The new Riven remake is even better than Myst

A remake of Riven: The Sequel to Myst launched this week, made by the original game's developers. It strikes a fascinating balance between re-creation and reinvention, and based on a couple of hours of playing it, it's a resounding success.

Myst was the classic most people remembered fondly from the early CD-ROM era, but for me, its sequel, Riven, was the highlight. After that, the sequels declined in quality. The sophomore effort was the apex.

It was certainly more ambitious than Myst. Instead of a handful of tightly packed theme park worlds, it offered a singular, cohesive one that felt lived in and steeped in history in a way that Myst couldn't quite match.

A worthy presentation

That was thanks to outstanding art direction but also to its iconic musical score.

For the most part, the remake nails both of those things. While the original game resembled the first Myst in that you had to click to scroll between static images to explore the game's world, the new one follows the 2020 Myst remake (and 2000's oft-forgotten realMyst) in giving the player full movement, akin to contemporary first-person puzzle games like Portal, The Witness, or The Talos Principle. Since it's easy to re-create a lot of the original camera angles this way, it might have been cool if there had been an option to control the game as you did originally, but I can see why that wasn't a priority.

The environments are just as atmospheric and detailed as they used to be.

Credit: Samuel Axon

It just so happens that today's graphics hardware does an outstanding job of replicating previously static visuals in full 3D. (There's even VR support, though I haven't tried it yet.) And the music is just as good as it used to be.

There are only two downsides on the presentation front. First, I've heard that folks running on older machines may struggle to achieve satisfactory fidelity and performance. I played it on both an M1 Max MacBook Pro and a Windows 11 desktop with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. The MacBook Pro ran the game at maxed-out settings at the laptop's native resolution at around 30 frames per second. The desktop did the same at 4K at 120 fps. But those are both high-end, recent-ish machines, so your mileage may vary.

Second, the full-motion video performances in the original game have been replaced with full 3D, video game-looking characters. It's a necessary concession, but I feel some of the character was lost. They did a pretty good job matching the motions of the original videos, though.

The original's FMV performances have been replaced by respectable but still video game-ish 3D models.

Samuel Axon

The original's FMV performances have been replaced by respectable but still video game-ish 3D models. Samuel Axon

The fictional animals fare a bit better visually.

Samuel Axon

The fictional animals fare a bit better visually. Samuel Axon

The original's FMV performances have been replaced by respectable but still video game-ish 3D models. Samuel Axon

The fictional animals fare a bit better visually. Samuel Axon

Reinventing the puzzles

Almost immediately, I was surprised to see that some of the puzzle solutions and sequences of events had changed. It seems developer Cyan Worlds wanted to keep things fresh for folks who remember the old game well and to introduce some quality-of-life changes for people who are coming to Riven for the first time. I'm more the former, and while haven't reached the end of the game by any means, I don't mind any of the changes so far.

Don't expect this to be a modern puzzle game, though. More recent trends have focused on puzzles contained in easy-to-read spaces with clear rules. Riven is a sprawling world that never does much to hold your hand and which is deliberately (but creatively) obtuse.

Don't worry: the puzzles aren't nonsensical guessing games, as you might remember from other 90s classic point-and-click adventures. (Remember the rubber chicken pulley in The Secret of Monkey Island? Yikes!) But they're challenging and mysterious in a sensible way, and there's no modern game design philosophy of holding your hand and introducing you to concepts in a transparent and deliberate way.

You'll need to take notes. Fortunately, the game has a built-in screenshot feature. Expect to use it a lot if you want to avoid backtracking more than necessary to solve some puzzles that refer to information found elsewhere in Riven.

You'll spend a fair amount of time backtracking between the game's various islands via various transportation methods, though some of the puzzle reworking has reduced just how much this happens.

Samuel Axon

You'll spend a fair amount of time backtracking between the game's various islands via various transportation methods, though some of the puzzle reworking has reduced just how much this happens. Samuel Axon

I felt like I should be able to jump down here, but I couldn't.

Samuel Axon

I felt like I should be able to jump down here, but I couldn't. Samuel Axon

You'll spend a fair amount of time backtracking between the game's various islands via various transportation methods, though some of the puzzle reworking has reduced just how much this happens. Samuel Axon

I felt like I should be able to jump down here, but I couldn't. Samuel Axon

There are some cases where the free-roaming, first-person controls bring attention to some arbitrary limitations. There are places where you could imagine a real person could jump off a short ledge to reach a new location, for example, even though you can't jump or climb in this game. That was true in the original too, but the limited camera angles helped obscure some of that before.

That's not a huge problem, though. The game is maddeningly difficult at times, but it never feels like nonsense. It's still one of the best puzzle games of all time.

The missing link

It's striking how ahead of its time Riven was back in 1997—that much is clear while playing this remake. The aforementioned The Witness and The Talos Principle, along with many of the popular walking simulators in recent years, owe a lot to Riven, which put together an immersive, cohesive world unlike anything seen up to that point. If you don't mind slowing down and taking notes, it's arguably still better than the vast majority of the games that have followed it. In many ways, it has aged better than Myst, and I prefer the Riven remake to the Myst remake so far.

I'd love to see more classic PC games of the 90s get this kind of loving re-creation by their original developers. It's a real treat, whether you played the original or not.