Part I: 1997.

I first played Riven as a child around the time of its release. If you were not there, it's hard to explain just how mindblowing it was at that time.

The convincing FMV actors. The roller-coaster like maglev rides. The Star Wars-like animals you can (kind-of) interact with.

What really sticks out in my memory is all the religious iconography.

It's hard to put into words the effect this had on me. The island is so beautiful, but this is the first inkling that something is deeply wrong here. Someone has taken on power that no human should have. Someone is playing God. And God is wrathful.

And so, I wandered. I clicked on a lot of things. I went on more maglev and mine cart rides. I changed disks, a lot. I clicked on more things. I clicked on a lot of things that didn't seem to do anything. It was thrilling. But eventually, I was despondent. Nothing I did seemed to make any difference.

I moved on. As did, presumably, the majority of the 5 or so million people who played this.

—

I returned to Riven over the last few days. Hearing about the remake brought back a flood of memories. This time I was determined to finish it. I would once again immerse myself in this world. I would solve all the mysteries myself. I have an adult's brain now, after all.

Well, I succeeded. Kind of.

Part II: The bullshit.

There are basically three kinds of puzzles in Riven.

1. Just keep clicking.

This is most of the puzzles. You just keep trying the different combinations of things and seeing what happens. Eventually you get through. Does it make sense? Well, only kind-of. But at that point you're past it and you can move on without thinking too deeply.

2. That one thing you didn't notice.

There's no puzzle, really. Just keep looking around. Did you miss it? Well, have fun traversing hundreds of random random other places for hours without making any progress. Riven's not going to call your attention to it.

Riven doesn't care if you found it or not, because Riven is a real place.

3. Some really obscure hint.

I'm looking at you, animal puzzle. If you've played the game, you know what I am talking about. Getting the right idea isn't hard, but executing it is a different story.

But actually, I'm not giving Cyan enough credit. There is one more:

4. The epiphany.

This is the gold standard of puzzle design, the aha moment every adventure game creator wants their audience to have. And Riven succeeded here, in some moments. Surprisingly, the infamous Fire Marble puzzle was actually in this category - I was able to put this together myself. (Well, kind-of. I had to cheat a little even though I had the right idea.) As was the numeral system - I felt like a real archaeologist when I figured that out.

But ultimately, it's the bullshit puzzles that keep you stuck for hours. And so if you're going in completely blind, the vast majority of your time will be spent with the bullshit. By the nature of this kind of game design, the worst aspects of the game are the ones you spend the most time on.

But there is a reason for these choices. It comes down to Cyan's game design philosophy.

Part III. The Three Schools of Puzzle Design

There is a baseline question to every puzzle game, one that the developer must answer, at least to themselves, to determine the whole scope of the adventure.

Who made all these damn puzzles?

And there are essentially three answers.

1. The Zelda answer: Don't ask. It's just a video game.

A Zelda game won't ask you to consider why someone made all these simple lock and key puzzles. That would be like asking why characters wait until their turn to attack in a JRPG, or why characters keep repeating the same lines. It's just how the medium works. Don't sweat it bro.

You might argue that it's metaphorical. On some level you don't believe that your spiky haired JRPG dude is just standing around waiting for their turn - you know this is supposed to represent a battle in the same way a simple cardboard background is supposed to represent a room in a play. Similarly, you can think of the puzzles as representing some sort of challenge the hero must go on. In terms of story, there's nothing more to it than that.

2. The Portal answer: Some mad genius made them to test your understanding.

This is the most straightforward: Somebody has made a series of challenges for you. It has the basic advantage that you know what is a puzzle and what is not a puzzle. This was one of the major conceits of "The Witness", which in many ways seems like a response to games like Riven. You get all the ephiphanies with none of the bullshit. There aren't as many red herrings to distract you, like switches that do nothing or cryptic clues. It's abstract and pure. You know the rules. Well, except when you don't.

