The Riven remake transforms a tricky classic into a modern masterpiece

polygon.com:

Back in the early 1990s, the creators of Myst had a problem with their testers. Players would wander around the initial island, poking at the rocket ship, flipping the levers on the podiums up and down, and watching as none of it did anything. The quantity of puzzles was overwhelming, the solutions inaccessible. They’d get bored, and then get frustrated, and then too many of them would give up.

The solution was to add a hologram, near the starting point of the game, which contained a recorded message from Myst’s guiding figure, Atrus. And if players missed that room, there was a piece of paper — a piece of paper, loose on the ground — with a note on it that told players — with, like, words! — to go check that room.

Today, this would be fixed by making the message room more obvious. Or by starting with the player facing the door, or by putting the room in a privileged position. In the genre of puzzle games in which you explore a series of freaky li’l rooms, environmental storytelling is king. Except the phrase “environmental storytelling” wouldn’t be coined until years after the release of Myst and its expectation-shattering sequel, Riven.

To unpack the legacy of those two games would take another article on its own, but suffice it to say, the genre that developer Cyan Worlds put on the map has done some significant evolving in the 30 years since Myst and Riven were first released. Which is exactly why it’s so fascinating to play this week’s 3D remake of Riven, in which Rand Miller and the rest of the folks at Cyan return to a masterpiece with three decades of environmental puzzle games at their backs.

Riven (2024) is a compelling work of preservation. The game’s earliest life began as the Starry Expanse Project, a fan-run effort to faithfully convert the three hours of video and nearly 5000 images that make up the original Riven into a traversable 3D environment. The final result, after Cyan officially absorbed the Project’s assets and even hired some of its