Riven (remake)

Myst sold like hotcakes when it was released in 1993, but for a game so financially successful, it has a strange reputation. A lot of those copies may have been bought by normies just eager to see what the CD-ROM drives on their pricey new PCs could do, because when I bring it up in gaming circles, I’m more often met with derision than reverence. “The puzzles sucked!” many say. “It’s just so boring.” Well, it certainly made for a stark contrast with Doom, released the same year, and while I admired both, Myst’s was the world I got utterly lost in. I think everything about the game is brilliant. Its distinctive architecture and atmosphere seeped into my mind so deeply that, out and about in the real world, I’d sometimes spot something vaguely Myst-like and feel transported into the game. And I think its puzzles were brilliant, each so distinctive and absorbing, with all the information you needed to solve them able to be picked up through experimentation and examination of the environment around you. Myst is a masterpiece, one of the games of my life.

But when its sequel landed a few years later, I was in no position to play it. Here it was, the follow-up to one of the most mind blowing and formative experiences of my life as a lover of video games, and I missed it. By the time, years later, that things in my life had settled and I actually could play it, the moment had passed, and despite my love for Myst, I struggled to go back to a game with rigid, node-to-node movement, even one as gorgeous as Riven. Now, finally, this landmark sequel has gotten the remake treatment it so clearly deserved, and I can experience its atmosphere and its puzzles in free-look, free-movement glory. I admit I think that inevitably, when remaking a game like Riven, some things will be lost even as others are gained—I will always prefer the original’s live-action characters to the 3D models of those in the remake (watch the early stretch of this video for a comparison of the two)—but the environments look incredible. This weekend I’ll find out if the rest of Riven—its puzzles, its narrative, its music—can cast a spell on me like the one its predecessor once did, all those years ago.—Carolyn Petit