3. The Riven answer: There are no puzzles. Just a world that you don't understand yet.

The world exists as it is - it wasn't built for you. It's a real place. If you see some interesting art or a strange contraption, you don't get to assume that it's part of a puzzle. Why would you? In real life, nobody would think this way. You would ask yourself who made this, and why? You wouldn't ask yourself what is the puzzle clue? Because the real world is not made up of puzzles. The real world is made up of people, and places, and science, and language.

This is by far the most difficult of the three to pull off. It's a video game attempting to transcend beyond being a video game, and create the feeling of verisimilitude, of being real. But the thing is, it's not real, and in fact it's still a video game. So this is walking a tight rope. We'll make a puzzle, but we can't make it seem like a puzzle. We can give you a clue to it, but we can't make it seem like a clue. Because puzzles and clues don't exist. But of course, that's a puzzle, and that's a clue. It's antithetical to the Nintendo school, which emphasizes clarity over everything. Nintendo never wants you to be confused. Cyan is OK with you being confused!

In Riven, everything in the world makes sense - at least if you take the time to soak up all the details and read all the lengthy journals. For every switch, lever and mysterious contraption, there is some reason for it, and some particular person who made it.

In a Nintendo game, you can ask why the designer made a particular room, but you aren't allowed to ask what character made it. In Riven, it's the opposite. You can ask who made this, and why, but in some sense, you're not allowed to ask why Cyan put it there and what it accomplishes in gameplay terms. I mean, you can certainly ask, but it might not have an answer!

But this is where things get tricky, because you will ask this question, and you have to ask this question. Because again, even though it's real, and it's not a video game - it's not real, it's a video game. And in a video game, the player needs some damn clues.

Design philosophies (1) and (2) have the virtue of clarity. (3) does not. Again and again, the conceit of reality runs smack into the limitations of game design. The two notions are almost antithetical to each other. After all, the villain Gehn didn't design this world for you to succeed. Gehn has his own designs for the world and you're an intruder.

What this means in terms of gameplay is there are red herrings. There are a lot of red herrings. Some of the red herrings are actually clues of some form, but not in the form you are expecting.

The upshot of this is that you will spend a lot of time wandering around seemingly accomplishing nothing. You're going to click on the same things over and over hoping it will do something different, and it won't. Because it's not there for you. It's there for Gehn.

Part IV: 2024.

So where, then, do I stand on Riven? As you know from the title of this post, I think it's a masterpiece. The narrative is thoroughly compelling. Gehn is one of the greatest villains of any game, because he is so coldly cruel and narcissistic in a thoroughly believable way. You don't have to look far to see his real-world equivalents. You could certainly argue that Riven is a game about colonialism and white supremacy. Gehn believes that the Rivenese people are incapable of self-governance and incapable of The Art (of bookmaking.) Only He can save them from their own violent, savage ways, and if that means sacrificing one or two or a hundred of them for his plans, so be it. He created this world, and he can destroy it if it suits his goal of a higher civilization. Only he didn't create it - he merely found it, as Atrus tells the story. Similarly, Cyan continues to contend that they didn't create Riven. They discovered it.

So do I recommend Riven? Absolutely. But you should know that, almost as an inevitable consequence of Cyan's design philosophy at the time, there are going to be a lot of bullshit puzzles and you're going to get frustrated. I *really* wish I could tell you to go in completely blind. That's what I would recommend for Outer Wilds, for example. But chances are, you're not going to have an ideal experience. So I'd recommend using a guide at times. This is a nice light-weight one that will help put you back in the right direction if you're really stuck. But don't go to it too fast. As a rule of thumb, I probably waited until I was thoroughly stuck for at least half-an-hour to an hour before reaching for help. Not everything is bullshit in Riven - there are some solid puzzles here that create a deep sense of accomplishment. But at some point, you're just not going to notice that one thing you can click on to progress, or not pick up on that overly-subtle clue.

The Steam ScummVM version worked remarkably well for me, with none of the bugs or crashes I would expect from a PC game of this age. But in some ways it's still held back by 1997 limitations. In particular, the lack of free perspective can be very frustrating. At times it's really difficult to see how things connect to each other because you are moving from one still image to another and you just can't quite get the right perspective. At other times you are limited by the low resolution - there's one puzzle you could completely skip over if you could just see a little better.

