To me, the Myst series seems to take the librarian's metaphor "books are a gateway to another world" to a literal and beautiful end. The games are deeply reverential of books, their binding and writing and art, as well as industrial material and engineering from the 19th century. I think it's quite special that the Millers devoted one medium (video games) to celebrate the beauty of another. Despite the worries of boomers and people stuck in the past, books and literature are something very much valued today, alongside artful cinema and simulacra.
@@1r0zz lol no it isn't. there's always been bad art, mass produced karp designed for profit instead of expression, but none of these mediums are dying. There are still messages worth filming, and still people passionate about creating quality experiences. You just have to be open to changes in the medium and culture producing it, and you'll see every century and every decade has its Kubricks, alongside its Michael Bays.
Rocketing through the roof in VR must have been quite an experience! About Gehn's copy-pasting, I like to think that the fact you can hear the sounds of different Rivenese animals in Uru (the ytram in Kadish Tolesa and the wahrk in Dereno) means that Gehn copied these animals from those Ages. Thinking this way reassures me that the Rivenese animals didn't actually go extinct, since their progenitors are still living out there in stable Ages. (I know it's all fiction, leave me alone, it affects me.)
@@HalaBasinah Theoretically, there's at least one Age that's just like Riven, only Gehn never visited it, and his writing never destabilized the world.
The fact Gehn only refers to Ages as numbers instead of names tells you all you need to know on how he views them. They're just a number, a disposable number.
Daaaamn! I ain’t think about that! Almost reminds me of Frieza colonizing planets in DBZ. He was about to call Namek “Planet Frieza 80” if memory serves before conquering. 😂
Worse still, in the novels when Atrus met his father’s acolytes (in an age Ghen would screw up so bad the book would end up linking to a different reality), they were numbered too! Yahvo’s sake, he went to all the trouble of teaching them a language he knew (as opposed to learning their tongue), and didn’t bother asking their names afterwards!
Ah even though the book was thrown into the ficher of the space energy the ledges under it could have caught it and other things like books of discarded books
39:58 First time I heard the Kadish Gallery theme in Uru I was too engrossed in the gameplay for it to click how gorgeous it was until it came round a second time, and then the dawning realisation of its amazing quality was spine-tingling. I had to stop playing the game for a while just to absorb this stunning piece of the music, which, once you stop to listen to it properly, stays with you forever.
I did the same. These games are made to be savored. I think we've all just hung out in our favorite spots and stopped gameplay for a bit, just to enjoy the music or the view.
That glass is a very nice light reflection/refraction study. Back in the day when Riven was released these optical effects were the most computationally demanding and time consuming during rendering, often taking days to complete even a single frame on the most powerful workstations. It's astonishing that now this effect is way more correct physically and calculated/rendered in real time at hundreds of frames per second... We waste so much resources on stupid games. I wish this computing power was available to game creators in the 90s.
@@sinus2220 I'm glad it wasn't, the gaming industry never would have got started if consumers expected modern visuals and nobody had any experience making them.
I've always felt the depiction of the Five Guilds linked them to an island each. Builders on Temple Island because of the dome, educators on Jungle Island because of the school, Surveyors on Survey Island, and the Bookmakers on Prison Island because of the huge tree. The only oddity is the Maintainers for Crater Island; which I guess was Gehn's primary spot of operations before moving to the 233rd Age? Speaking of the 233rd Age, if I failed that many times to write a stable planet then at that point I think I'd just kidnap someone who knew how to write books (like Atrus) and force him/her to tell me what I'm doing wrong. Also I like how this remake does two essential things: expand upon glimpses of the first game showed us so we can learn more, and give us more reasons to hate Gehn.
@@WarthogDemon Book Assembly/Crater Island is for the Bookmakers. The Maintainers are presumably spread all over Riven, but it would make sense to associate them with the Prison Island, since it used to be Gehn's private space (and likely was kept under guard) and now holds Catherine's prison.Prison. As for Gehn's writing, he's too much of a narcissist to admit that he doesn't really understand what he's doing. Imprisoning Atrus with Riven's Descriptive Book, along with a pen and ink, is the closest he's ever come to admitting that Atrus understood the Art better than he did.
1:38 there's one of those moths/butterflies from Jungle Island sitting on the stone sphere. Also, if you don't visit Catherine until after you recover the Trap Book (like I did in my playthrough), her dialogue will be a combination of her first and second scenes. So she'll mention how Gehn is watching you but also give the hint about the combination being on Age 233 and that you need to capture Gehn to get it. Interesting foresight by Cyan.
46:55 My hypothesis, based on the fact that the 235th Age book is on his desk, is that Gehn tried sending some men into the 234th Age, but the Age proved incapable of supporting human life (maybe its atmosphere wasn’t breathable); his writing abilities are so bad that he struggles even to write Ages that are survivable. And yeah, he treats the Rivenese like coal to be used as fuel for the fires of his industry, so why should he treat their grave markers any better?
Incidentally, I'm guessing the smaller books that are locked up beside the Age 233 are Linking Books to other locations around Riven; since he doesn't have five power stations in this version, he can only power one Book at a time.
You mean to tell me this whole time he was barbecuing outside?!? I thought he was conducting some sort of experiment or performing an engineering survey.
Oof, Sven was many times so close of seeing a recently new (and IMO quite Important) addition if he only would have looked up a little higher above the Dish in 233 when standing outside, like 90° up, tbf I also almost missed it too while recently replaying this after the latest Patch 😅
Yoooo it’s so crazy i heard about its addition on the myst subreddit, people thought it was a glitch at first but it’s so intentionally supposed to be there. It answers a lot of questions about gehn’s skill as a writer & why he may have referenced his age being a failure in his second journal
I always assumed that the Fissure was the result of Catherine's modifications, and that it was something she got from her dreams. The series makes a point about Catherine having visions and dreams, which she seems to attribute to divine inspiration, and the dreams apparently show her garohevtee that the D'ni didn’t know.
