Riven's remake is out today and makes me feel weird – there’s still a demo, if you’re quick

rockpapershotgun.com:

Cyan Worlds' remake of their 1997-released Myst sequel Riven launches today on Steam. Word on the reviewvine is that it's jolly decent, offering free movement around a real-time 3D reinvention of the original point-and-clicker's shimmering archipelago, with its many murals of crushed and scattered civilisations. There’s still a demo on Steam at the time of writing, a relic of long-ago Next Fest 2024. Demos tend to be removed once the game hits shelves, so I thought I’d rush you a quick post based on 30 minutes with the remake over lunch.

Riven’s world feels odder today than it did when I laid eyes on it as a teenager. I think that’s partly because it’s a fossilised vision of the internet from before the broadband era, a Narnian panegyric to the humble hyperlink. The Myst games unfold in a universe of pocket dimensions or “Ages” - accessed by diving into the pages of magic books and made up of obscure, half-real mechanisms, where generations of artisanal explorers and inventors vie to reclaim lost knowledge while prosecuting grudges and giving into their megalomaniacal tendencies.

You are a nameless Stranger, asked by Myst’s benevolent patriarch Atrus to rescue his wife, Catherine, from an Age created by his wayward father. Play is about exploring the archipelago and poking at exquisite, weather-worn brass instruments to open doors and reach different islands. It's a mesmerising place, but a frustrating one to unravel: one of the first things you discover is a broken lever.

The other reason the Riven remake demo feels odd is that something in me rebels against the translation of the original’s static environment art into real-time 3D. The remake is beautiful, and moreover, true to the ethereal pristine dessication of the 1997 game’s Softimage-produced and Hypercard-mounted landscapes, but – perhaps because I used to dabble with making games in Hypercard myself – I felt a bizarre unease about failing to match my perspective to the old frozen vistas. Exploring the demo