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.