I also like the idea that Gehn knows ages need air but he also lacks subtlety so he thinks **more air** is better. And he wrote it into his descriptive book that way. And now age 233 has a super dense atmosphere.
@@donwald3436 I mean, if the pressure inside is inhabitable but the pressure outside isn't, then yeah some transition zone is needed (hypothetically. this game kind of clearly establishes that's not the case)
You can get a bit of extra dialogue if you refuse to use the prison book when he offers it. You can do this up to three times before he loses patience with you.
The grey checkerboard textured books on the left of the shelf at 34:54 are actually using the default missing texture material in Unreal Engine. Cyan made a small snafu.
28:20 It makes sense to me that, since what the linking panel shows (an Age) doesn't represent where the book actually takes you ("the dark void of the link"), anyone currently trapped would not show up in the linking panel. If a person being trapped in the book made the panel switch from showing an Age to showing the trapped person against a black background like we see Myst, Gehn would surely have gotten suspicious enough not to use the book. On the other hand, Catherine concluding that you've trapped Gehn by looking at the linking panel doesn't really fit with that.
I love how desolate and hopeless age 233 is. Especially the impossible rock formations, as if ghen tried to write in mountains but fudged the algorithm. In the remake the scale of it is massive too, its really cool
Even stranger than the fact that the view from Prison Island is 2.5° off from horizon level, is that right after you talk to Catherine, it's approximately level again... like the game is trying to tell you Catherine is a very leveling influence. Then it's un-level by 2.2° when you reach the ground, where it was previously level before you spoke to her. I vaguely remember that in the original, there were some scenes that weren't horizon-leveled. So maybe they ported this to the remake?
how many people noticed the sounds of jungle island seeping through that rift floating around the expanse even after someone covered the riven side with those plates?
27:53 Wasn't Gehn supposed to be seen getting his rifle, proving, just before he links, that he really hasn't changed and was in fact planning to kill Atrus?
If we ever, by some cosmic miracle, get another myst title, i would love to see the opportunity for players to write their own ages. I know it wouldn't be the same as exploring Cyan's own worlds and puzzles, but Mystcraft, a minecraft mod, presented a clear example of how fun and engrossing it can be to write your own worlds and explore, or even harvest from, them. It would be, in my mind, the culmination of the promise of Uru, 20 years ago.
This could probably be done with procedural generation. The player could write in a bunch of variables and see what kind of world is created/linked using an algorithm behind the scenes. The player could then write some changes and see what effect they have. I’m not sure how good of a game this would be, but it would be an interesting experience for sure.
People are writing their own Ages, and getting them made public, in Uru. It is free to play (donations appreciated) and thanks to the tireless work of volunteers such as Doobes, fans are getting their own Ages added to the game.
The music box was lovely, thanks for playing it. If I'm remembering correctly, in the original when Gehn is about to follow you into the trap book, he's shown arming his fire-marble gun. I wonder why they changed it.
It is interesting how these book powering systems resemble the hologram technology, when a certain laser is needed to "reveal" the holographic image, make it visible.
Necrovarius did some "Myst Explained" videos, including footage from your LPs! I think that's really awesome. I can't wait for his Myst IV Explained video. I think it's very near completion.
Finding keys to unlock the book case is a good idea if he didn't take them with him i wonder why he didn't have a contengency plan to link out with a solution to a trap book😅
28:40 Well isn't it confirmed that the image in a linking book doesn't show live footage of the age you are linking to, but is moreso a general idea of what the age is like? Atrus said as much in the opening when he said that although he monitizes the Riven book he wouldn't be able to see you trying to contact him - like if you were sending smoke signals or waving your arms - but he would be able to see general changes in the age's nature.
I have always enjoyed your walk-throughs. In the past, I would see them after you had uploaded them long before I found them. However, with Riven remake, I am getting frustrated waiting 2, 3 days before the next video. LOL I don't really have an issue with it, it's just I may be impatient!!!
Now we know that cooking dinner outside was all the work that Gehn was doing that he didn't want to be interrupted from by the stranger, until the stranger returned with the book.
This video answers my question on whether an Age can contain its own Descriptive Book: it can! While there is still heavy debate on whether D'ni writers create Ages or merely create links to pre-existing worlds, it's still surreal to think that a universe, as described in a Descriptive Book, can technically be inside itself. By the way, I can't shake how just before he uses the Prison Book, Gehn's expression resembles Fred Armisen's cameo in Barry.
Is it confirmed how exactly imprisonment in linking books work regarding the wellbeing of the prisoner? Like, if Gehn is just trapped in a void with no food or water, wouldn't this prison of his contain a corpse who'd starved to death after about a week? Also, say you figure that a person has served their sentence, how will you go about releasing them again without sacrificing someone else to take their place? In regard to these questions I am actually glad the lore was changed in the fourth game to say that prison books were actual ages designed without a way out and with absolutely NO way to produce new linking books. Horrible as Gehn is, he doesn't deserve to starve to death in a black void, and if Atrus disagrees he's perhaps even more heartless than his old man.
I wonder how many people Gehn would bother to take with him. If he decides to take none, he's going to have to excavate his way out of that round room in Dni by himself. Something tells me he'd just take a loyal few dozen. You want to know the SCARY part though? What if he learns about the surface world? Don't let their art style fool you, the Dni were probably a 0.9 to a 1.5 on the Kardashev scale, with nearly-indestructible space suits and instant-killing bioweapons. I wonder how much Gehn knows about the outside world... If the Stranger made the mistake of writing about the surface before helping Atrus, it is doomed starting with New Orleans or Mexico City. His would be a conquest faster and more devastating than Cortez, and his reign could last for hundreds of years. If the Stranger lets Gehn escape, it would be the end of the world as we knew it.
