gamingcirclejerk

Riven is unique among point and click games, some things it does very well, and others not so much.

I played Riven before I played Myst, and little of what Atrus says at the beginning makes sense, then there's a guy who speaks two languages to you that you don't speak, then you're left to your own devices. You wander around, with basically no goal, with a lot of things to interact with, and no reason to interact with them that you are conscious of. Because unlike every other adventure game including Myst, it isn't a series of smaller challenges, But it really consists of two very BIG puzzles that require inter-relating information about numbers, sounds, colors, animals, the shape of the game world itself and the locations of items in it, much of this information is given to you in awkward and incomplete ways requiring at least some interpolation.

You're supposed to spend the first third of the game taking in the environmental storytelling and learning about the lore of this place including a base 25 number system, the middle third solving the puzzle to get to the Moiety's world, another middle third reading Catherine's lengthy journal written in the worst handwriting ever digitized, and the last third of the game getting to Gehn and trapping him.

A lot of players spent the first third of the game wandering around not knowing what the hell is going on, the middle third failing to complete certain pixel hunts and failure to find a couple paths that are hidden behind open doors (You open a door to walk through it, and the path is hidden behind the door you just walked through), and the last third failing to recognize puzzle elements as puzzle elements because the signal to noise ratio in this game is very low.