Riven: The Sequel to Myst

Riven: The Sequel to Myst followed one of the best-selling titles of the mid-1990s and, instead of expanding the formula, distilled it into an almost perfect form. The player is sent into the world of Riven to free Catherine and resolve the situation surrounding Gehn, a man who has built himself the standing of a god on a crumbling archipelago. None of this is explained up front: the story unfolds purely through the environment, notes, the constructions of the natives and a handful of encounters with people, so for a long time the player has no idea who to actually trust.

The gameplay is built around moving between static pre-rendered shots and around observation. The puzzles aren't separate tasks with levers but part of a functioning world: the player must understand how the archipelago draws its power, how the individual islands relate to one another, how the local numeral system works, or why a particular animal reacts to a particular sound. Notes on paper are practically a necessity while playing, and many players keep their own maps and sketches of symbols. Technically it was cutting-edge for its time: the game shipped on several discs for Windows, the shots were rendered at a quality unthinkable in real time, and they were accompanied by live-action video sequences inserted directly into the image.

The atmosphere is remarkably quiet and lonely. The sound design works more with ambient noise, wind and creaking mechanisms than with music, and it's precisely that silence that gives the world its weight. Riven was very well received and sold strongly, though some critics faulted the harsh difficulty and the frequent disc swapping. The influence of both games on the genre was enormous: a whole wave of first-person adventures with pre-rendered graphics followed, one that lasted until the end of the decade and fed an entire segment of the CD-title market. Today both a modern remake and the original version exist, and thanks above all to how tightly its puzzles are woven into the environment, Riven is commonly cited among the best-designed logic games of all time.