Wait so the D'ni are a space faring civilisation? I'm not that familiar with myst lore but I thought they were only on early industial age level of technological advancement at most. And like what even is that place this trap book is supposed to link to? Does Atrus just live underground?
@@rhogal8310 It's sort of a long story but basically: 1) They don't travel THROUGH space but rather write a bunch of books to other worlds. As far as we know they never had spaceflight, but never really needed it either (excepting that weird 1950s rocket ship Atrus somehow built on Myst. The first game is weird like that.) The D'ni LOOK steampunk-ish but their Guild of Maintainers used spacesuits that were extremely durable because they didn't want to accidentally perish when linking to a new world for the first time. They didn't fight many wars, but they can build giant machines and access "unlimited" resources by writing books to worlds full of the things they want. The Myst game Uru has a lot of D'ni architecture and giant machinery, including an entire prison that rotates, so you can't write a linking book to escape (you need a stationary location to write a linking book.) The D'ni also had a super material called Nara, which is basically rock thrown into a "fusion-compounder" that compacts the atoms of the rock into a smaller space, creating nearly unbreakable materials stronger than steel. 2) The trap book resembles the room at the start of the game. The room Atrus talks to you in at the beginning is actually a big meeting hall or something, in the middle of an underground lake, just off the shore of D'ni. The city of D'ni is basically underground Atlantis, built over a mile beneath the southern New Mexico desert. At the time of the first few games everything's ruined and half-buried, but near the end of the franchise people started to explore and excavate things. In theory, if the Stranger had the time and tools, he or she could have maybe dug their way out past all the rubble and found their way back to the surface, but they would have had to reactivate or climb up an elevator shaft over a mile high. It was easier to just do everything in Riven than dig their way out.
I don't know a whole lot of the lore, but we must remember that Gehn's own mother is human, so Gehn must at the very least be aware of "a" world outside the D'ni cavern. Also the D'ni as a whole are also aware of such; after all, the games Uru and End Of Ages show us The Great Shaft, a D'ni engineering project that would have connected the underground city/cavern with the surface world. As for the underground room (K'veer), Gehn would not have enough info to determine that the room is completely sealed off. (Indeed, in End Of Ages, it isn't sealed at all; a retcon, likely).
@@ScooterBond1970 The D'ni were really just sort of dabbling in exploring earth, oddly enough. Their entire society seems very, VERY built around the idea of one big central underground hub with a few linking book vacation homes for some reason. They were pretty scared of the surface and didn't have maps of it, I think. Maybe it's because their original homeworld orbited a dark red star, so living in a dark cave made them feel nice and safe without hurting their eyes? I'd have to binge read the wiki again. Gehn's mother was indeed a surface woman, one who stumbled upon the city during it's later years. It caused a big scandal when Gehn was born and he was basically treated like a second class citizen his entire life until the Fall of D'ni though he still fell in love with his country. After that, Gehn, Atrus's grandmother and a newborn Atrus lived on the surface for a while, Gehn abandoned his family to explore the ruins beneath. It doesn't say whether or not he bothered to explore the wider world, but I bet his family used to tell him about it. Kveer isn't sealed off anymore by End of Ages because it takes place after the events of Exile, Revelations, and Uru. Basically Atrus found a little under two thousand D'ni survivors, they did some scavenging/repairs/exploration of the ruins and left to build a new home. Then the D'ni Restoration Society showed up in the 1990's to fix up the place in a big archeological dig. End of Ages takes place sometime shortly after the end of Uru, so about... 2002? 2003? Anyway either Atrus or the DRS cleared the entrance to Kveer sometime after the events of Riven.
I thought that prison books were later retconned as prison ages in later instalments of the Myst series. With all the changes made in this remake, you'd think that at least you'd be able to have a glimpse of Ghen's prison age in this version.
The prison isn't a separate Age in this case -- it was a linking book to D'ni. What makes it a prison is some modified text in the book that interrupts the normal link process and traps them in a void. Reversing that change and "opening the prison" would allow the link to complete and dump Gehn in k'Veer. In the case of Atrus' sons, the prison books were to new Ages because they were intending to exploit new places.
Prison Books were re-conned, yes; officially, they're artistic license taken by Cyan to create a playable game. The "real" scenario would involve a Prison Age with a room that looks like K'veer, but is actually on another Age entirely.
@@micahbush5397 Then how does the Riven prison book work? If it was an normal linking book to an age made to look the same, Gehn and the stranger would both be trapped there.
@@Lunyaaaa The best scenario I can figure involves a more rehearsed plan. Atrus must have hidden a Linking Book somewhere in the Prison Age, probably secured such that Gehn would never be able to brute force his way to it. There would have to be a readily accessible way to destroy the Book (ex. a lava pit or an acid pool), and preferably a way to incapacitate Gehn when he arrived (maybe a knockout gas?) just in case he brought his own Linking Book. The Stranger would know exactly where to find the hidden Linking Book, and would be able to escape without leaving Gehn a way out.
That's overly complicated though. The facts as already stated is that a "one person prison" book is an ordinary linking book with some key gahrohevtee deleted or added in just the right way to show a normal linking panel but trap the traveller in the void on the source side of the link, such that a second traveller will displace the first back to the source Age. Restoring the book to original condition repairs the link and the traveller continues to the destination Age, just with a large time lag. (The last part is somewhat more of an assumption, but it makes sense and is consistent with Myst IV.) When Atrus was trapped in k'Veer, that wasn't a prison book (since his sons didn't know how to write one) -- they just removed his other books and tricked him into going without bringing a new one, much like how Gehn was originally trapped in Riven. The prison book in Riven must have been an actual k'Veer book -- you can see him reading through the pages of the book. While he wouldn't have remembered enough of the book to write a new one (and linking books have to be written at the destination anyway), he'd certainly remember enough of it to recognise a fake. So that's not the retcon. The only actual inconsistency is that in Myst, the linking panels (of both prison and regular books) allowed two-way communication with people on the other side. Which could make sense for prison books (but then Gehn would never have been tricked, and we see direct evidence that didn't happen afterwards) but definitely doesn't make sense for regular books. So that part must have been artistic license for the game, and the Stranger found out what was going on through some other method (such as more journals).