So, it's very possible that the remake will fix many of these issues. I thought about just waiting. But I really wanted to finish what I had started 27 years ago and scratch that particular itch that had been lurking in some dark corner of my brain since childhood. And I succeeded. With a little help.

One question remains: Which is the superior school of puzzle design?

I may have exaggerated when I implied that The Third School inevitably leads to frustration. It's possible to do this well. Riven does it well, at times. And Outer Wilds does it extremely well. So I'm not giving up on this tradition. But even Outer Wilds has many of the same problems as Riven - often sending you down forking garden paths to nowhere. I think it's difficult to pull this off, and I still see it as an open problem to solve for future designers. But despite all of the pitfalls, The Third School is still my favorite approach, because it draws you into the game world like no other way does. You will click, you will cry, but eventually, you might learn. It needs a steady hand and a lot of playtesting, but it's totally possible to make games like this that don't have too many bullshit puzzles. And when it works, it's masterful.

A few years ago i did exactly the same thing :P.

Riven came out when i was 8 and i used to play it with my older sister, mostly because the atmosphere can be intensely forboding for an 8 year old but also because i was 8 and there's no freaking way i could make any kind of progress.

I revisited it a few times over the years but only really to see the opening areas get stuck and drop it, but in 2019 i decided to properly see the thing through. Now... i hate puzzles, i hate them, i hate being stuck and am easily frustrated, so my journey through Riven was pretty much to follow a walkthrough step by step and i STILL frequently got stuck even while following a guide, that's how obtuse this game is.

You might be expecting a "but" at this point but there isn't one, actually getting through this game is suffering and following a guide obviously diminishes any sense of accomplishment you might feel, i got a bad ending in my playthrough and watched a youtube video to see the rest.

BUT... i would play it again lol, i first experienced this beautiful and extremely memorable game as an 8 year old so it's kind of in my blood, i don't know if anyone playing it for the first time now would leave with the same impression so i don't know if i could recommend it, but simply walking around in this world flicking switches and pushing buttons is extremely valuable to me.

Such is my nostalgia that i backed Cyan when they announced they would be making Obduction which i still haven't played, and i would absolutely check out a Riven remake, it would be cool if they... made it... playable... hey maybe they could put a hint system inside the game that would be great.

Other games in a similar vein that i think work better are Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, though there are far more conversations than puzzles in that game, and The Room series, containing the puzzles within puzzle boxes helps limit frustration because you know you're looking at the answer, you just haven't noticed it yet, later games in the series allow players to walk around more expanding the scope of the puzzles but they've been smart about it so far.

I've noticed quite a few people talking about a Riven remake, it's cool that it's so fondly remembered despite probably no one actually finishing it.

I also played Riven when it came out (though I was a teen at the time. I played it with a friend who loved adventure games, which I was always luke warm on.

While audiovisually it was fantastic and it did have interesting ideas and storytelling I have a much more negative view of it than others in this thread. To me the fundamentally obtuse, frustrating, and unfun gameplay ruined everything else.

Riven would be an interesting art project if it weren't a commercial product. My friend spent a lot of money on it, and we got to experience a tiny fraction of it, and much of that time was spent annoyed and frustrated, and not in an engaging way. Wandering around clicking on things pretty much at random, or being confused by intentional red herrings didn't help us understand or relate to the world, especially because we never got deep enough into it to understand how it coheres.

Even in 1997 there were ways to build a believable world with enough guidance to make a playable game for the average player. NPCs who give real hints because they've figured things out (even if you don't want 'live' NPCs you can always provide notes and journals). Out of game built in hint systems that players can access (some obtuse adventure games included these interactive guides.)

Just making better puzzles that guide the player without appearing unnatural. Such puzzles do exist, and even exist in Riven. I think a lot of the puzzle design is just bad, and especially annoying in that so much required tedious backtracking and searching every corner over and over.

