One of, if not the very first computer game I ever remember playing was Cosmic Osmo - a fun little exploration game that was probably just a glorified Hypercard stack and didn't really have any objectives. The only point was to explore the various planets in a goofy, kid-friendly solar system. I think I was three, but my sister and I would return to this game time and again, and we later got an expansion to it: Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, which I believe was when they re-released it on CD-ROM (then a kind of new technology) with four new planets to play around in.
But in the packaging was an ad for the next work by the same studio, Cyan. A little game called Myst.
I was only seven when Myst came out, but I think even as a little kid I understood it to be a phenomenon. The graphics (while they wouldn't win any awards today) were astonishing. If you were too young to remember, 3D graphics, as in polygonal objects in a simulated 3D environment, rather than 2D sprites, were, prior to this, usually either untextured, with vector lines sketching out the shapes, or they only had solid colors for textures. Myst wasn't being rendered real-time - it was basically a series of still images with occasional pre-rendered animations. But the game was by far the most beautiful thing that had come out of the computer game industry up to that point. And the world was a fascinating, surreal environment that oozed mystery.
As a kid, I didn't even realize there was an objective to the game for a long time. I remember my best friend in elementary school talking about how he had reached the "Mechanical Age" and the "Channelwood Age" and having no clue what he was talking about. But, over time, I'd come to understand that, unlike Cosmic Osmo, there was a goal beyond just exploring the map. But honestly, the real pleasure of the game was just seeing the strange sights.
In the infancy of the internet, there wasn't really the online hype machine there is now, and so the first time I discovered there was a sequel to Myst was when I walked into an independent computer store my dad liked (he's a professor of computer science, so he'd often take me to tag along while he was shopping for computer stuff) and I saw "Riven, the Sequel to Myst."
So, naturally I got that game, and was introduced to a far more complex, far, far more challenging puzzle/exploration game.
I have a confession: I'm pretty impatient with puzzles. I'm totally the kind of guy who will look up the solution to a puzzle if I get stuck on it. I try not to peak ahead, especially in a game that is all about puzzles, but it's a weakness of mine.
Riven was... it was difficult.
Myst had a wonderful, surreal world, but in a lot of ways, the design of the world was basically one built around puzzles. The giant gears and wooden rocket ship on the primary Myst island were ultimately there only to serve as big signposts that said "hey, there's a linking book to another age here!" The fact that the isle of Myst was not really built to be a place where people really lived helped give it its strange, dream-like aesthetic, but you could argue that it was also a little "gamey."
Riven is, let's be clear, also an environment built around puzzles. But unlike Myst, the puzzles in Riven all seem to have some kind of in-world purpose.
And there's a story there that is, yes, partially told through extensive, hand-written journals (evidently actually written by hand and scanned) but there's also a lot of environmental storytelling:
Gehn, the father of Atrus (the sort of benevolent figure whom you rescue in the original Myst but who seems to have big family problems, as his sons are the villains of the first game) is, like Atrus, a practitioner of "The Writing," a magical skill developed by the D'ni civilization. Writing allows the creation of Linking Books, which act as magical portals to other "Ages" or worlds/universes. Atrus believes (and I think we're meant to agree with him) that these Linking Books are only describing worlds that already exist, and while alterations to the books can have an impact on the worlds that they link to, ultimately there's no real hierarchy between the ages.
Gehn, on the other hand, is convinced that writing a Linking Book actually creates the world to which it links, and because he wrote a linking book to the age of Riven, he believes himself to be the creator of it, and currently rules over it and the native Rivenese as a god - manipulating their culture to set them to aiding him in the creation of books, after Atrus trapped him on Riven.
I love environmental storytelling, and you can see pretty early on the way in which Gehn has shaped this culture around his needs. It's a story of colonialism, with Gehn using his knowledge of The Writing and technology (which ranges from 19th century steam engines to holograms and force fields) to keep himself in power.
Riven sacrifices a little of the dream-like surrealism of Myst in favor of a more justified world, but it's not like things are totally normal here. Rifts in the ocean and earthquakes demonstrate the manner in which the age is succumbing to some structural instability - possibly the consequence of Gehn's attempts to alter it to his needs.
Recently, Cyan came out with a full 3D remake of Riven, and so I downloaded it. I've been having a fun nostalgia trip - though there was a bit of a false start when I found myself unable to push a button in the very first puzzle of the game (I felt very foolish when I realized I had just not gotten close enough to it to press the button).
Like the earlier Myst remake, you have full freedom of movement (more or less - sometimes they restrict you to a path, but you can walk and move the camera around like any modern first-person game). Sadly the old FMV characters had to be replaced with 3D models - a choice I understand, but makes me all the more appreciative of Remedy for keeping the live-action FMV fires burning.
Also, I feel like some of the puzzles are different than they were in the original, but I genuinely cannot tell if this is because they are or if it's just that it's been decades since I played this game. For one thing, I cannot seem to find any of the little spherical balls with Rivenese numbers on them that form the eye of hidden animal shapes.
I also don't remember any of the puzzles involving Rivenese numerals (apparently the boxy base 5/25 ones are actually D'ni numerals - numerals I've been dreaming of using as a recurring puzzle in a D&D campaign) that seem to be associated with these little idols/shrines that also look totally unfamiliar... but again, it's been probably over 20 years since I played this game.
Anyway, the sequence of events also feels a little unfamiliar - I had to go to four of the islands in the game before I actually got into the village on the Jungle Island, which I don't remember being so hard to get into.
Graphically, I think the industry has advanced so far that even with a modern update in Unreal Engine, Riven's graphical fidelity isn't really anything special (and arguably even looks a little low-budget). But the visual conceptualization is really fantastic, and is an aesthetic that has absolutely burned itself into my brain.
While there's a lot of horror within the world design (hey, how about we teach kids how to count with a toy recreating the executions they most definitely witness on a regular basis!) there's a part of me that wishes I could live in a world with this general look and feel - you know, minus all the creepiness.
Throughout the game, the number five is a big motif, and I will say that we lose one expression of that motif in this modern remake - back in the day, the game came on five CD-ROMs, and you had to change discs every time you went to a different island.
Ok, I don't miss that too much.
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