I don't think it really makes a difference if Gehn actually believes that he's a godlike entity or just constructed the mythos to subjugate Riven, he's insane either way and needed to be stopped.
How did Gehn actually convince the Rivenese that he is a God? Did he bring some impressive technology? Did he give out working linking books, so the people could see what he could do?
He had knowledge of advanced technology from D'ni, linking into an Age would be a very impressive first introduction, he had the ability to modify Ages, and he apparently looted D'ni to build temples to himself, decorated with finery unknown to the people of his Ages.
I wonder if the island is breaking up because the world is unstable or because the description book is flawed and causing parts of an alternate reality to intrude due to poorly balancing the link. And as such thus making the local area become increasingly warped, something one presumes could then lead to the breaking up of the island. Interestingly enough if one considers where one links in, then it is near some of the more significant fault line of where the islands broke apart, being even right on the cliff overlooking the islands from the interior. And right next to it is the biggest and I guess first of the starry rifts. So it does kind of feel like the link in area potentially the ground zero of where things started going badly wrong. Sadly none of that really helps determine if worlds ares created or linked. But either way Atrus is modifying something with all his writing,. So if one went with Atrus point of view, then presumably they think that they are then modifying the linking effect in the local area then. Because if you aren't creating the world, all you can do is modify the link structure with in the limits of what is already written. I guess there are some experiments one could in theory try out for the matter. But who knows if anyone did so, though some level of trying out does seem to be done by the current book makers. So if the D'ni were anything like that, then surely they put at least some efforts in to try and determine if they were linking or creating places. At least so one would speculate.
In my personal opinion, if this remake has one glaring weak point compared to the original (besides the CGI characters), it's been the acting/dialogue of Atrus and Catherine. It feels a lot less believable/tonally appropriate than in the original, at least so far. I guess they decided that since some of the context of the scenes would be different, they had to redo everything for the sake of consistency, but I wish it felt more like the original's delivery.
Yeah, I am still unconvinced that The Art just links to worlds and I support Gehn's point of view. I just don't see how The Art can alter a world if it is not creating said world. However, that doesn't mean that I support Gehn's insanity.
This is the way I understand the art. It operates like an AI art generator and a sensitive programming engine. The books are like advanced prompts. You write a descriptive book and the book finds the closest world to the description. Once you have the world, you can modify it subtly, major changes go against the “programming” of the age and break it. Small changes like adding the daggers in Riven are ok. If you are Gehn and mess up with the descriptive book then at best nothing happens and you failed. At worst, your book has linked to a world that is screwed up from the original.
I actually like the ambiguity of the creation/discovery argument. Particularly when we also consider the Bahro as part of the process, either creating or finding ages seems to be only in part the writing, and rather the Art is something interpreted by the Bahro? The question is as much "how does writing change physics/material reality?", and "how does it create a link between worlds?"
kimbertactpro9 ...See henke37's reply. Look, you will need only a Linking Book if what you say is true. However, The Art requires a Descriptive Book with complex and balance equations in order to create a stable Age. It just doesn't make sense to me that Gehn's shortcuts create flaws in an already stable Age. Go in Peace and Walk with God. 😎 👍
TheSkullPanda ...You bring up excellent questions. Still, I am still in the creation camp. When you break down everything we know about The Art, I just can't justify the discovery argument in my head. Go with God and Be Safe from Evil. 😎 👍
![Part 14 + Ending: Trap yourself in the Trap Book | Riven | [VR][No commentary]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/SuW054F_EeY/mqdefault.jpg)
“Welcome back” The sweetest sound at the end of a long day at work
To me, the Myst series seems to take the librarian's metaphor "books are a gateway to another world" to a literal and beautiful end. The games are deeply reverential of books, their binding and writing and art, as well as industrial material and engineering from the 19th century. I think it's quite special that the Millers devoted one medium (video games) to celebrate the beauty of another. Despite the worries of boomers and people stuck in the past, books and literature are something very much valued today, alongside artful cinema and simulacra.
Artful cinema is something we are losing /:
I never considered it to be a literal interpretation of that metaphor before. That is clever, lol.
@@TheSkullPanda I actually thought about that too! It’s definitely genius. Great point about cinema too.
@@1r0zz lol no it isn't. there's always been bad art, mass produced karp designed for profit instead of expression, but none of these mediums are dying. There are still messages worth filming, and still people passionate about creating quality experiences. You just have to be open to changes in the medium and culture producing it, and you'll see every century and every decade has its Kubricks, alongside its Michael Bays.
@@TheSkullPanda
“messages worth filming” yeah, alright. See ya
Rocketing through the roof in VR must have been quite an experience!
About Gehn's copy-pasting, I like to think that the fact you can hear the sounds of different Rivenese animals in Uru (the ytram in Kadish Tolesa and the wahrk in Dereno) means that Gehn copied these animals from those Ages. Thinking this way reassures me that the Rivenese animals didn't actually go extinct, since their progenitors are still living out there in stable Ages. (I know it's all fiction, leave me alone, it affects me.)
@@HalaBasinah Theoretically, there's at least one Age that's just like Riven, only Gehn never visited it, and his writing never destabilized the world.
The fact Gehn only refers to Ages as numbers instead of names tells you all you need to know on how he views them. They're just a number, a disposable number.
Daaaamn! I ain’t think about that! Almost reminds me of Frieza colonizing planets in DBZ. He was about to call Namek “Planet Frieza 80” if memory serves before conquering. 😂
Age(s) Ain't Nothing But a Number.
Well he thinks he creates them so why not, you make one maybe you keep it maybe you burn it lol.