I support developers trying interesting or unique things and maintaining their visions, and I even respect Riven for that (especially in a game that was so expensive, commercial, and such a big hit) but I do think games are a product and should ultimately seek to be a good experience for the customers who are paying for them, even if they aren't exactly the product those people wanted or expected. Riven is a product with a lot of wonderful aspects (audiovisual, storytelling, aesthetics etc..) but a fatal flaw that makes it unusable for the majority of consumers.

It's like a beautiful car perfectly made but with a gas pedal that's small and hidden and most people can't use it. You can sit in the car and admire it, you can show people all the wonderful design features, but the majority of people can't actually drive it anywhere, which makes it kind of useless.

I guess you can argue that with an external guide people can still use it (and by 1997 there was online help for games, and there was an official strategy guide, of course) which I guess is the equivalent to getting an aftermarket replacement for the pedal, though for me playing through a game with a guide like that is almost always a bad experience. But the fact remains that the makers of Riven were fine with releasing a game that's pretty much unplayable except for a tiny fraction of either very good or very obsessive players, and that to me is a bad game no matter what else is in it.

@cikame: Man, it was sure great to finally see that... thing... after so many years.

@bigsocrates: I don't disagree. It's interesting that I can hold both "Riven is a masterpiece" and "Riven is kind of a bad game" in my mind at the same time.

I hope that when the Riven remake comes out, they fix some of the more obscure puzzles or add some more hints. I feel that some of the confusion is inherent to the design of the world (like all the red herrings, which you can't remove without losing some of the worldbuilding) but a *lot* of the confusion could be easily remedied just with better signposting and more or better clues. There's a great game in there, dammit, if they just let us play it.

Some very specific changes I'd request:

1. Make the animal shapes more recognizable. I knew the frog one but I totally mis-guessed which one was the frog.

2. The animal clues should be much clearer and more distinct. The sounds that the eyes make should actually sound like animals. I mean, that first eye by the maglev just sounds like wood tapping on metal or something, like any other sound made by a contraption, so there's not much to call your attention to it. And PLEASE just come up with some more clearer hints in general.

3. Make the secret passageways way more obvious. It's not fun at all having to guess which tiny tunnels you can actually squeeze into. No modern game would do this because they require some crouch mechanic you can always perform, so it's very clear when you can fit and when you can't. Also, give us some visual hint that there's secret passageways when you close the door.

4. Make it more clear which pipes go to where. Sometimes the pipes are just lost in the rocks are something and it's not clear where they go to. Just having a free perspective would help a ton with this.

5. Have some kind of *puzzle clue music* to tell you when what you are looking at is important to solving a puzzle vs. when it's just worldbuilding or flavor. I'm not sure the best way to do this without breaking immersion.

6. Fixing the puzzles to "lock in place" when you're done solving them or to provide shortcuts. This solves two problems - you don't have to perform the same actions over and over, and you won't be able to interact with them so you won't waste time being unsure if it's solved. Once you've opened up a secret passage, it should stay open regardless of what else you do.

6. A quest log. Outer Wilds showed how to do this well, especially with its "There's more to explore here" notification that tells you when you need to keep exploring and when you're done.

7. A hint system.

If they made all these changes, it would become an accessible game for a wide audience, and I hope more people would be able to enjoy the story (which is quite good!). It's not going to impress like it did in 1997, though.

I'm really looking forward to the Riven remake, but the okay-ish-ness of the Myst remake and the mostly above mediocrity of Firmament hasn't left me extremely confident in Cyan's ability to execute. BUT, the 7th Guest VR remake left me fully convinced that every 90's era first-person adventure game needs a functioning VR version, so at least Riven is getting scratched off that todo list.

One of the most disappointing sequel of all time? It's super pretty to look at even today, but the puzzles are just bonkers nonsense. I don't remember the specifics but I remember having to look up solution every couple hours and going "I never would've thought of that!" which is a hallmark of bad puzzle design in the words of Ron Gilbert.

What's odd is that Myst had almost none of the issues - I beat Myst without getting stuck once (well once truthfully, because I missed a door/panel behind a chair and didn't know where to go next)... I think the limited budget and scope of Myst actually meshed well with their design sensibilities because puzzles are mostly localized/self-contained and kept it from exploding in complexity.