If you’ve been following the ridiculous contest that @zombiepie and I have been having, you’ll note that I beat Myst last week. My part of the original bargain is done. However, in the spirit of fairness I agreed to add more games from the Myst series to my burden. And so here I am playing Riven: The Sequel to Myst. This should be fun and informative…funformative.

Riven picks up immediately after the good ending from Myst, and I admire Cyan’s dedication to the cold-open. Riven doesn’t bother explaining what happened in Myst, or even the basic building blocks of the world, like where you are, book transportation, or Ages. Heck, if you didn’t get the best ending in Myst, the cold-open doesn’t even make sense! The game opens with an FMV of Atrus (who you easily could have missed) giving you two books and telling you to find Catherine (who you never even meet in the first game) on Riven (a world that doesn’t exist in the first game). He also tells you to capture Gehn (a character that doesn’t exist in the first game). There is an endearing brazenness to making a sequel that openly alienates new players this intensely, this immediately. Yet, like Myst before it, Riven quickly plants you in a completely foreign world where your prior knowledge doesn’t matter.

Riven continues its predecessor’s amazing use of FMV in its opening cutscene. Once I entered the world of Riven, I found myself locked in a cage with a strange man speaking a strange language gawking at me. He stole my entrapment book, opened it, spontaneously seized, died, and was dragged off screen by some kind of low-rent ninja. Low-rent ninja then freed me and absconded with my book. With no other context, I wandered out into the world and began clicking on things.

I was warned that Riven would be less intuitive than Myst and that was clear from the first screen. Unlike Myst, with it’s small island full of somewhat recognizable architecture and devices, Riven take place in a giant, original world full of unintuitive puzzles. The rotating tower unlocked all of the puzzles in Myst, but Riven doesn’t seem to have any clear knowledge hub. So with no clear guidance I wandered around the first few screens for about 20 minutes. I found a room full of scarabs with Riven’s version of the Stations of the Cross inside of them. It looks like there is some kind of church, likely created by Gehn, that worships people who control books. It also looks like this church clear-cut a bunch of forests to make more books. I suppose that this is the destabilization that Atrus mentioned in the opening cutscene. The stained glass art inside of mechanical scarabs might be one of the more aesthetically interesting storytelling devices I’ve seen in a while. It evokes Egyptian and Christian theologies, and in combining the two it manages to both show a familiar theology’s iconography co-opted by (likely) the main antagonist and provide this temple with a sense of ancient, romanticized mysticism. It reminds me of the opening of Bioshock Infinite in the way it combines recognizable artstyles and influences to create something awe-inspiring and perverted.

I fumbled around the opening screens a bit more before I noticed a dagger buried in the sand next to a locked door. The Costco ninja jammed a similar knife into the controls that freed me from my initial prison, so I figured that this second knife was a clue. Sure enough, clicking on the knife caused the camera to pan down and reveal a large gap below the locked door. I was able to climb under the locked door, effectively making the lock an annoying Red Herring. Beyond the door I found another odd temple with some snake-like idols, a chair surrounded by a spider-leg looking cage, and dead end. At first I didn’t see any way to proceed, but after circling a few times I noticed that I could rotate the scarab room. Rotating the room opened up a few other passageways and I found some switches that seemed to connect to a rail system running throughout the area. I followed the rotating room thread as far as I could before I noticed a switch in the spider-leg chair room. The switch opened a door in the snake-idol room – I sound like I'm writing about “The Legend of the Hidden Temple” or something – and so I checked out that new door.

Behind the snake-temple door was a cart contraption; I climbed in and set off. At the end of the ride, I found another set of obtuse puzzles and directionless screens. At this point I’m not really sure where to go. I found some people, but they all ran away as soon as I showed up. I found some aquatic dinosaur-like things, but they ran away from me as well. I found a dragonfly-looking tree totem, but it doesn’t do anything. I found a village, but it seems to be abandoned or the citizens won’t open their doors. I found some eyes embedded in walls with symbols on their back sides, but I don’t know where to use the symbols. I found a pool and partially filled it with water, but I don’t know why. In my flailing I did manage to move and enter a submersible mine-cart.

I rode the mine cart for a few stops and found another room with switches and no clear indication on how to proceed. At this point I decided to step away from the game. It’s clear that I have a lot more aimless wandering to do. Unlike Myst, I have absolutely no idea how to proceed with any of the multitude of puzzles I’ve found. Playing Myst, I could continue to ruminate on puzzles after I shut the game off since I felt like I had or could easily get all of the information I needed to solve a puzzle. In Riven I can’t even begin to speculate on how to progress since so much of the game world is abstract. I could recognize star-charts and numbers, but eye symbols and runic text are completely foreign to me. This game could have really used some piggybacking. I can see why @zombiepie says this game helped kill PC adventure games. Till next time, I’m lost, but not broken.