Myst/Riven Thoughts

So over the past 2 weeks I've played the original Myst and Riven. Here's a review thing / thoughts.
Also, I knew almost nothing about either game before diving in, which I think is actually optimal.

tl;dr Riven is ridiculously good, IMO, and is something that I would think almost anyone who enjoys games would like. Myst is a little more hit and miss, but is short and leads directly into Riven so is probably worth a play too! Though you don't really NEED to play Myst to understand Riven, you could just look up a quick synopsis of Myst if you wanted to jump right in.

~~ M Y S T ~~

Myst was both better and worse than my expectations. I knew it was point and click, I knew it was kind of atmospheric, but I thought it was all going to be more of 1 coherent, immersive world.

It turns out, that doesn't really apply to Myst. It's more "SM64 style" where you have a hub world that leads to these other worlds (called Ages) and you need to collect things to bring them back to the hub. The idea of Ages is actually pretty cool, though I was kind of surprised by how small they ended up being in Myst. That being said, the Ages were all pretty distinct and atmospheric and the puzzles in them were pretty high quality (besides the Space Ship Age, which had puzzles that were kind of arbitrary and out of place).

Speaking of the puzzles, in Myst the puzzles are pretty clearly defined...the clues you find are obviously clues and the places you need to use the clues are also pretty obvious. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it does serve as a big difference between it and Riven. As long as you're paying attention and writing important things down, Myst is actually pretty dang simple to beat.

The CGs in Myst have aged a little poorly, I mean everything's still recognizable and makes sense, but the CG renders are very obviously fake, which hurts the immersion quite a bit in places. I actually think the main island of Myst actually suffered the most from this, since it had so many disparate elements, like the boat kinda clashed with the forest kinda clashed with the spaceship.

All that being said, Myst is kind of unlike any game I've played, really. It obviously shares a lot of mechanics with other point and click adventure games, but the lack of inventory and a more 'lonely' sort of world to explore really differentiates it.

Anyways, Myst is still a fun little playthrough that's not too challenging, and the story leads right into Riven, so I would still recommend it.

[ ] [ ] [ ] - I give Myst 3 Blue Pages out of 5

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~~ RIVEN: The Sequel to Myst ~~

They took Myst and made it godlike. I loved every minute of Riven, pretty much. It was exactly the sort of thing I was expecting from Myst and then some.

The idea of the Ages is still present, but 95% of Riven takes place in the singular Age of Riven, which leads to 1 coherent, living, breathing world. It really does feel like it could be a real place. The islands make sense in context at each other, the village feels lived in, all the machinery and doors and places feel old and weathered. Also, it's frikkin' gorgeous. For all the roughness of Myst's CGs, Riven's hold up PERFECTLY well, IMO.

And whereas Myst had clearly defined puzzles, Riven is much, much better at making everything feel integrated with the islands themselves. About halfway into my play through, I said something like "I can hardly tell what's going to be a clue and what's just part of the world", I think that's brilliant. There's only about 3-4 things that I would consider obvious "puzzle points", and everything else is just doing things that make logical sense in the world around you.

Lots of opening and closing doors, spinning rooms, powering devices, exploring all the nooks and crannies, learning the D'ni language and numbers, it's all great.

And the cool part about the obvious puzzle places is that it's never as simple as like read numbers in book, put them into a safe, hurr durr. They all involve combining various elements around the island and synthesizing them into a solution. This does have the side effect of making them quite a bit more challenging, but with a lot of thinking and a little guesswork, they're all definitely solvable.

I really just can't say enough nice things about this game. I love the coherence of the world, I love the simple but effective story, I like the little bits of worldbuilding scattered all throughout, and the ahha moment when you get something to work.

[ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] - I give Riven 5 Island Linking Books out of 5.

I really wish there were more games of Riven's quality in this sort of genre, I guess. I plan to play Myst 3-5, but I've lowered my expectations after reading more about them, apparently Riven is by far the high point of the series.

If anyone knows more games in this vein that are Riven-tier, please let me know, briiing me the paaages.