and brutal. Due to the stakes attached to the game, any one of the bad endings is implied to follow shortly by the tragic death of many, many people. Some are brutal, involving the sudden and violent deaths of various protagonists, and some are horrifying, leaving you trapped in a severed link forever. However, they're all logical and quite easy to avoid if you read the supplementary material and don't do anything stupid. The good ending is notable because it's very "final", and offers an enormous amount of closure. In fact, the closure is so final that when Myst III came around, it had to take up a different plot entirely, which is more than can be said for the average sequel these days.
<youtube=ITObGdvx7x4&autoplay=1>
<img_inline width=350 align=right>http://imageshack.us/a/img820/4715/0zqt.pngAs an adventure game, it lives and dies by the quality of its puzzles. And this is where Riven truly shines: It has some of the best and most well-integrated puzzles in adventure game history. There are a couple "locked door" puzzles that require you to find a password, but many of the puzzles are very natural and feel like something you'd have to do if you were really there, rather than feeling like the programmers had an arbitrary puzzle quota.
For example, there's a boiler with a locked door. In a lesser adventure game, you'd find a passcode, enter it on the door, and then it would empty itself and open, allowing you in. In a bad adventure game, you'd have to use a complex and unintuitive series of items needed to drain the boiler so you could access it. In Riven, you simply have to decode the surprisingly intuitive and understandable manually-built controls on the side to manually empty the boiler, at which point the door will unlock, which seems like the sort of thing you'd actually do to access the inside of a heated boiler.
There are a couple exceptions, of course.
One of the "padlocks" is the infamous "Fire Marble" puzzle, which requires you to collect information from not one, not two, but SIX different resources to even have a prayer of solving it, as well as being hidden quite well and the needed information being conveyed somewhat badly. It's not impossible by any means, it just requires you to keep your brain open to the symbols that surround you.
<img_inline width=350 align=left>http://imageshack.us/a/img89/7893/wqdx.png
Similarly, there's a quasi-brilliant but insanely difficult puzzle involving wooden eyes that's used to figure out the order of a string of animals. It requires journal-reading, a keen eye for detail, and careful observation of detail, although it does not require any logical leaps or assumptions (unlike the Fire Marble puzzle).
It also requires you to learn the number system, as does some of the other puzzles.
The number-learning method is one of the many, MANY brilliant details scattered through the game. To learn the number system, you find a device in a schoolhouse where you roll a number, and a small humanoid figure is lowered a centimeter the displayed number of times. When he gets too low, he gets eaten by the fish at the bottom. It's a game for the children in the schoolhouse to learn their numbers. This beautifully demonstrates the organic and integrated nature of all of Riven's aspects: By playing with the device, not only do you learn how the number system works, but you'll also learn how the Wahrk Gallows work (within site of the schoolhouse), receive justification for why this device exists (it's a nasty educational toy) and get more context on why the villain is considered evil (seriously, those fish are scary as hell, to be fed to one... ).
<img_inline width=350 align=right>http://imageshack.us/a/img32/3176/tqq1.pngThere's a few absolutely brilliant moments of scenery-porn throughout the games. Not only does Riven look gorgeous as a whole, but there are a few sequences that defy physics (albeit they're explained in-game), moments that are utterly dripping with style and flair, and immense variety of location across the islands, but there are a few moments where you leave the earthy and pastoral locations of the islands behind and link to different worlds, one of which is a small building on top of a massive thousand-foot-high rock formation, with more of these formations surrounding it. The sudden shift of tone, color, atmosphere, and landscape is dramatic, so dramatic that it reminds you just how deeply ensconced the game gets you into the world it paints.
The sound design is absolutely insane. Absolutely everything you interact with sounds exactly how it should, from the creaking rotating room in the temple, to the air rushing around you as you blast thorough an elongated air bubble underwater, to the beetles zipping past your ears. The sound design is so solid, in fact, that it succeeds in acting as a strange sort of visceral feedback. Levers creak with slowing clicks as they're pulled, buttons delay against the initial push before depressing, and other such variations that one can almost imagine they were in the game, interacting with these objects. Also notable is that the original "linking sound" from the first game isn't used here, opting for a much louder and deeper sound with a more windy leadup that sounds more like you're being actively pulled into the book.
The music was also written by Robyn Miller, so it maintains the creepy atmosphere while still taking a more ambient and less motif-driven approach. It's a good one, as you've likely noticed.
