Riven

Riven delivers exceptional visual modernization, featuring beautiful, high-quality visuals that faithfully recreate the original's aesthetic while significantly improving lighting, textures, and environments using Unreal Engine 5. This breathtaking presentation supports deep and immersive world-building, where distinct islands like the Jungle, Survey, and Boiler facilities offer a profound sense of history that expands beautifully upon the lore established in Myst. The story effectively handles the tense conflicts between Atrus, Gehn, and Catherine, providing a compelling, story-driven conclusion that feels far more substantial than its predecessor. The core gameplay thrives on engaging numerical logic, as discovering and deciphering the intricate D'ni number system offers a deeply rewarding sense of intellectual accomplishment that feels integral to the world. Progressing through the islands is aided by satisfying fast-travel integration via the Starry Expanse Nexus hub, which connects the disparate lands in a way that remains consistent with the game's sci-fi logic. Meticulous exploration is constantly rewarded with hidden pathway discoveries, offering genuine aha moments when you uncover secret routes hidden behind doors or deep within underwater caves. Furthermore, manipulating large-scale machinery like the iconic rotating room, golden domes, and mechanical mag-lifts provides a highly tactile and satisfying sense of environmental scale. However, this magnificent cerebral journey still faces a few notable hurdles stemming from archaic user interface choices and sensitive control parameters. The gameplay suffers from highly illegible handwriting in journals, utilizing a stylized, cursive font for Gehn's and Catherine's notebooks that makes them incredibly difficult to read and easily leads to missed narrative context. The puzzle mechanics can introduce unnecessary friction through overly sensitive controls, meaning that puzzles requiring fine adjustments like color calibration or precise marble placement feature erratic sensitivity that becomes tedious with a controller. You will also encounter inconsistent visual feedback for buttons, where critical interactive elements like a tiny white calibration switch blend too perfectly into the environment and cause players to get stuck on challenges they have already technically solved. The pacing can also feel heavily weighed down by tedious backtracking and traversal, as a significant portion of your time is spent enduring slow walking or climbing animations just to recheck a distant detail. The user experience faces additional minor hurdles from confusing submarine mechanics, where navigating the vessel and understanding its relationship with changing water levels can feel highly unintuitive. The technical presentation exhibits a few graphical blemishes, most notably an aggressive visual ghosting in the water effects that results in distracting trailing artifacts during exploration. Finally, the interface utilizes an archaic save system design that feels clunky, occasionally leading to menu navigation errors or accidental new game starts. Overall Riven is a remarkably gorgeous, intellectually stimulating, and atmospheric puzzle masterpiece that excels through its spectacular Unreal Engine 5 graphical overhaul, brilliant numerical logic, and grand mechanical interactions. While the legendary island exploration is occasionally slowed down by illegible journal scripts, erratic controller sensitivity, distracting water artifacts, and tedious backtracking loops, the phenomenal world-building and satisfying narrative depth ensure it stands as a definitive and triumphant remake for adventure enthusiasts.

good relaxing adventure game

Vorweg, ich habe das originale Riven vor 28 Jahren gespielt und mit den paar Dingen, die mir noch im Gedächtnis geblieben sind, konnte ich im Remake nichts mehr anfangen. Also habe ich angefangen, alles neu zu entdecken und möglichst keine Hilfe in Anspruch zu nehmen. Lösungen sind für das Spiel sowieso nur bedingt nützlich, da viele Dinge zufällig erstellt werden. Aber nach viel Knobelei und 30 Stunden Spielzeit habe ich alle Enden erlebt und alle Errungenschaften bekommen. Mir hat dieses Remake sehr gut gefallen, die Grafik und der Surround-Sound waren klasse. Ich habe nicht einen Fehler oder gar Absturz erlebt. Das man für die Notizen das Menu öffnen muss, hat mich nicht wirklich gestört, da ich meine wichtigen Infos sowieso auf meinem zweiten Bildschirm oder in meiner Zettelwirtschaft habe. Alles in allem kann ich das Spiel jedem empfehlen, der sich für dieses Genre begeistern kann und auch bei schwierigen Rätseln nicht aufgibt.

I never played a Myst game before but I'm glad I did it with the remakes. With a solid start Myst is Riven an even better game. In fact for some that never played a Myst before the riddles are quiet hard because you get no help or hint at all. My personal incentive is to complete the game and riddles without any help so I got stuck... a lot.. and more oh boy. But even greater is the joy of solving a puzzle or a mytsery when you get it for yourself. A Great game which I absolutly recommend to play.

Someone got me the original Riven for PS1 when I was a kid and I loved playing it but never got very far because I was only about 7 years old. Being able to come back and conquer it in the updated version was a great experience! Highly recommend and will go down as one of my all time favorites.

A new approach to an old favourite, yet still true to form. Free roaming is just what this game needed. The new puzzles and re-jigged ones freshen it up nicely. This deserves to be a hit for Cyan