Worse still, in the novels when Atrus met his father’s acolytes (in an age Ghen would screw up so bad the book would end up linking to a different reality), they were numbered too! Yahvo’s sake, he went to all the trouble of teaching them a language he knew (as opposed to learning their tongue), and didn’t bother asking their names afterwards!
Ah even though the book was thrown into the ficher of the space energy the ledges under it could have caught it and other things like books of discarded books
The linking panel of the burnt book in the fire pit gave me the impression that it could be an Easter egg of Cyan’s upcoming project. 🤔
That would be cool.
44:24 Gehn: “The work I am doing is quite demanding.” (Translation: “LET ME EAT.” 🤣🤣)
I guess we shouldn't have interrupted him during lunch.
39:58 First time I heard the Kadish Gallery theme in Uru I was too engrossed in the gameplay for it to click how gorgeous it was until it came round a second time, and then the dawning realisation of its amazing quality was spine-tingling. I had to stop playing the game for a while just to absorb this stunning piece of the music, which, once you stop to listen to it properly, stays with you forever.
I did the same. These games are made to be savored. I think we've all just hung out in our favorite spots and stopped gameplay for a bit, just to enjoy the music or the view.
maybe in another 27 years if the world is still turning we can explore that book that ghen was burning. it looked to be in shape enough to fix
That glass is a very nice light reflection/refraction study. Back in the day when Riven was released these optical effects were the most computationally demanding and time consuming during rendering, often taking days to complete even a single frame on the most powerful workstations. It's astonishing that now this effect is way more correct physically and calculated/rendered in real time at hundreds of frames per second... We waste so much resources on stupid games. I wish this computing power was available to game creators in the 90s.
@@sinus2220 I'm glad it wasn't, the gaming industry never would have got started if consumers expected modern visuals and nobody had any experience making them.
I've always felt the depiction of the Five Guilds linked them to an island each. Builders on Temple Island because of the dome, educators on Jungle Island because of the school, Surveyors on Survey Island, and the Bookmakers on Prison Island because of the huge tree. The only oddity is the Maintainers for Crater Island; which I guess was Gehn's primary spot of operations before moving to the 233rd Age?
Speaking of the 233rd Age, if I failed that many times to write a stable planet then at that point I think I'd just kidnap someone who knew how to write books (like Atrus) and force him/her to tell me what I'm doing wrong.
Also I like how this remake does two essential things: expand upon glimpses of the first game showed us so we can learn more, and give us more reasons to hate Gehn.
@@WarthogDemon Book Assembly/Crater Island is for the Bookmakers. The Maintainers are presumably spread all over Riven, but it would make sense to associate them with the Prison Island, since it used to be Gehn's private space (and likely was kept under guard) and now holds Catherine's prison.Prison.
As for Gehn's writing, he's too much of a narcissist to admit that he doesn't really understand what he's doing. Imprisoning Atrus with Riven's Descriptive Book, along with a pen and ink, is the closest he's ever come to admitting that Atrus understood the Art better than he did.
1:38 there's one of those moths/butterflies from Jungle Island sitting on the stone sphere.
Also, if you don't visit Catherine until after you recover the Trap Book (like I did in my playthrough), her dialogue will be a combination of her first and second scenes. So she'll mention how Gehn is watching you but also give the hint about the combination being on Age 233 and that you need to capture Gehn to get it. Interesting foresight by Cyan.
I love your narration! It has added a lot to my game :)
46:55 My hypothesis, based on the fact that the 235th Age book is on his desk, is that Gehn tried sending some men into the 234th Age, but the Age proved incapable of supporting human life (maybe its atmosphere wasn’t breathable); his writing abilities are so bad that he struggles even to write Ages that are survivable.
And yeah, he treats the Rivenese like coal to be used as fuel for the fires of his industry, so why should he treat their grave markers any better?
Incidentally, I'm guessing the smaller books that are locked up beside the Age 233 are Linking Books to other locations around Riven; since he doesn't have five power stations in this version, he can only power one Book at a time.
That’s so funny about being catapulted out of the cage. It happened to me as well. It was kinda cool. 😎 … I reported it to Cyan.
You mean to tell me this whole time he was barbecuing outside?!? I thought he was conducting some sort of experiment or performing an engineering survey.
Oof, Sven was many times so close of seeing a recently new (and IMO quite Important) addition if he only would have looked up a little higher above the Dish in 233 when standing outside, like 90° up, tbf I also almost missed it too while recently replaying this after the latest Patch 😅
Yoooo it’s so crazy i heard about its addition on the myst subreddit, people thought it was a glitch at first but it’s so intentionally supposed to be there. It answers a lot of questions about gehn’s skill as a writer & why he may have referenced his age being a failure in his second journal
And what is there?
@@nicholasimholte7359 giant blob of starry expanse rift floating in the sky
Odd Sound Design Fact: the sound of the howling wind in 233 is the same as the wind you hear from inside Gehn's lab on Riven
I always assumed that the Fissure was the result of Catherine's modifications, and that it was something she got from her dreams. The series makes a point about Catherine having visions and dreams, which she seems to attribute to divine inspiration, and the dreams apparently show her garohevtee that the D'ni didn’t know.
Tbh I liked the idea that 233's atmosphere isn't friendly to humans/D'ni. The bird fish made me think of some crazy air pressure
I also like the idea that Gehn knows ages need air but he also lacks subtlety so he thinks **more air** is better. And he wrote it into his descriptive book that way. And now age 233 has a super dense atmosphere.
@@daylightsleeptight There would be more to this door if that was the case, though. Some kind of airlock and maybe a protection suit would be in order
@@JaneXemylixa The pressure would be equally high on both aides no need to reinforce the door.
@@donwald3436 I mean, if the pressure inside is inhabitable but the pressure outside isn't, then yeah some transition zone is needed
(hypothetically. this game kind of clearly establishes that's not the case)
More likely, it's just really windy, so the flying fish can glide on the air currents.