<img_inline width=350 align=left>http://imageshack.us/a/img24/1818/ccww.png
Of course, all this effort is for naught if the game is no fun to play. Happily, this game is considered a true classic of the genre for a reason. Solving the puzzles is thrilling, the locations are genuinely fun to gawp at, the story is sordid and gripping, and the atmosphere is too good to shatter. When you're in, you won't want out until the game's final conclusion.
Riven is a wonderful gem. The game is positively unique in how effectively it portrays the locations the player wanders through, it's a benchmark of puzzle design, and it is a pure joy to explore. Cyan did an insanely good job with the technology of 1996, and it holds up almost alarmingly well today. If any part of you likes adventures, realism, or classics, or if you're interested in game history, this game should near or at the top of your to-play list.
<link=http://www.gog.com/game/riven_the_sequel_to_myst>You can get it here. Do eet.
Also, seeing how this is the game that Cyan wants to emulate with its freshly Kickstarted upcoming adventure game, you may want to keep an eye on that one as well.
TL
R: I hope you get eaten by a wahrk.
http://imageshack.us/a/img820/5476/n2z.png
<spoiler=Other stuff I have reviewed>Games:
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.828966-A-Religiously-Charged-Review-of-Captain-Bible-in-Dome-of-Darkness>Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.827773-Clone-A-Tragically-Obscure-Gem>Clone
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.832816-lacktheknack-Reviews-Myst-All-Three-Editions>Myst
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.824389-Poll-The-most-inexplicable-MMO-of-all-time-Myst-Online>Myst Online
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.307920-Tropico-3>Tropico 3
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.399959-Review-All-The-Things-XCOM-Enemy-Unknown>XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Not Games:
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.825273-lacktheknack-Reviews-Dev-Musician>Dev (Musician)
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.825489-So-I-got-Origin-from-EA-A-Review-Image-Heavy>Origin (Distribution Client)
http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/16033/1482074-riven_coverartwork.jpg
<color=black>RIVEN (MYST II)
Do something really quickly: Find an Adventure Gamer from the 90s. Ask them what they thought of Riven.
Without fail, they'll get a misty look in their eyes.
Riven was the direct follow-up to Myst. It plays exactly the same way, it follows on the lore established in the previous game, and the story takes place literally hours after the first game ended.
<img_inline width=350 align=right>http://imageshack.us/a/img163/2607/c7pc.png
As before, the game functions with a node-to-node movement system. You click at the sides of the screen to turn 90 or 180 degrees (there's a different cursor for each), and you click on the hotspots on the screen to move to a new location or interact with something. Since this is a nineties point-and-click adventure game, there will be puzzles.
A lot of them.
And what glorious puzzles they are.
So what has changed?
Well, the game looks significantly better. Many fans maintain that they look "photorealistic" to this day, and while a few scenes are rough around the edges now, it's still mostly true. The stills for each node are exquisitely rendered, showing dozens of details in each scene. Many of them have animations in them as well.
Adding to the detail is a delicious sense of earthiness. While the original Myst was liable to throw you from surreal and impossible location 1 to surreal and impossible location 2, none of Riven's scenes look unreal (with a couple of wonderful exceptions). The surrealism has been reduced in exchange for earthy browns and gorgeous blues, and it works wonderfully.
The story, stakes and setting are also significantly improved over the first game. The series hook is excellent: A now-dead civilization have discovered a method of writing that allows one to literally fall into a book, through a link to another world. However, while this was the key plot point to the original game (as well as the later games), Riven is significantly more grounded in one age.
<img_inline width=350 align=left>http://imageshack.us/a/img201/2637/gigx.pngYou've been sent to a small group of islands to find and rescue Catherine, the wife of Atrus (who sent you). Standing in your way is a very hostile village, a rebel force, and the minions of a man who claims to be God... as well as the "God" himself. As you search, the world you're exploring is being revised and rewritten by Atrus, who presumably hasn't slept in days, and if he can't stabilize the collapsing cave systems of the islands, the entire world will finally sink into the ocean. And, most dangerously of all, one of the islands is sitting on top of a rift in time and space, held shut by a single seal.
Why yes, that seal DOES come into play later.
The details of the story are scattered through various books and journals in the game's world. You start with Atrus', and a few others will be found scattered throughout the world. The game manages to strike a near-perfect balance between sensible and surreal, with the villain's cold and analytic musings and theories balancing out the pure wonder and mystery of wandering through a crevice cutting a square lake in half, or Catherine's ramblings and insecurities counterbalancing the deity-level of admiration the natives have for her.
