Amazon.com Review
Welcome back to the world of Myst. Riven: The Sequel to Myst--the most highly anticipated CD-ROM game of all time--is finally here and worth the wait. Riven is larger, more impressive, more beautiful, and certainly more frustrating than its predecessor. To some degree, Riven is an extension of Myst, which is a positive thing for the legions of Myst fans who still feel the sting of disappointment from reaching that game's abrupt, cliffhanger ending.
In fact, Riven is an extension of Myst and then some--five CDs' worth of bizarre contraptions, puzzles, and riddles with a defining logic all their own; breathtaking scenery and locales; and intricately portrayed civilizations. In addition to a whole new set of worlds to discover, four years of development have brought this game to life in a way that wasn't possible for the original.
The first thing you will notice is that Riven is teeming with life compared to Myst. There are animals and insects and people--yes, you are no longer the only living soul in sight--and all of them figure prominently into the game and mysteries of the island. Sociological and political struggles are occurring on the island, and all of them impact your course of action in the game.
As the game begins, you arrive on the island to find yourself imprisoned by one of its inhabitants, dressed in a military uniform. He speaks to you in a foreign tongue and steals the book Atrus has given you to imprison Gehn, the "greater foe." Then, outside of your field of vision, something or someone mysteriously attacks this stranger and drags him away. The direct encounter is a far cry from the disassociated heads trapped in the books of Myst. Later, as you explore, strange birds raise their heads as you intrude on their beachside nap. There are a variety of such strange and beautifully animated creatures in Riven, which serve to enhance the ambience of the game and figure directly into the action of the story. Riven also features much more dynamic motion than Myst: Cable cars hurtle through the sky, carts zoom through brightly lit underwater passageways, and a submarine rolls along the floor of a lake, creaking to a halt at various destinations.
While the initial puzzles of Myst were very focused and the path before you was relatively straight before branching out into a myriad of ages, Riven is vast and wanderable from the outset. You can travel between the islands, explore at your whim, and see many of the sites without crinkling your brow in frustration at a single puzzle. While initially daunting, this lends itself to a much more immersive experience than the original game and to a greater sense of freedom both in movement and in action. The puzzles of Riven build in intensity and difficulty, not just throughout the entire game but also on the individual islands themselves.
To confound you even further, the puzzles of each island are amazingly interconnected and dependent on one another. In Myst, it was occasionally necessary to solve one puzzle in order to gain information on a later one, but these usually followed in logical succession. In Riven, finding out how and where to begin is integral to the gameplay. You will not be able to solve one problem until you've conquered another and obtained all of the necessary information. Once you've figured that one out you'll be able to gain access to yet another puzzle--and so on.
Throw in several different final goals and possible endings (thankfully, the correct one is much more satisfying than Myst's), and you've got your work cut out for you. While this maddening level of interconnectedness may seem unduly cruel, it should hopefully keep you occupied while the Miller brothers and Cyan conjure up their next offering. Whether its a continuation of the series or something new, if the progress between Myst and Riven is any indication, it will certainly be something to see.
GameSpot Review
For whatever reasons that Myst was such a success, Riven has a lot of the same. You'll see the same click/move/slide-show interface, along with similar mechanical and navigational puzzles and the now familiar wander and wonder gameplay. Riven's markedly improved graphics and sound further enhance the ambiance and make Riven even more immersive than its predecessor. The puzzles and problems are more cohesive, and there is more of a storyline, but in the end, Riven is only an evolutionary improvement over Myst.
You begin where Myst left off. Atrus (played once again by Rand Miller), the father of the two feuding sons in Myst, has another task for you: Rescue his wife from the evil clutches of Atrus's father Gehn, then permanently imprison Gehn in one of those "trap" books from Myst.
Your quest takes place in Riven, a fanciful world created by Gehn in the tradition of his ancestors - by simply imagining it and writing about it. Riven (from the ancient English word "rive," which means "to rip apart") is a collection of small islands connected with catwalks, aerial trams, and a minisubmarine. You will expend much of your effort just figuring out how to get around. In many instances you'll find a switch in an obscure location, then take a circuitous route to the gate it opens.
Unlike Myst, these islands have human inhabitants, although you'll be hard-pressed to actually see any. There are plenty of spherical, earthen huts and occasional fleeting human encounters, but there is no interaction or dialogue. The oblique storyline is played out in the islands' objects and the implications you can draw from them, such as a disturbing kid's toy, a Wizard of Oz-like throne, and a frog trap. And if these are too obtuse you can always arduously pore through the voluminous journals you'll acquire.
Riven's two major puzzles require solving several miniproblems that in turn require close observation of Riven's denizens, colors, and unique numbering system. Gathering those elements becomes routine but just as you get comfortable with the concept there is a clever extra challenge tossed in - a missing color, a broken device, an obtusely revealed animal. Much of Riven's prerelease PR emphasized the environment as a source of clues and puzzle solutions. It is, but not to the large extent and subtle degree you may expect.
There are no technological breakthroughs but plenty of high-quality production values. The QuickTime animations - doors opening, levers moving, drawbridges dropping - are larger and blend well with the backgrounds, but that's principally a reflection of improvements in that display method. The sound effects are perfect and worth the price of high-end speakers, but there is no support of newer 3D audio technology. The graphics are superbly, even fanatically, detailed but that's more an aesthetic decision than a technical achievement.
For a game that has low-tech system demands, it consumes an inordinate amount of hard drive space - 140MB. Plus, if you play it for an extended period of time, you may encounter audio lapses. I missed a critical end-game aural clue, but after rebooting, and replaying that scene, it played just fine. Riven ships on five discs, but you can start saved games with only one of them and must click slowly through four animations before you can load a game [editor's note: This is not the only way to restore games - but it is the only intuitive way].
With a walk-through in hand, Riven took only about four hours. Without it, I'd still be at it, doing a lot of wandering, mapping, and recording of my observations. And just like Myst, that's what Riven is all about: exploring a new world full of unique beings, organic machines, and family intrigue. There is no inventory, no need to combine mysterious potions, and no board game puzzles with little connection to Riven's world. Rather, it's a leisurely paced, all-encompassing, mentally challenging experience. If you enjoyed Myst, you'll thoroughly enjoy Riven. -- Jeff Sengstack
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. GameSpot and the GameSpot logo are trademarks of GameSpot Inc. END
