Lost in the Myst : Part 5- Riven is Trying to Kill Me

When we last left off I had hope. I thought that simply exploring and finding clues would be enough to progress in Riven. I thought that some major revelation was around the corner. I thought I would keep stumbling upon puzzles by following the beaten path. There were no pixel hunts in Myst so I thought the same would be true of Riven. I was wrong… so very wrong.

I continued my underwater mine-carting and I managed to find a house. In that house was a toy with two hanging figures and a monstrous head underneath them. On the base of the toy was a symbol that I recognized from one of the wooden eyes I’d seen during my exploration. I played with the toy and quickly noticed that the hanging figures would descend a set number of times based on which symbol came up. So those symbols are numbers! I kept playing the game until I had every number from 1-9. I also noticed that the number system is base 5. There are only 5 unique characters from what I’ve seen, and the symbols 6-9 are made by combining the symbol for 1-4 with the symbol for 5. Looks like I’ll have a number puzzle at some point!

The toy also made sense of a wooden complex that was also accessible via the underwater mine-cart. The wooden structure contained one pull-rope that caused a device that looked like a set of handcuffs to descend from the ceiling and dangle for a few moments above the water, before winding back to the ceiling. This device seems to be the life-size version of the toy and, if that’s the case, the bad guy has been sacrificing people to a giant fish monster. More importantly, that means that the wooden structure is there for story reasons and not puzzles! One less thing to worry about, yay!

With that thread followed as much as I could surmise, I doubled back and found another mine-cart near the forested area of the island. This mine-cart took me through several rings of fire and dumped me down an excavation chute. Once I regained my footing, I found a huge boiler and a lake with a switch in the middle. I was able to drain the boiler and inside I found a secret tunnel that lead me to the top of a nearby hill. Halfway down the hill I found a balcony with a manhole and a doorway leading into the cliff. I opened the manhole to create a shortcut back to the boiler and then went inside the cliff. Inside I found a device that looked like a colander with a bear-trap trigger inside and a cup full of rocks. I put one of the rocks in the colander and closed it… nothing happened. Then I noticed a handle to the left of the colander, but I found it did nothing. However, I did figure out that the switch in the middle of the lake powered some of the other machines; so I returned to that switch and diverted power to the cliff-lab. With power restored, I found that I could lower the colander into the dark abyss inside of the hill. After pulling it back up, I realized that it was probably a trap of some kind. So I opened it and sent it back down into the abyss. I heard a snap after a few moments. Upon pulling the colander back up I found what appeared to be a poison dart frog in the colander. It croaked at me and hopped away. I caught a few more frogs before losing spirit and leaving.

I then proceeded to wander aimlessly for another half hour. None of the information I found seemed to lead anywhere. I couldn’t find any more wooden eyes with numbers on them. The underwater mine-cart held no new secrets. The main island didn’t seem to have anything either. I had no indication on how to proceed and my notes gave me nothing. Myst used real world objects and symbols to communicate possible puzzles, but Riven’s original fantasy world has, so far, given me almost nothing to cling to beyond a number system. It was at this point that I asked @zombiepie if I could use a guide or get a hint. I want to go through this game as purely as possible, but at a certain point I really don’t care how clever the developers thought their puzzles were. I don’t enjoy running around through a huge world with no clue how to proceed for hours on end. I have a lot of things going on in my life and being able to say “I beat Riven without any help” is really not high on my list of goals. So @zombiepie tried to help me with the boiler puzzle and throughout our conversation he kept mentioning locations that I frankly didn’t see. He explained all of the steps to catch a frog and empty the boiler, but I already had those handled. He mentioned a switch on a catwalk, but I didn’t see any switches on any of the visible catwalks. He mentioned a spinning dome and a device, but I didn’t see anything like that. After trying the frog puzzle 2 more times, he told me to close the doors to the cliff-side lab from the inside… which revealed two doors .