<img_inline width=350 align=right>http://imageshack.us/a/img191/3715/j4af.pngThe islands themselves are amazingly distinct and gorgeous. Originally all part of one island that's been shattered and dragged apart, they're now five distinct segments used by the villain for very different things. One is the "public" island where all the locals live in a spectacular cliffside series of huts overlooking a salty inlet beside a strange forest with giant grasses. The villagers' architecture is very distinct and different from the metal walkways seen elsewhere on the islands, and it adds immense character to the island. The other islands are off-limits to the villagers, and are used for very different purposes: One is crowned with an awe-inspiring gold dome crouched over a temple, used to power things on other islands. Another is used as a giant paper-factory on a lake, one is used to take topological maps of the islands (this one makes more sense when you actually see it) and the last one, not even in sight of the other islands, has been repurposed as a prison.
While Myst was notable for invoking feelings of intense loneliness, Riven is notable for invoking feelings of intense paranoia. In Myst, your only company was two unstable men talking at you through unstable links. Here, if you ever want to see signs of people, you merely have to go back to the village to see signs of life everywhere. Sure, the natives hide from you and won't speak to you, but at least you know they're THERE. However, when it becomes clear that the villagers aren't allowed anywhere else (there's a memorable moment where a woman catches sight of you on the wrong island and breaks into a dead run, mistaking you for one of the antagonists), you realize that by extension, YOU aren't supposed to be on these islands either. Add in the signs that you appear to be missing antagonists by mere seconds (another memorable scene leaves absolutely no doubt that the bad guy knows exactly where you are, and puts him within a ten second walk from you), and you suddenly begin jumping at shadows and faint outlines in the dark. One of the few interactions you have with the villagers is a scene where you run into a small girl, who promptly runs off, but because of the foreboding and forbidden nature of everything you do and interact with, the encounter was enough to launch me clean out of my chair.
<img_inline width=350 align=left>http://imageshack.us/a/img17/7628/bfor.pngThe interactions with the various people is fairly limited (albeit miles beyond what you could do in the original Myst). The characters are played by actual living, breathing actors superimposed on the prerendered backgrounds, and the effect is seamless. This time around, the actors also have the opportunity to show off their acting chops. While there's a few somewhat awkward moments (one of the opening cutscenes contains a man being tranquilized, and the acting is pretty hilarious for the sequence), most of the acting is convincing, sensible and grounded in reality. The actors playing the villain and Catherine are notably good, and it's a treat when they're on-screen (even if the villain is shooting you in the face).
Whereas Myst had three bad endings and a good ending, Riven has a larger array of endings. There's still only one "good" ending, but the bad endings are more numerous and brutal. Due to the stakes attached to the game, any one of the bad endings is implied to follow shortly by the tragic death of many, many people. Some are brutal, involving the sudden and violent deaths of various protagonists, and some are horrifying, leaving you trapped in a severed link forever. However, they're all logical and quite easy to avoid if you read the supplementary material and don't do anything stupid. The good ending is notable because it's very "final", and offers an enormous amount of closure. In fact, the closure is so final that when Myst III came around, it had to take up a different plot entirely, which is more than can be said for the average sequel these days.
<youtube=ITObGdvx7x4&autoplay=1>
<img_inline width=350 align=right>http://imageshack.us/a/img820/4715/0zqt.pngAs an adventure game, it lives and dies by the quality of its puzzles. And this is where Riven truly shines: It has some of the best and most well-integrated puzzles in adventure game history. There are a couple "locked door" puzzles that require you to find a password, but many of the puzzles are very natural and feel like something you'd have to do if you were really there, rather than feeling like the programmers had an arbitrary puzzle quota.
For example, there's a boiler with a locked door. In a lesser adventure game, you'd find a passcode, enter it on the door, and then it would empty itself and open, allowing you in. In a bad adventure game, you'd have to use a complex and unintuitive series of items needed to drain the boiler so you could access it. In Riven, you simply have to decode the surprisingly intuitive and understandable manually-built controls on the side to manually empty the boiler, at which point the door will unlock, which seems like the sort of thing you'd actually do to access the inside of a heated boiler.
There are a couple exceptions, of course.
One of the "padlocks" is the infamous "Fire Marble" puzzle, which requires you to collect information from not one, not two, but SIX different resources to even have a prayer of solving it, as well as being hidden quite well and the needed information being conveyed somewhat badly. It's not impossible by any means, it just requires you to keep your brain open to the symbols that surround you.
