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I played Riven about a year ago (never played Myst), and it held up pretty well. I think the biggest shortcoming is the standard 90s adventure game trope of arb

by tetrep 9y ago

I played Riven about a year ago (never played Myst), and it held up pretty well. I think the biggest shortcoming is the standard 90s adventure game trope of arbitrarily obtuse solutions to some puzzles. I ended up needing about 2 or 3 vague hints to point me to certain areas to advance the plot (luckily, though, IIRC no puzzle solutions), usually revolving around not understanding navigation options (like not knowing you could move through a certain part of a screen). I'm not sure how much of that was developer's being tricky or the low resolution of the game making it difficult to discern details, or the general shortcomings of the cursor-based UI. If I wasn't able to find a walkthrough or guide, I don't think I would have been able to complete the game. But, that was also the era of official strategy guides, so maybe acquiring those would provide adequate context (I know the one for Morrowind makes the game for me. It's written in such a way that you feel like you've got a companion guiding you along with its commentary, providing just enough information to "unblock" you when you're stuck).

fjfaase 9y ago
Did you try search for "Riven hints"? Some people have set up some nice hints websites for most of the games, which give you hints in small steps. I have used the ones on The Universal Hint System. See for Riven: http://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/riven.php http://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/riven.php
- GFischer 9y ago
  Universal Hint System was great, I used it for some adventure games waay back :) . Glad to see it's still alive!
laurieg 9y ago
I think the difficulty of Riven is definitely cranked up a couple of notches too high. Myst seems to hit the sweet spot perfectly. I felt like there were far too many moments in Riven where I didn't look in just the right place (the space at the bottom of a door, for example) and so I couple not progress. I played the original 5 CD version where you had to swap CDs as you moved around. Further into the game it finally requests "Insert disc 5". Somewhat fittingly for Riven I couldn't find the fifth disc because it was hidden behind other discs in the double CD jewel case....
hlandau 9y ago
Myst and Riven are fond memories for me. Riven was a real masterpiece, though; after the success of Myst they went to town on it. I never paid much attention to the sequels, since gur raqvat bs Evira onfvpnyyl cerpyhqrf frdhryf, and they weren't made by the Miller brothers. In my own personal mind-canon Riven is the end of the series. Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure games of the day; pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context of the world that you're in. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook. This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult... the game is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. (I ended up using one myself when I played it as a kid; I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you need to work with. There are a few exceptions... a certain pair of double doors was a pretty cheap trick, for example. What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small) revival; I think Portal started it. Before Portal the use of modern rendering technology and first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. third-person 3D. Only with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person non-FPS gameplay. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an FPS shouldn't be first person -- I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person perspective. Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc.
- sjm-lbm 9y ago
  I also think Riven killed adventure games for a bit - regardless of what you think of it from a gameplay perspective, it's really pretty graphically, and the slideshow-style presentation honestly doesn't hamper what you can allow the player to do if you aren't twitch-reacting to enemies that the computer is throwing at you. It's been much more recently that the same sense of artistry could be added to realtime games, at least IMHO. Even Myst 5 - ok, yes, done by Cyan when they were a shell of their Riven selves - just feels different due to the compromises made to make it realtime.

by tetrep 9y ago

fjfaase 9y ago

Did you try search for "Riven hints"? Some people have set up some nice hints websites for most of the games, which give you hints in small steps. I have used the ones on The Universal Hint System. See for Riven: http://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/riven.php http://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/riven.php

GFischer 9y ago
Universal Hint System was great, I used it for some adventure games waay back :) . Glad to see it's still alive!

laurieg 9y ago

I think the difficulty of Riven is definitely cranked up a couple of notches too high. Myst seems to hit the sweet spot perfectly. I felt like there were far too many moments in Riven where I didn't look in just the right place (the space at the bottom of a door, for example) and so I couple not progress. I played the original 5 CD version where you had to swap CDs as you moved around. Further into the game it finally requests "Insert disc 5". Somewhat fittingly for Riven I couldn't find the fifth disc because it was hidden behind other discs in the double CD jewel case....

hlandau 9y ago

Myst and Riven are fond memories for me. Riven was a real masterpiece, though; after the success of Myst they went to town on it. I never paid much attention to the sequels, since gur raqvat bs Evira onfvpnyyl cerpyhqrf frdhryf, and they weren't made by the Miller brothers. In my own personal mind-canon Riven is the end of the series. Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure games of the day; pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context of the world that you're in. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook. This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult... the game is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. (I ended up using one myself when I played it as a kid; I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you need to work with. There are a few exceptions... a certain pair of double doors was a pretty cheap trick, for example. What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small) revival; I think Portal started it. Before Portal the use of modern rendering technology and first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. third-person 3D. Only with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person non-FPS gameplay. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an FPS shouldn't be first person -- I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person perspective. Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc.

sjm-lbm 9y ago
I also think Riven killed adventure games for a bit - regardless of what you think of it from a gameplay perspective, it's really pretty graphically, and the slideshow-style presentation honestly doesn't hamper what you can allow the player to do if you aren't twitch-reacting to enemies that the computer is throwing at you. It's been much more recently that the same sense of artistry could be added to realtime games, at least IMHO. Even Myst 5 - ok, yes, done by Cyan when they were a shell of their Riven selves - just feels different due to the compromises made to make it realtime.