Riven

The biggest problem for me is the artificiality of the puzzles. Most of them are deliberately over-engineered mechanisms whose sole purpose is to confuse the player. They don’t feel believable, because they make no practical sense if they were to exist in real life. Puzzles should feel environmental — like natural extensions of the setting — not abstract machines designed solely to be puzzles. On top of that, the game is filled with long, unskippable animations that you’re forced to sit through over and over again. On the plus side, the graphics are pretty solid, and the atmosphere can be nice at times.

A game for the curious. Riven is rather rudimentary in its gameplay. You walk around, you look at objects, you take pictures of said objects and perhaps even write notes for yourself along the way (you will need it). There is very little talking, most of the game is just exploring the various enchanting islands of the world of Riven, discovering its past and solving intricate puzzles along the way. The game is certainly not just a walking sim, the puzzling can be quite difficult, especially because it's originally a game that required a pen & paper by hand to play and keep notes of certain findings. It is very much required here in this remake aswell. Some of the puzzle elements are randomly generated too, so you can't simply walkthrough-cheat your way out of this, you will have to solve (at least certain parts) of Riven if you want to beat it, and I think that's cool. Definitely be ready for a very slow-paced experience though. Many little animations for traversing, pulling levers, looking at and into objects... it is not a high-octane experience at all, quite the opposite. Also be ready for a lot of reading and for some thinking outside the box. Riven has some neat tricks for you in store. Performance I'd say is okay, the menus are a bit slow, I'd also probably introduce a dedicated button to quickly bring up the Notebook with your pictures and notes, as I think it's a very handy menu, but is annoying to access all the time when you're in the middle of solving something complex (you will have to learn not one, but TWO numbering systems to solve this world!) as it is located in the pause menu, so you always have to pause and select the Notebook, a dedicated in-game button to bring it up would make the flow so much better. One more thing that frustrated me quite a bit, is that it seems you can actually very easily get softlocked right before the ending, no idea if there was anything else I could have done there, but I've missed a key object during one of the final time travel sections, and there was no way to progress without it, guides won't help either as this is one of the aforementioned randomly generated riddles. So tough luck there, had to replay from a save I've done an hour ago, but nevertheless I've pushed through and finished the game. Overall it's a beautiful, relaxing experience of peaceful exploring and puzzle-solving, with some cool lore to find along the way, with annoying and slow menus and some bugs or minor technical issues here and there.

I'm giving this a thumbs down. I finished the game, without relying on any guide or hint. So take that. I could rant a little on some storytelling details or how and what does or does not make sense but I don't want to. This is a remake of a game that's almost as old as me. A game which define a genre I adore. Why the thumbs down then? Because it's made in a stupidly incompetent fashion. The environments are gorgeous, I love this style, yet it is still simple. WHY on EARTH then it takes twenty seconds or more to load a new area? Why does it stutter frequently? Why are textures collapsing? Why do the screenshots the player makes with the internal tool get corrupted, blur and have their contents mixed? Why does the game need to autosave every time the player position updates (literally constantly)? And why oh why is there not a fix for the player falling through the map when a save is loaded when the stupid saving system put the coordinates a tiny bit underneath the ground????? I'm usually overwriting saves to keep them to a manageable count, often just 1-2 until a branching option presents itself so I had to do a hefty retrace. Because upon loading my save I just kept falling and due to how autosaves are handled that was immediately corrupted as well. I tried to manually edit the save file but it's composed so hideously I had zero chance. It was an all-around nuisance that took away quite a lot from my enjoyment of this game. I'm sorry, but the technical execution of this game is quite around what you'd expect from freshly graduated junior developers.

神秘岛系列的第二部：烈文时代 相比第一部在各个时代穿梭，这部的大部分时间都在烈文时代，而烈文里几座岛屿之间的连接方式和传送设施都设计得非常性感。

I know many people especially fans of the Myst series may disagree with me. However, I have to be honest: for a 2024 remake, I expected much more from Riven. Perhaps the developers wanted to remain faithful to the original 1997 story and avoid making significant changes. Or maybe they focused more on the visuals than on improving the gameplay and narrative experience, relying on the success and reputation of the original game. Whatever the reason, I believe the game should have offered much more than it did. I take my time with games like this. I enjoy exploring every corner, examining every detail, and understanding the purpose behind every interaction. While I did enjoy Riven, I was ultimately left unsatisfied by what it offered. One of my biggest issues is that many interactions seem meaningless. Instead of contributing to the puzzles or story-building, they often send players searching for significance where none exists. If you're a detail-oriented player like me, you'll spend a lot of time trying to understand why certain objects or mechanisms are there, only to discover they serve no purpose at all. Examples, the cart and wood-shredding machine on Boiler Island, the crystal polisher, the three-button ring elevator that moves to an extra level for no apparent reason, the room where you open the temple door and raise the bridge, the temple room itself, and even the middle speech station reached by the submarine train and many others. So many locations and interactions felt disconnected from the overall puzzle design that they gave me the impression that parts of the game were incomplete or underdeveloped. Another issue is the in-game journals and textbooks. Many of them are unbelievably long while contributing very little to the actual gameplay, story, or puzzle-solving experience. In most cases, skimming through them is enough, as carefully reading every page rarely provides meaningful rewards. If the developers wanted to include such extensive reading material, they could have at least provided optional audio narration to make the experience more engaging. And the animation, done multiple times, was exhausting! For comparison, I played Quern: Undying Thoughts, and in my opinion, it is a masterpiece compared to Riven. Every interaction in Quern serves a purpose and feels like a meaningful piece of a larger puzzle. The game combines brilliant environmental design, breathtaking music, and genuinely challenging puzzles that constantly engage the player. And it achieved all of this back in 2016. Cyan, you should have done better.

Absolutely brilliant remake. Only things that are weird are the characters being very low quality 3d compared to the rest of the game and being locked into vehicles not able to look around while they are moving. If you loved Riven back in the day buy and play this its amazing,

I am a story-game enjoyer first and foremost, but as a 90's child it was time to experience the jaw-dropping games I saw my parents play when I was little. Myst was fun, shorter than I expected. Riven on the other hand was really good. Bigger world, higher stakes, more understanding. While you can play Riven by itself, I highly recommend to play Myst first to familiarize yourself with how the mechanics work and some background lore-wise to what's going on in Riven. I certainly feel like I appreciate Riven more after having played Myst first, coming from someone who never played the original games and decided to jump right into the remakes.

It's only one of the greatest games ever made. It takes all the strengths of the 1997 original and only improves on it. The redesigned puzzles are much less opaque than the original, but not dumbed down. The lore and the setting are just as good as they come. And it's a graphical showcase to boot. The one and only nitpick I have is that the redone real-time characters are not as good as the original's FMV, but that's inevitable in the move to a free-roaming perspective. 10/10.

It's not just the original with (much) nicer graphics. It's got whole new puzzles and locations too!

Really great! I missed out on playing these games back when they came out so it's cool they re-released them.