You can get a bit of extra dialogue if you refuse to use the prison book when he offers it. You can do this up to three times before he loses patience with you.
The grey checkerboard textured books on the left of the shelf at 34:54 are actually using the default missing texture material in Unreal Engine. Cyan made a small snafu.
28:20 It makes sense to me that, since what the linking panel shows (an Age) doesn't represent where the book actually takes you ("the dark void of the link"), anyone currently trapped would not show up in the linking panel. If a person being trapped in the book made the panel switch from showing an Age to showing the trapped person against a black background like we see Myst, Gehn would surely have gotten suspicious enough not to use the book. On the other hand, Catherine concluding that you've trapped Gehn by looking at the linking panel doesn't really fit with that.
I love how desolate and hopeless age 233 is. Especially the impossible rock formations, as if ghen tried to write in mountains but fudged the algorithm. In the remake the scale of it is massive too, its really cool
11:45 I will now expect someone to make a youtube video about that butterfly titled "WHY this Butterfly is IMPORTANT"
Even stranger than the fact that the view from Prison Island is 2.5° off from horizon level, is that right after you talk to Catherine, it's approximately level again... like the game is trying to tell you Catherine is a very leveling influence. Then it's un-level by 2.2° when you reach the ground, where it was previously level before you spoke to her.
I vaguely remember that in the original, there were some scenes that weren't horizon-leveled. So maybe they ported this to the remake?
Gehns ages might be unstable. But you have to give him that Riven is absolutely beautiful!
how many people noticed the sounds of jungle island seeping through that rift floating around the expanse even after someone covered the riven side with those plates?
27:53 Wasn't Gehn supposed to be seen getting his rifle, proving, just before he links, that he really hasn't changed and was in fact planning to kill Atrus?
If we ever, by some cosmic miracle, get another myst title, i would love to see the opportunity for players to write their own ages. I know it wouldn't be the same as exploring Cyan's own worlds and puzzles, but Mystcraft, a minecraft mod, presented a clear example of how fun and engrossing it can be to write your own worlds and explore, or even harvest from, them. It would be, in my mind, the culmination of the promise of Uru, 20 years ago.
There's a Minecraft mod named Mystcraft it's pretty cool, you can make descriptive and linking books.
This could probably be done with procedural generation. The player could write in a bunch of variables and see what kind of world is created/linked using an algorithm behind the scenes. The player could then write some changes and see what effect they have. I’m not sure how good of a game this would be, but it would be an interesting experience for sure.
People are writing their own Ages, and getting them made public, in Uru. It is free to play (donations appreciated) and thanks to the tireless work of volunteers such as Doobes, fans are getting their own Ages added to the game.
The music box was lovely, thanks for playing it.
If I'm remembering correctly, in the original when Gehn is about to follow you into the trap book, he's shown arming his fire-marble gun. I wonder why they changed it.
@@woodencoyote4372 I wonder that too. My guess is that the animation wasn't working out.
The 233th Age always seemed to me like a landscape fit for the adventures of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. :)
The 234th Age looked cold.
Oh yeah musicbox tune reminds me my dog koki we were listening it together when he was alive in 2016 😊
The butterfly thing is unexpectedly cute
It is interesting how these book powering systems resemble the hologram technology, when a certain laser is needed to "reveal" the holographic image, make it visible.
Yes sven gold on bricks looks so real like it was painted in real life
46:14 What do Boomer Comics and Riven have in common?
"Father, I cannot click the book!"
Necrovarius did some "Myst Explained" videos, including footage from your LPs! I think that's really awesome. I can't wait for his Myst IV Explained video. I think it's very near completion.
Love this music when gehn thinks to put hand on page or not
Finding keys to unlock the book case is a good idea if he didn't take them with him i wonder why he didn't have a contengency plan to link out with a solution to a trap book😅
You can rotate the cooking bird.
Oh cool, I didn't know that.
Medium rare on one side, Extra well done on the other
It looks like it tastes oily, the way settlers described the tate of seabirds like gulls and murres
I've always wondered how Catherine was able to tell that Gehn was trapped in the book, considering we couldn't even see him there.
28:40 Well isn't it confirmed that the image in a linking book doesn't show live footage of the age you are linking to, but is moreso a general idea of what the age is like? Atrus said as much in the opening when he said that although he monitizes the Riven book he wouldn't be able to see you trying to contact him - like if you were sending smoke signals or waving your arms - but he would be able to see general changes in the age's nature.
I have always enjoyed your walk-throughs. In the past, I would see them after you had uploaded them long before I found them. However, with Riven remake, I am getting frustrated waiting 2, 3 days before the next video. LOL I don't really have an issue with it, it's just I may be impatient!!!
Now we know that cooking dinner outside was all the work that Gehn was doing that he didn't want to be interrupted from by the stranger, until the stranger returned with the book.
whoa they let you walk around the 233rd too.
This video answers my question on whether an Age can contain its own Descriptive Book: it can!
While there is still heavy debate on whether D'ni writers create Ages or merely create links to pre-existing worlds, it's still surreal to think that a universe, as described in a Descriptive Book, can technically be inside itself.
By the way, I can't shake how just before he uses the Prison Book, Gehn's expression resembles Fred Armisen's cameo in Barry.
Indeed the most hardest part is not getting shot by Gehn
11:27 How did a butterfly get in here? This isn't Life is Strange!
Is it confirmed how exactly imprisonment in linking books work regarding the wellbeing of the prisoner? Like, if Gehn is just trapped in a void with no food or water, wouldn't this prison of his contain a corpse who'd starved to death after about a week?
Also, say you figure that a person has served their sentence, how will you go about releasing them again without sacrificing someone else to take their place?
In regard to these questions I am actually glad the lore was changed in the fourth game to say that prison books were actual ages designed without a way out and with absolutely NO way to produce new linking books. Horrible as Gehn is, he doesn't deserve to starve to death in a black void, and if Atrus disagrees he's perhaps even more heartless than his old man.
