Riven

If you grew up playing this series like I did, you'll really enjoy this remake. I only play these games with my father, just like we did many years ago. We sit down on the couch together with a notebook and work through the puzzles. He tells me stories about the first time he saw a cutscene with a real person in a game—it actually scared him back then, which always makes me laugh. We often compare this remake to the original Riven, and the developers did an excellent job staying true to the story and preserving the core experience. The game is confusing at times, and it's definitely challenging, but that's exactly what you'd expect from a faithful remake of a classic puzzle adventure. More than anything, this game has given me the chance to create some incredible memories with my father. Those moments have become some of my favorite memories, and for that alone, this remake is special to me.

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

Absolutely amazing. Most beautiful game I've ever played. It's a bit short and easier than the original, but still a 10/10.

My brain is too small for this but i liked the vibe. If you have a big brain you will like this

Riven delivers exceptional visual modernization, featuring beautiful, high-quality visuals that faithfully recreate the original's aesthetic while significantly improving lighting, textures, and environments using Unreal Engine 5. This breathtaking presentation supports deep and immersive world-building, where distinct islands like the Jungle, Survey, and Boiler facilities offer a profound sense of history that expands beautifully upon the lore established in Myst. The story effectively handles the tense conflicts between Atrus, Gehn, and Catherine, providing a compelling, story-driven conclusion that feels far more substantial than its predecessor. The core gameplay thrives on engaging numerical logic, as discovering and deciphering the intricate D'ni number system offers a deeply rewarding sense of intellectual accomplishment that feels integral to the world. Progressing through the islands is aided by satisfying fast-travel integration via the Starry Expanse Nexus hub, which connects the disparate lands in a way that remains consistent with the game's sci-fi logic. Meticulous exploration is constantly rewarded with hidden pathway discoveries, offering genuine aha moments when you uncover secret routes hidden behind doors or deep within underwater caves. Furthermore, manipulating large-scale machinery like the iconic rotating room, golden domes, and mechanical mag-lifts provides a highly tactile and satisfying sense of environmental scale. However, this magnificent cerebral journey still faces a few notable hurdles stemming from archaic user interface choices and sensitive control parameters. The gameplay suffers from highly illegible handwriting in journals, utilizing a stylized, cursive font for Gehn's and Catherine's notebooks that makes them incredibly difficult to read and easily leads to missed narrative context. The puzzle mechanics can introduce unnecessary friction through overly sensitive controls, meaning that puzzles requiring fine adjustments like color calibration or precise marble placement feature erratic sensitivity that becomes tedious with a controller. You will also encounter inconsistent visual feedback for buttons, where critical interactive elements like a tiny white calibration switch blend too perfectly into the environment and cause players to get stuck on challenges they have already technically solved. The pacing can also feel heavily weighed down by tedious backtracking and traversal, as a significant portion of your time is spent enduring slow walking or climbing animations just to recheck a distant detail. The user experience faces additional minor hurdles from confusing submarine mechanics, where navigating the vessel and understanding its relationship with changing water levels can feel highly unintuitive. The technical presentation exhibits a few graphical blemishes, most notably an aggressive visual ghosting in the water effects that results in distracting trailing artifacts during exploration. Finally, the interface utilizes an archaic save system design that feels clunky, occasionally leading to menu navigation errors or accidental new game starts. Overall Riven is a remarkably gorgeous, intellectually stimulating, and atmospheric puzzle masterpiece that excels through its spectacular Unreal Engine 5 graphical overhaul, brilliant numerical logic, and grand mechanical interactions. While the legendary island exploration is occasionally slowed down by illegible journal scripts, erratic controller sensitivity, distracting water artifacts, and tedious backtracking loops, the phenomenal world-building and satisfying narrative depth ensure it stands as a definitive and triumphant remake for adventure enthusiasts.

It's pretty good. I was actually super frustrated in the beginning because the first "pixel hunt" you have to do to progress wasn't immediately obvious and I found myself in a very small area with nothing obvious to do, but I was determined to get as far as I could without looking anything up so I persisted and ultimately found the solution. I mention that, because that is kind of the theme of the game. It's a combination of some fairly satisfying puzzles, odd pixel hunts where you might not have realized there was some kind of button right before your eyes. You also may be looking at something important, but won't realize it until much later, so you will have to do quite a bit of hiking back and forth. There's a lot of unimportant things as well. Ultimately I finished the whole game without ever having to look anything up, and that is quite satisfying. So I would say hang in there, avoid looking anything up unless you are absolutely at your wit's end. I think if you played the newer Myst game that came right before this, this one is considerably more difficult and a lot of the puzzles don't have immediate feedback, and you really have to read everything and though the game has a screenshot system, realistically you are going to need a notebook for this one. So with all that said, if it sounds fun to you give it a try. I personally am very happy with this one (as well as the newer Myst game that came before it). For context, I never played the original Riven, except that after playing this I went and played the original just to see the difference, and it seems very similar, though the world was laid out a little different. I'd certainly recommend this as your introduction to Riven though.

A new approach to an old favourite, yet still true to form. Free roaming is just what this game needed. The new puzzles and re-jigged ones freshen it up nicely. This deserves to be a hit for Cyan

Good storyline

Beautiful, even after all this time. It was a very fun ride.

Pretty good game, even if it was incredibly difficult and confusing sometimes