Fuck everything. I mean really, fuck that design decision. There is no fucking reason you would want to shut those doors other than it’s an adventure game and that’s the type of unintuitive shit that adventure game developers did in the 90s. Getting to those doors was a puzzle. Figuring out how to catch frogs was a puzzle. Shutting the doors to a fucking pitch-black lab because two doors were hidden behind a perspective trick is not a puzzle. It’s just a fucking gotcha. The locked door at the beginning of the game had a similar “click everywhere until you find the door isn’t really locked” brand of design, but the nearby knife was a hint there. The hint to shutting the doors of that lab was that the doors were shut-able at all. However, there are tons of fucking interact-able objects in this game that do nothing. You can close the door behind you in other areas too and they didn’t matter. The game gives you no reason to look in that direction, only to slap you in the face with a gotcha. Even worse, this bullshit is either completely forgettable because you stumble on the answer quickly or its infuriating because you don't even know that there is a secret at all. This “puzzle” was worse than the control panel on top of the elevator in the Mechanical Age. This is the type of shit that killed adventure games. At the bottom of one of the sets of stairs the same “puzzle” was repeated again with another door hiding a pathway. At least this time I had the prior experience of dealing with that particular brand of bullshit to help me. That second door “puzzle” made me quit for the night.

After I took a break, I came back and stopped the rotating dome. I then unlocked another shortcut, this time back to the main island and its central dome. I also found the catwalk switch that @zombiepie mentioned. With that switch thrown, a fan above the frog catching station stopped spinning. I climbed up into the duct work and made my way into a lab. On one of the tables in the lab I found the book that got me back onboard.

Yup, I remember those exact doors.

You should've stopped while you were ahead! Nothing but darkness awaits!

@arbitrarywater: It can't get worse. You can only get stabbed for the first time once. Now that I know this game is out to get me I'll never turn my back on it again.

Please do yourself a favor and keep the Universal Hint System website pulled up while you play through this. You haven't even scratched the surface of unintuitive puzzle design in Riven yet.

Great writing penguino! You're starting to make real progress, and gained a lot of momentum since part 1, by unlocking patways all across the game, must like those trademark dark souls-eske checkpoints. The good thing is that you are getting some the bullcrap out of the way (those friggen doors!) and starting to make sense out of the mysteries tying the world together (nice job on figuring the number system) while getting a better idea of the world's lore, which is definately one of the game's strongest points. You're on the verge of getting to the next island and I really can't wait to read your next impressions.

I'd also like to point out that if you are playing the steam version, there is a very strange bug in the game that could induce much head scratching, and I'd like to warn you in advance. On "village island", if you encounter any unwarranted teleportation after doing an 180 degree turn (I wish I would be making that up), know that there is an in-game workaround to this.

@thatpinguino said:

Fuck everything.

accurate. Especially when it comes to Riven

@kitcatham: Wait what? What do you mean a teleportation? Like there is a screen I should see, but the game jumps you to a different one instead? Because in the village itself I felt like there might be a path to some of the homes, but turning around seemed to not work properly.

@thatpinguino: No, sorry it isn't in the village itself, the layout might be confusing but I'm talking about a long, dark tunnel that you can't access yet. You'll know it if you encounter it because the game warps you several screens back. Also you totally can reach one of the huts, but that's not essential for the game's completion. Good luck!

Just reading about you playing Riven makes me remember how much I hate Riven.

@kitcatham: I found the teleport. Fuck this game.

Fuck Myst. The worst of all the games that I love.

Edit: Also fuck Riven.

@thatpinguino: You've been making progress, I see. If you haven't figured it out, once youve lit the first lightbulb at the end of the tunnel and teleported, go to the penultimate screen, do a 180, light the second bulb and then keep progressing forward. Hope that helps.

@kitcatham: I did that. Then I found the animal room. Fuck the animal room.

Figuring out the animal stones is probably the most obtuse and frustrating puzzle in a game that is nothing but obtuse and frustrating puzzles. Good luck, sir!

@mrsensible: I looked up the answer. Fuck figuring out what sound fish make.