I wonder how many people Gehn would bother to take with him. If he decides to take none, he's going to have to excavate his way out of that round room in Dni by himself. Something tells me he'd just take a loyal few dozen. You want to know the SCARY part though? What if he learns about the surface world? Don't let their art style fool you, the Dni were probably a 0.9 to a 1.5 on the Kardashev scale, with nearly-indestructible space suits and instant-killing bioweapons. I wonder how much Gehn knows about the outside world... If the Stranger made the mistake of writing about the surface before helping Atrus, it is doomed starting with New Orleans or Mexico City. His would be a conquest faster and more devastating than Cortez, and his reign could last for hundreds of years.
If the Stranger lets Gehn escape, it would be the end of the world as we knew it.
Wait so the D'ni are a space faring civilisation? I'm not that familiar with myst lore but I thought they were only on early industial age level of technological advancement at most. And like what even is that place this trap book is supposed to link to? Does Atrus just live underground?
@@rhogal8310 It's sort of a long story but basically:
1) They don't travel THROUGH space but rather write a bunch of books to other worlds. As far as we know they never had spaceflight, but never really needed it either (excepting that weird 1950s rocket ship Atrus somehow built on Myst. The first game is weird like that.) The D'ni LOOK steampunk-ish but their Guild of Maintainers used spacesuits that were extremely durable because they didn't want to accidentally perish when linking to a new world for the first time. They didn't fight many wars, but they can build giant machines and access "unlimited" resources by writing books to worlds full of the things they want. The Myst game Uru has a lot of D'ni architecture and giant machinery, including an entire prison that rotates, so you can't write a linking book to escape (you need a stationary location to write a linking book.)
The D'ni also had a super material called Nara, which is basically rock thrown into a "fusion-compounder" that compacts the atoms of the rock into a smaller space, creating nearly unbreakable materials stronger than steel.
2) The trap book resembles the room at the start of the game. The room Atrus talks to you in at the beginning is actually a big meeting hall or something, in the middle of an underground lake, just off the shore of D'ni. The city of D'ni is basically underground Atlantis, built over a mile beneath the southern New Mexico desert. At the time of the first few games everything's ruined and half-buried, but near the end of the franchise people started to explore and excavate things.
In theory, if the Stranger had the time and tools, he or she could have maybe dug their way out past all the rubble and found their way back to the surface, but they would have had to reactivate or climb up an elevator shaft over a mile high. It was easier to just do everything in Riven than dig their way out.
I don't know a whole lot of the lore, but we must remember that Gehn's own mother is human, so Gehn must at the very least be aware of "a" world outside the D'ni cavern. Also the D'ni as a whole are also aware of such; after all, the games Uru and End Of Ages show us The Great Shaft, a D'ni engineering project that would have connected the underground city/cavern with the surface world.
As for the underground room (K'veer), Gehn would not have enough info to determine that the room is completely sealed off. (Indeed, in End Of Ages, it isn't sealed at all; a retcon, likely).
@@ultimatecorgi3392 thanks that explains it!
@@ScooterBond1970 The D'ni were really just sort of dabbling in exploring earth, oddly enough. Their entire society seems very, VERY built around the idea of one big central underground hub with a few linking book vacation homes for some reason. They were pretty scared of the surface and didn't have maps of it, I think. Maybe it's because their original homeworld orbited a dark red star, so living in a dark cave made them feel nice and safe without hurting their eyes? I'd have to binge read the wiki again.
Gehn's mother was indeed a surface woman, one who stumbled upon the city during it's later years. It caused a big scandal when Gehn was born and he was basically treated like a second class citizen his entire life until the Fall of D'ni though he still fell in love with his country. After that, Gehn, Atrus's grandmother and a newborn Atrus lived on the surface for a while, Gehn abandoned his family to explore the ruins beneath. It doesn't say whether or not he bothered to explore the wider world, but I bet his family used to tell him about it.
Kveer isn't sealed off anymore by End of Ages because it takes place after the events of Exile, Revelations, and Uru. Basically Atrus found a little under two thousand D'ni survivors, they did some scavenging/repairs/exploration of the ruins and left to build a new home. Then the D'ni Restoration Society showed up in the 1990's to fix up the place in a big archeological dig. End of Ages takes place sometime shortly after the end of Uru, so about... 2002? 2003? Anyway either Atrus or the DRS cleared the entrance to Kveer sometime after the events of Riven.
I wonder what Riven looks like at night. Probably very beautiful.
I thought that prison books were later retconned as prison ages in later instalments of the Myst series. With all the changes made in this remake, you'd think that at least you'd be able to have a glimpse of Ghen's prison age in this version.
The prison isn't a separate Age in this case -- it was a linking book to D'ni. What makes it a prison is some modified text in the book that interrupts the normal link process and traps them in a void.
Reversing that change and "opening the prison" would allow the link to complete and dump Gehn in k'Veer.
In the case of Atrus' sons, the prison books were to new Ages because they were intending to exploit new places.
Prison Books were re-conned, yes; officially, they're artistic license taken by Cyan to create a playable game. The "real" scenario would involve a Prison Age with a room that looks like K'veer, but is actually on another Age entirely.
@@micahbush5397 Then how does the Riven prison book work? If it was an normal linking book to an age made to look the same, Gehn and the stranger would both be trapped there.
@@Lunyaaaa The best scenario I can figure involves a more rehearsed plan. Atrus must have hidden a Linking Book somewhere in the Prison Age, probably secured such that Gehn would never be able to brute force his way to it. There would have to be a readily accessible way to destroy the Book (ex. a lava pit or an acid pool), and preferably a way to incapacitate Gehn when he arrived (maybe a knockout gas?) just in case he brought his own Linking Book. The Stranger would know exactly where to find the hidden Linking Book, and would be able to escape without leaving Gehn a way out.
