A Glorious Trip Home: A Review of the 2024 Riven Remake

I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a video game before. I don’t think I’ve been so excited about a video game in more than a decade.

You have to understand, I grew up with Cyan games. They were one of my autistic obsessions. I was a lonely girl, a girl with no proper diagnosis because high-masking autism in girls was not something the medical community knew about in the 90s. I was bullied in Catholic schools until I suffered from post-traumatic stress. Then I was homeschooled, which was a good thing that I needed but also isolating in its way. I got through by reading speculative fiction, and by playing video games when I could. And all the stories and games that I loved most were stories about leaving the world as we know it and going someplace magical: I read The Chronicles of Narnia until I memorized them. At some point, a CD-ROM of Myst came into the house, and of course I was in love: a video game with no guns, no aliens and no fist fights, just bizarre atmospheric worlds you could escape to, and get trapped in, by touching a book. That was Heaven.

We convinced my strict Charismatic Catholic mother that “Myst” was just short for “Mystery” and not “Mystical” so her fears spurred by the Satanic Panic were allayed. We were allowed to play Myst.  My brothers two and four years younger than me used to sit side by side at the great big noisy Macintosh and fight over who got to click the mouse as we solved puzzles. And then, we found out about Riven: The Sequel to Myst. We ordered Riven from the public library on an inter-library loan. We spent weeks trying to memorize the animal sounds and learn to count in Base Five. We had to renew the library loan twice before we solved the whole thing. Those are some blissfully happy memories of a childhood that was miserable much of the time. I love all five of the Myst games plus Uru. There’s not a single one I haven’t played over and over.

When I heard there was going to be a modern remake of Riven, I nearly cried.

When they teased that this version of Riven would be greatly expanded with lots of new things to see and do, I was on the edge of my seat.  I’ve been daydreaming about all the parts of Riven that were just off camera for decades. I can’t tell you how high my expectations were.

Bear that in mind when I tell you: the 2024 re-imagining of Riven did not disappoint, at all.

Riven follows the exact same story as the 1997 original. The game still opens with Atrus sending you into the linking book to rescue his wife, whom you’ve never met or seen before, with no way back to D’ni. Your only weapon in your quest, a trick Linking Book, is immediately stolen upon your arrival, and then the thief in turn is assaulted and robbed in front of you. The cage door opens. And then you’re off on your adventure. The aim of the game is the same: rescue Catherine and capture the evil Ghen before Riven self-destructs. But the gameplay is completely modernized. The new game is not a flipbook of images you can interact with by clicking on things. It’s a world you can walk or run through with the arrow keys. You can look all around in a smooth circle, just as you would in real life. You don’t have to stop where you are and stand still when someone’s talking to you; you can rudely look away. When you move from space to space, you don’t do so in a series of jumps from one picture to another. You just walk or run there. Indeed, the walking and running is so smooth that I started to get carsick. I had to play the game for only ten minutes at a time, at first, because my brain accepted what was happening as real. Then I adapted to it and I couldn’t stop playing for hours.

The slightly grainy video cut scenes from the nineties have all been replaced by CGI, and it’s excellent CGI. It’s not rubbery or ethereal-looking; it’s miles away from the disappointing animation in the 2021 Myst remake. When Ghen takes a puff on his pipe or two characters embrace, it looks as though the characters have real weight and can interact with their surroundings. If you admired John Keston’s performance as Ghen as much as I did in 1997, you’ll be pleased to know that they just animated the CGI on top of his original performance and it’s still his voice, so nothing has been lost. Personally, I don’t like the look of CGI characters as much as I liked the videos, but they grew on me because they’re very well done.

The game did take me hours and hours to play, even though I had played the old one several times, because it’s been greatly expanded. There are far more ladders to climb and nooks and crannies to explore. You can step off the paths in several places. You can walk on the beach near those weird barking sea creatures on Jungle Island and even wade in the shallows. There are new places to go on several of the islands. You can explore much more of two other worlds you glimpsed in the original game, and I won’t spoil anything about a THIRD, brand new, very confusing world with a nice satisfying series of pipes and steering wheels to crank.

And what’s more: the new Riven has all new puzzles. They didn’t just scramble the answers to the old puzzles. They’re new puzzles. Those rotating eyeballs around Jungle Island are gone. You’re going to have to discover the Rivenese and the D’ni cultures all over again if you want to get anywhere. You’re going to learn a whole new complicated numeral system as well as the old Base Five D’ni system. The new puzzles are, largely, as fun as the old. The handful of puzzles that were so notoriously difficult they made people give up in exasperation in the nineties have been replaced with puzzles that are more intuitive and fun, but still challenging. Longtime fans of Riven will understand when I tell them that I had to try the notorious “waffle iron” only four times, and then I solved it instead of giving up in despair. The result is just what you want from a Cyan game puzzle: mystifying at first, a bit frustrating as you get the hang of it, and then immensely satisfying.

In other words, not only does the player get to go back to Riven in 2024, you get to feel inept and mystified by Riven, even though you’ve been there a hundred times before.

When I finally finished with the last puzzle and watched the ending sequence, I was thrilled, but also sad it was over.

I hope they’re already re-making Exile, the third Myst game, with a CGI refreshing of Brad Dourif’s supremely cheesy performance and a whole new set of better puzzles. I hope we get new spinoff games about D’ni with new complex, atmospheric worlds to explore. I would love to find out what adventures Atrus and The Stranger had together in between Exile and Revelation, for example. They must have had them, because the dialogue in Revelation establishes that we’ve visited several times. Those are stories I’ve always wanted to know.

In the meanwhile, I’m going to play Riven again several times.

You can find the game on Steam and Gog right now.