I thought that puzzle was awesome, but grew impatient too after looking endlessly for the ball. Pinguino, you should've looked into gehn periscope... Good luck figuring the rest, it might be worth it to be patient and attentive for the other stones, unless you gave up on the game after all the unfairness...

(BTW the other big puzzle is much more logic centered than observation based. My favourite moment by far in the game was finally putting all the pieces together. Give this last one a chance pinguino, ZombiePie's not quite done with FFVIII either!)

@kitcatham: I looked in the periscope. I just didn't think to listen to the fish because WHY WOULD YOU EVER THINK TO LISTEN TO THE FISH?. Yo, I also couldn't find 2 of the eyes and couldn't recognize 4 of the sounds without seeing the animal making the sounds. I'll never know why the devs thought that a quiz on their made up animal sounds was a good idea. The test requires 3 separate layers of conversion across multiple mediums and languages! Each of which only come from wandering around for hours! That's the freaking worst! I think my next blog is just going to be 1000 words on why this puzzle is terrible. I want to go deep on this.

I also have no interest in using graph paper so the marble puzzle is so not happening even though I already know about the colors and the geographical maps. I know how to solve it, but running back and forth to do the work just sounds so tedious.

I remember enjoying Riven. I'm not sure why, maybe its because I had help from my brother and sister on all the puzzles? I do remember many of them being beyond devious though. Something about some color gem puzzle sticks out in my mind. I feel like that was later in the game. I've contemplated going back and playing it a few times, figured as an adult it would be cake, but seeing your frustration scares me!

I remember using my MYST notebook that came with MYST for scribbling down all my notes for Riven puzzles. That helped immensely. I wonder if I still have it?

@thatpinguino: You're right, this puzzle might just be over-complicated, but you jumped to conclusions here . Remember that shallow pool you filled up in part 1? You should take a good look at it. Same for the rock on the beach and the eyeball next to the tram ride. My mind was blown away when I realised I only needed to indentify the frog sound in the entire game!

And good job on the marble puzzle, I will be missing the handwritten player notes though, they're fascinating to go back yo once you're done.

@thatpinguino: Cyan does throw a couple other hints at you about the animal stones, although they're hardly obvious. You can actually find the silhouettes of four of the five animals hidden around Riven, usually near their respective wooden spheres. The triangular fish is tricky; because its sphere was moved into Gehn's laboratory, it doesn't make a noise when you roll it around on the table and the sphere itself is no longer near the animal's silhouette, which can be seen from the weird rotating spyglass in the middle of the bay surrounded by the villager's huts. Also, there's no silhouette for the "sunner" creature (the one that looks like an aquatic dinosaur with four flippers); apparently Cyan thought putting that one in would make the puzzle too "easy".

@bfz: I'm up to the colored gem puzzle. I have a feeling I'm going to remember it too. Let me rephrase that, I have a feeling I'm not going to be able to forget it no matter how hard I try.

@mrsensible: Yeah I think I'm going to just spend the next blog talking about this puzzle. Thanks for the info about those "hints".

@kitcatham:I found those three eyes and the one in Ghen's lab, but where is the fifth stone?

That's one of the unfortunate pixel hunt items. It's in the forest path, between the 2 wooden gates, where the giant dagger and the strange shrooms are. Look for stairsin the dagger's vicinity. Also I was wrong ; this stone is the only one where you need to identify the corresponding animal with its sound.

@kitcatham: Of course they put a small stone in one of the most visually busy areas in the game. Of course they did.

The animal puzzle is probably one huge reason that this game will never see a full 3D remake like Myst had. It would totally break the forced perspective that the silhouettes rely on.

@mrsensible: It's not an official one, but there's a fan 3D remake in the making: and yes, it would make the frog's silhouette almost impossible to glimpse, as hard as it already is... The fan remake's called the starry expanse project, but it's taking a while to build. Check it out!

@kitcatham: Awesome, I'll give it a look. For the record, I think Riven is one of the most visually-interesting games ever made, and back in the day I was totally in love with its meticulously-detailed fiction. It's really unfortunate that its actual gameplay does not hold up particularly well.