The End of Riven

 I can't say that I completed the game without any help, but I do think I really understood all the puzzles in a way I hadn't before.

I'll also say that my previous post was somewhat disparaging of the graphics - while there are some environments that are maybe a little lower-rez than a AAA-level game could do nowadays, I've actually warmed up to the NPC models.

The remake of Riven changes some of the puzzles. Most notably, it introduces a new area, the star fissure, which becomes a convenient way to travel between the game's five islands as well as being a necessary part of what is probably the most complex puzzle in the game - empowering the book to the 233rd Age.

One thing I found surprising was that the remake actually gets rid of what I thought was the most memorable puzzle in the original, which was finding the little rotating balls set into certain places with D'ni numbers and hidden animal shapes that are required to solve the puzzle that leads into the age of Tay, where the Moiety rebels have taken refuge (ironically, the cover art for the original Riven box portrays the giant tree-village that is actually in Tay, not Riven).

The replacement for this puzzle does involve finding hidden animal shapes, but it's also randomized and requires learning the Rivenese number system.

This, actually, is kind of hilarious. The original game required you to learn the D'ni numbers (which I had previously assumed to be native to Riven,) but I suppose after 27 years they figured enough people already knew that, so they introduce an entirely new numerical system that you can only learn if you also known the D'ni ones. I believe the Rivenese one is just base 10, but builds its digits in a sort of base 3 system. While it's probably easier once you know how the Rivense one works to convert larger numbers (as every Rivense digit corresponds to an Arabic one, though I don't know if they have a zero, instead seeming to have a digit for 10,) I find the cleverness of the D'ni one - being sort of base 5 and base 25 at the same time - a little more satisfying.

Really, the thing that felt very gratifying is that I actually think I understood the multiple aspects of the puzzle required to empower the link to 233. I think it was also made a little easier because rather than having to place the fire marbles on a, like 25x25 grid, it's now just a 5x5 grid - easy enough to just draw it and mark where the marbles for each island go.

One funny note is that when I found one of Gehn's journals, I saw that he made note of when I accidentally destroyed the bridge to Boiler Isle - given that I don't think that you need to do that to progress, I wonder if this entry either disappears or is different if you never do that.

And boy, if you had any doubts about his malice and thought that Gehn was maybe just a misguided but well-intentioned person, the journal betrays an utterly callous and cruel colonialist mindset that makes me feel pretty ok trapping him in a broken linking book forever. You can find some holograms in his bedroom in the 233rd age that do hint at the complexity of this family tree.

I remember buying the Book of Atrus when I was like 9 or 10, but never read it. I've heard that the Myst books (at least those released in the 90s - not sure if there have been more) are actually pretty good, and the book is literally sitting on my bookshelf here, but I still haven't read it.

Anyway, it's been nice revisiting this. While I did also play Myst 3: Exile when it came out, I don't think it really left as much of an impression on me as the first two games did. Riven, indeed, ends on a note that could have been a pretty good grand finale for the duology.

Returning to Riven

 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.

Myst - The Latest Remaster

 The first computer game that I remember playing was called Cosmic Osmo. It was a black-and-white exploration game with no objectives. You traveled around in a space ship to one of I believe four worlds, and could meet funny characters with bulbous bodies and very simplistic animations. It was goofy and fun, and perfect for a small child like I was (I probably played it first when I was 3, so this would be 1989 or so).

Later, we got a new version of it called Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel (the last "world" of the original game was a giant spacebound fish, though of course you could visit them in any order.) This added another four worlds (again, if I remember correctly,) but in addition, the game advertised the next project by the creators of Cosmic Osmo, a little game called Myst.

If you are too young to remember when Myst game out, you might not realize how huge a deal it was. No other game looked remotely like it. It was the first game (or at least the first popular one) to have computer-generated 3D graphics that had rendered textures (as opposed to flat colors), making it look more like a real world you could inhabit than anything that had ever come before.