<img_inline width=350 align=left>http://imageshack.us/a/img89/7893/wqdx.png
Similarly, there's a quasi-brilliant but insanely difficult puzzle involving wooden eyes that's used to figure out the order of a string of animals. It requires journal-reading, a keen eye for detail, and careful observation of detail, although it does not require any logical leaps or assumptions (unlike the Fire Marble puzzle).
It also requires you to learn the number system, as does some of the other puzzles.
The number-learning method is one of the many, MANY brilliant details scattered through the game. To learn the number system, you find a device in a schoolhouse where you roll a number, and a small humanoid figure is lowered a centimeter the displayed number of times. When he gets too low, he gets eaten by the fish at the bottom. It's a game for the children in the schoolhouse to learn their numbers. This beautifully demonstrates the organic and integrated nature of all of Riven's aspects: By playing with the device, not only do you learn how the number system works, but you'll also learn how the Wahrk Gallows work (within site of the schoolhouse), receive justification for why this device exists (it's a nasty educational toy) and get more context on why the villain is considered evil (seriously, those fish are scary as hell, to be fed to one... ).
<img_inline width=350 align=right>http://imageshack.us/a/img32/3176/tqq1.pngThere's a few absolutely brilliant moments of scenery-porn throughout the games. Not only does Riven look gorgeous as a whole, but there are a few sequences that defy physics (albeit they're explained in-game), moments that are utterly dripping with style and flair, and immense variety of location across the islands, but there are a few moments where you leave the earthy and pastoral locations of the islands behind and link to different worlds, one of which is a small building on top of a massive thousand-foot-high rock formation, with more of these formations surrounding it. The sudden shift of tone, color, atmosphere, and landscape is dramatic, so dramatic that it reminds you just how deeply ensconced the game gets you into the world it paints.
The sound design is absolutely insane. Absolutely everything you interact with sounds exactly how it should, from the creaking rotating room in the temple, to the air rushing around you as you blast thorough an elongated air bubble underwater, to the beetles zipping past your ears. The sound design is so solid, in fact, that it succeeds in acting as a strange sort of visceral feedback. Levers creak with slowing clicks as they're pulled, buttons delay against the initial push before depressing, and other such variations that one can almost imagine they were in the game, interacting with these objects. Also notable is that the original "linking sound" from the first game isn't used here, opting for a much louder and deeper sound with a more windy leadup that sounds more like you're being actively pulled into the book.
The music was also written by Robyn Miller, so it maintains the creepy atmosphere while still taking a more ambient and less motif-driven approach. It's a good one, as you've likely noticed.
<img_inline width=350 align=left>http://imageshack.us/a/img24/1818/ccww.png
Of course, all this effort is for naught if the game is no fun to play. Happily, this game is considered a true classic of the genre for a reason. Solving the puzzles is thrilling, the locations are genuinely fun to gawp at, the story is sordid and gripping, and the atmosphere is too good to shatter. When you're in, you won't want out until the game's final conclusion.
Riven is a wonderful gem. The game is positively unique in how effectively it portrays the locations the player wanders through, it's a benchmark of puzzle design, and it is a pure joy to explore. Cyan did an insanely good job with the technology of 1996, and it holds up almost alarmingly well today. If any part of you likes adventures, realism, or classics, or if you're interested in game history, this game should near or at the top of your to-play list.
<link=http://www.gog.com/game/riven_the_sequel_to_myst>You can get it here. Do eet.
Also, seeing how this is the game that Cyan wants to emulate with its freshly Kickstarted upcoming adventure game, you may want to keep an eye on that one as well.
TL
R: I hope you get eaten by a wahrk.http://imageshack.us/a/img820/5476/n2z.png
<spoiler=Other stuff I have reviewed>Games:
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.828966-A-Religiously-Charged-Review-of-Captain-Bible-in-Dome-of-Darkness>Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.827773-Clone-A-Tragically-Obscure-Gem>Clone
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.832816-lacktheknack-Reviews-Myst-All-Three-Editions>Myst
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.824389-Poll-The-most-inexplicable-MMO-of-all-time-Myst-Online>Myst Online
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.307920-Tropico-3>Tropico 3
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.399959-Review-All-The-Things-XCOM-Enemy-Unknown>XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Not Games:
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.825273-lacktheknack-Reviews-Dev-Musician>Dev (Musician)
<link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.825489-So-I-got-Origin-from-EA-A-Review-Image-Heavy>Origin (Distribution Client)
