Riven — A RetRose Tinted Review
Recall — Myst, but bigger.
I’ve already rambled on about Myst and revisiting it as a cantankerous (but slightly sharper) old man, but then there’s Riven. I recall snippets of Riven, more scattered than I do Myst. While Myst had the island that I mapped out perfectly in my head, Riven felt grander, and larger. I remember small parts: a rapidly spinning globe, stonecut villages, a bathysphere on rails, and having to fumble around with multiple CD-ROMs. Ah, the good old days.
I remember movement feeling smoother, even though it was still controlled by pointing and clicking. The music was more…woodwind? Brassy? Different than the strings and key music from Myst, at the least. Just like its predecessor, I remember exploring, but rarely progressing. If I could go somewhere, I would, just to see what was around the corner. It was the thrill of discovery, albeit over and over again as I played the same areas.
If I was able to pick up Myst and play it like a proper player after all these years, surely I can do the same with Riven. Right? Right?
Revisit — Myst, but harder (?)
The short answer is “probably not.” The long answer: while still a puzzle game, Riven feels far more monolithic, taking place in a more sprawling world than Myst’s separate areas with their separate puzzles. This is neither better nor worse, but feels different. It feels more daunting. These days, I don’t appreciate that kind of brain tickling, backtracking style of puzzle. The sense of progress is locked behind remembering (or having written down) paths to retread, and brute-forcing information out of a children’s game. Time feels more precious to me (again, in my cantankerous old age), and, personally, I want to spend it with something I can feel more immediate satisfaction to. Now, are there puzzle and mystery games that I do appreciate? I believe so. But between Riven, and other adventure-style games of yore, I’m starting to think I just don’t appreciate that style (or era) of puzzle design.
A similar example is Quern: Undying Thoughts. Beautiful puzzle game, felt largely self-contained, and then it felt like it hit a breaking point where there was too much criss-crossing in the game world, too many callbacks to puzzles and solutions in the past. It is, personally speaking, not my style at a certain point.
But what do hold up to me are the visuals and audio. Despite Riven being a largely static game with pockets of digital video, it leans on that as a strength. It holds a more immersive, detailed, and borderline photorealistic gameworld than could be done with full 3D rendering, now or then. The music, I’ve long since co-opted into my tabletop RPG playlists; it is beautiful at setting both scene and location through its notes. Specifically, the soundtrack feels more atmospheric; I remember Myst’s feeling more direct, punctuating, but Riven steals out for being able to fade into the background and still set the scene.
So, all this rambling to say “I’m really bad at puzzle games but I like to try and gosh they look and sound pretty”? Yeah. Pretty much.
All images captured in-game.