The game came out when I was 7, and it was a phenomenon. Computer and video games had mostly been considered something for children, but Myst, with its tricky puzzles and beautiful but empty world attracted a wide audience of adults.

Now, Cyan Worlds (which had been just Cyan at the time of Myst's initial release) has come out with an update of it. This is not the first update - far from it. As computer games have grown far more sophisticated, Myst's initial selling points don't seem so revolutionary. But it's a true classic of a game. The latest release is designed to allow you to play the game in VR (though you can, like I have been, play it on a normal screen as well.)

My sister works in VR, and despite the fact that people have been talking about VR for longer than Myst has been around, it seems like it's finally starting to get rolling as a games medium. But with the exception of Half-Life: Alyx, we haven't really seen the AAA video game industry jump onto this new medium.

What I find interesting is that I think the sort of games VR developers have focused on seem to be more akin to Myst than the action- (and, to be honest, testosterone-) fueled "mainstream" game industry. Myst seemed like an obvious thing to bring to VR (though given how many rereleases it's gotten in the decade since its release, I'll be shocked if we don't get or already have a Skyrim VR port.)

Myst was hugely foundational to my fantasy aesthetic - it's one of the main sources I could cite for my interest in non-medieval fantasy, the surreal cross-section of a kind of 19th century sci-fi with magic sticking with me.

The game has a puzzle randomizer, which changes certain values and such in the game so we can't just do the whole thing from memory, but I've got to be honest, I've blown through it without looking up any guides. The only times I've gotten "stuck" have been forgetting that you could search the drawers in Achenar's room for his blue page in the Stoneship Age and getting a bit turned around in the Channelwood Age (I mistook the elevator to the Myst book for one I had already used.) These puzzles are basically hardwired into my brain, so in 2 and a half hours of game time, I've already cleared through the Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood ages.

The most notable difference playing now is that you have freedom of movement. Originally, you would warp from one tableau to another to move around the islands of the game, whereas now you have what is clearly a VR-style movement (you can go forward and backward or sidestep with keys and you aim where you're looking with your mouse, which presumably is just turning around and looking in VR).

I have noticed that some of the puzzle "consoles" have been changed, though that could have happened in other releases over the last 28 years. For example, the three pump buttons in the Stoneship Age have been replaced with this funny sliding lever and a single button to activate it. And Atrus has apparently upgraded the cabin in the "woods" on the main island to have an electric starter instead of requiring you to light a match.

The biggest change, which I didn't even realize until I was in the Channelwood Age, was that you can actually carry both Sirrus' red page and Achenar's blue page at the same time, meaning that you don't have to navigate back to the Myst linking book twice (glad I realized that before I did the Selenitic Age - that maze is a big one.)

Of course, with foreknowledge and also just the benefits of 30 years of game development, the game is sort of shockingly small. It's still gorgeous, though this release does not have the cutting-edge graphics the original had for its era. Also, they've replaced the blue-screen footage of Rand Miller playing Atrus and his brutish son Achenar and Robyn Miller (who also wrote the music) playing the conniving other son Sirrus. These have been replaced with CGI animated characters instead, which... I'll be honest, I always kind of liked the blue-screen live action stuff. Their performances were perfectly good for the characters (I believe, though I could be wrong, that the audio is preserved at least.)

The detail of the world is far greater now - the smooth polygons of the rock spire from which the big tower (the one where you find your initial hints to get to each age) rises are now jagged and treacherous-looking, and the hexagonal basalt columns that make up the area where you arrive in the Mechanical age looks a lot clearer. And there are birds and frogs and such that give the areas a bit of life.