That's overly complicated though. The facts as already stated is that a "one person prison" book is an ordinary linking book with some key gahrohevtee deleted or added in just the right way to show a normal linking panel but trap the traveller in the void on the source side of the link, such that a second traveller will displace the first back to the source Age. Restoring the book to original condition repairs the link and the traveller continues to the destination Age, just with a large time lag. (The last part is somewhat more of an assumption, but it makes sense and is consistent with Myst IV.)
When Atrus was trapped in k'Veer, that wasn't a prison book (since his sons didn't know how to write one) -- they just removed his other books and tricked him into going without bringing a new one, much like how Gehn was originally trapped in Riven.
The prison book in Riven must have been an actual k'Veer book -- you can see him reading through the pages of the book. While he wouldn't have remembered enough of the book to write a new one (and linking books have to be written at the destination anyway), he'd certainly remember enough of it to recognise a fake.
So that's not the retcon. The only actual inconsistency is that in Myst, the linking panels (of both prison and regular books) allowed two-way communication with people on the other side. Which could make sense for prison books (but then Gehn would never have been tricked, and we see direct evidence that didn't happen afterwards) but definitely doesn't make sense for regular books. So that part must have been artistic license for the game, and the Stranger found out what was going on through some other method (such as more journals).
Now that I think about it, how on earth did the Moiety manage to mark the correct symbol on the rapidly rotating domes?
When the domes are opened or closed, there's a brief moment when they are closed and not spinning; they probably marked the domes at that point.
Going to be honest, I felt more excited about 233 than Tay simply because it looked more different.
I hope at some point they release a dlc allowing us to repair 234 and visit it.
Yayy we can go outside
I don't think it really makes a difference if Gehn actually believes that he's a godlike entity or just constructed the mythos to subjugate Riven, he's insane either way and needed to be stopped.
I still don't know why on Earth the spinning room has the Nexus motif around the doorways
I think gehn itself composed this music
awesome!
Gehn makes me think for the leader of North Korea
How did Gehn actually convince the Rivenese that he is a God? Did he bring some impressive technology? Did he give out working linking books, so the people could see what he could do?
He had knowledge of advanced technology from D'ni, linking into an Age would be a very impressive first introduction, he had the ability to modify Ages, and he apparently looted D'ni to build temples to himself, decorated with finery unknown to the people of his Ages.
I wonder if the island is breaking up because the world is unstable or because the description book is flawed and causing parts of an alternate reality to intrude due to poorly balancing the link. And as such thus making the local area become increasingly warped, something one presumes could then lead to the breaking up of the island. Interestingly enough if one considers where one links in, then it is near some of the more significant fault line of where the islands broke apart, being even right on the cliff overlooking the islands from the interior. And right next to it is the biggest and I guess first of the starry rifts. So it does kind of feel like the link in area potentially the ground zero of where things started going badly wrong.
Sadly none of that really helps determine if worlds ares created or linked. But either way Atrus is modifying something with all his writing,. So if one went with Atrus point of view, then presumably they think that they are then modifying the linking effect in the local area then. Because if you aren't creating the world, all you can do is modify the link structure with in the limits of what is already written.
I guess there are some experiments one could in theory try out for the matter. But who knows if anyone did so, though some level of trying out does seem to be done by the current book makers. So if the D'ni were anything like that, then surely they put at least some efforts in to try and determine if they were linking or creating places. At least so one would speculate.
Very Stark looking world?
No chriztian halos are a not only for them it's a known example of sanskrit in Syria and tend to have a reagent in the medieval world
Look whats happening to book when gehn holding it look at pages
In my personal opinion, if this remake has one glaring weak point compared to the original (besides the CGI characters), it's been the acting/dialogue of Atrus and Catherine. It feels a lot less believable/tonally appropriate than in the original, at least so far. I guess they decided that since some of the context of the scenes would be different, they had to redo everything for the sake of consistency, but I wish it felt more like the original's delivery.
Yeah why we could not see gehn in book why they didnt add it
Age is nothing but a number
36:12 what if it's on a timer lol.
Keep it secret. Keep it safe.
28:22 Now link in again lol.
Its a shame not takeing the books he created to use later in the mindset looking for a reasonable amount of educational skills
That spinning mechanism sound ruins musicbox music
How butterfly get in here
Yeah, I am still unconvinced that The Art just links to worlds and I support Gehn's point of view. I just don't see how The Art can alter a world if it is not creating said world. However, that doesn't mean that I support Gehn's insanity.
This is the way I understand the art. It operates like an AI art generator and a sensitive programming engine. The books are like advanced prompts.
You write a descriptive book and the book finds the closest world to the description. Once you have the world, you can modify it subtly, major changes go against the “programming” of the age and break it. Small changes like adding the daggers in Riven are ok.
If you are Gehn and mess up with the descriptive book then at best nothing happens and you failed. At worst, your book has linked to a world that is screwed up from the original.
@@kimbertactpro9 They really need to define the difference between "writing the book" and "modifying the book".
I actually like the ambiguity of the creation/discovery argument. Particularly when we also consider the Bahro as part of the process, either creating or finding ages seems to be only in part the writing, and rather the Art is something interpreted by the Bahro? The question is as much "how does writing change physics/material reality?", and "how does it create a link between worlds?"
kimbertactpro9 ...See henke37's reply.
Look, you will need only a Linking Book if what you say is true. However, The Art requires a Descriptive Book with complex and balance equations in order to create a stable Age. It just doesn't make sense to me that Gehn's shortcuts create flaws in an already stable Age.
Go in Peace and Walk with God. 😎 👍
TheSkullPanda ...You bring up excellent questions.
Still, I am still in the creation camp. When you break down everything we know about The Art, I just can't justify the discovery argument in my head.
Go with God and Be Safe from Evil. 😎 👍
Sven play gehns music box please
Hi sven
hmm