Of course, another big change is that I'm five times older than I was when I first played this. The journals about the various ages found in the library, some of which carry necessary clues to reach them, I now find a lot more interesting, as they're the clearest area where the story is actually illustrated. I feel like you could do a whole exploration of the theme of colonialism - Atrus sets out to simply explore and meet new people, but his sons turn the whole exercise into domination and exploitation, and, given how empty these worlds are, likely also genocide. In Riven, the sequel, we find a world in which Atrus' father has come to dominate a terrified populace that views him as a god - it's implied that there are a ton of people in Riven, but that they are actively hiding from you for fear of either you or Gehn's retribution, or both.

Way, way back (probably when I was 8 or 9,) I bought one of the three books that the Miller brothers wrote about their world, this one being The Book of Atrus. I never actually read it, but it's sitting on my bookshelf. I'm given to understand that it's actually a lot better than most tie-in novels, and the fact that Myst (at least at that time) really was a project by a pair of brothers (and a few other people, of course) makes me think this is more about exploring the ideas and themes of it than generating excitement for the brand.

Anyway, after spending a couple weeks back in my childhood home with my dad, this is another fun nostalgia trip to go on.

Myst Nostalgia and the D'Ni Numerical System

 Myst came out when I was 7 years old, and Riven, its first sequel, came out four years later when I was 11. While I played the third game, it's these first two that had huge influences on my general aesthetic tastes. I loved the weird sort of "fantasy technological" style of it, where it wasn't really science fiction in any serious way, but there was still sort of futuristic technology amongst the broad 19th Century furnishings.

Anyway, in the second game, taking place in the "Age" (which might be thought of as a world or plane) of Riven primarily, one of the important things to discover is the workings of the D'ni numerical system. The D'ni are an ancient civilization that discovered or developed the magical art of Writing, which allows the creation of linking books that can take a person between Ages.

Anyway, using a creepy children's toy that has what looks like sacrifices being dropped toward a carnivorous fish or shark, you can work out the basics of five symbols that correspond to the numbers 1-5. Each is just a couple of lines drawn within a square, but it gets slightly more complex. The number system is kind of simultaneously a base 5 and base 25 system (our own number system is base ten, because once we hit 10, the "counter" resets and we add another place to the number - the digit to the left of the original one now indicates how many times the original counter has cycled through its 10 symbols, going 0123456789).

The Roman Numeral system ran into an issue when it got to certain amounts, due to the fact that it needed a new set of symbols for each multiple of ten, whereas the Indian/Arabic numerals can represent arbitrarily large numbers. The D'ni system can as well.

The reason I say the D'ni one is sort of both base 5 and base 25 is that there is a kind of reset every five numbers, but you only add a new digit to the number every 25 counts.

Every digit is represented as lines within a square. The "one" digit is a vertical line that cuts the square in half. The "five" digit is a horizontal line that cuts it in half, but the truth is that really what it is is the "one" rotated counterclockwise 90 degrees. Thus the "six" is a square cut into four segments by a vertical and horizontal line - representing effectively "five plus one." When you reach ten, you instead rotate the symbol for "two" counterclockwise 90 degrees, and overlay the other digits rightside up to say "ten plus X".

Eventually, when you get to 24, you have the symbol for 4 (a rectangle that covers the lower right corner of the square, a little taller than it is wide) along with itself rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise (hence representing "four-time-five plus four")

But when you hit 25, there's no more room for this - you can't just rotate another 90 degrees because your vertical line will just become vertical again, so now we finally move on to another digit - but the "digits," which, again, are all within squares, are now bound, sharing a "wall" to make it clear these are part of the same number. The first position, like in Arabic numerals, represents the highest order of magnitude, while the next represents the next lower. So 25 is thus just the "one" digit followed by an empty square, representing zero. In this sense, it's the equivalent of 10 (which is just a one followed by a zero) except that, being a base 25 system, it represents a value of 25.

Anyway, I just ran across a website that will convert Arabic numerals into D'ni ones, and I'm kind of delighted by it.

If you are running a TTRPG and want to play around with codes embedded in numerical systems, I'd recommend stealing this wholecloth. You could also take it as inspiration to make other systems - maybe a base 12 system or something else.