I'll be honest, at first I thought you looked too young to be commenting on Riven but I was happy to be proven wrong haha. Nice to watch a video like this from someone very experienced with the original.
I'm not done with the video but I wanted to mention regarding the domes and how they open, there's actually a pressure plate inside that's what triggers it to open and close. It took me awhile to figure that out too, I would have preferred a button.
2:41: I think part of the idea is that Gehn is supposed to not know what he is doing. He just got lucky. He is just taking advantage of the powers that he found in the Starry Expanse, after he sealed the spatial rifts on Riven with the domes. He's the kind of person he always is: a predator looking for everything and anything to gain power, control, and an audience.
With regards to the bridge that breaks in the remake, it was one of the limiting factors of the 3D remake of the OG game (the bridge was about a mile long) it was a great way to "solve" the "problem".
It's basically the best looking VR game ever. So even with its faults, it's still a unique experience for that given technology. Plus, new songs like the one on prison island enhance its atmosphere
For me, I didn't know about the remake - AT ALL. So this was pleasant surprise, when it came out, since I was wondering to play the Myst remake for the weekend, and what do you know. Just add to the thumnail "Yes, you should". Wanted to drop a video on this, but you have the exact title, I wanted to have. Good job sir! :)))
I have played the original close to 20 times during the last 25 years. I did enjoy many parts of the remake, but I don’t think I’m gonna play it again.
I was in the odd spot of having played the Myst remake first, but the Riven remake was still on "timeline TBD". I eventually went for the original, and I don't regret it, but it was amusing that the remake then began the full release process a couple of months afterwards. At least I can put the feather in my cap of solving the original fire marble puzzle. 😎
no one really gave a good energetic explanation of many of the MYST games. You did this one justice i think. its a good intro to help people save time or at least talk about it . Facilitating a talk in comments. etc
Such a thoughtful and in-depth video from someone who knows the game really well 🙂 Loved it. It’s my favourite game of all time (first played when I was 26 back in ’96). Unfortunately I don’t have an M1 Mac so I’m watching playthrough’s. Personally I don’t like that they made stuff easier. And took away some of the significance of the animals by changing those wooden balls. And yeah, as you say, the real people’s recorded parts in the original. There was no choice really as I know Catherine and Gehn are gone now (deceased)…so no way to re-do it.
I love Riven. I played it as a young teen in the 90s and have replayed it a couple times since. Overall I'm extremely pleased with the remake, despite the abysmal character models. I thought almost every change to the puzzles was well done. I was slightly disappointed by the simplification of the map puzzle grid from 25x25 to 5x5 as I thought finding the domes exact cell was a fun and pretty fair aspect of the puzzle. One of my favorite themes of Riven is the heavy use of 5 in every aspect of the world and I really enjoyed figuring out the base-5 number system as a kid. Now with the new native's number system that is kinda base-3-ish I don't know what to think. On the one hand I appreciated the puzzle, but on the other, I just couldn't square it with what I thought I knew about the world and the natives. A few pages in Ghen's journal about how despite all his efforts to integrate 5 into the age, the natives resist and use another system would have done wonders for the lore around this new puzzle change.
He already has a note in his workshop complaining about their number system for relying on a rotational reference and, as in the original, another comment straining to provide some explanation for how the number five could be forced into their six-color system. So I think it's pretty clear that he has no fondness for their systems that don't conform to his numerological expectations. (Also, the D'ni number system is actually base 25, not base 5, though it technically also has a single-digit 25.)
5:12 Oh boy, am I gonna blow your mind! Look down at the dome's floor, and you will see a pressure plate. A pressure plate with poor tactical feedback, but a pressure plate never with less
The thing is, that it’s not only Riven’s puzzles which have gotten easier on the remake. The trend is that every games’s difficulty has decreased steadily during the last 20 years or so, which is equally frustrating and concerning. There’s nothing wrong in challenging someone’s thinking abilities and gaming skills! Easy games are forgettable, hard ones are interesting and timeless.
I didn't play the original and I probably won't play the new one because I don't have adequate patience, but I find them fascinating and very much appreciate hearing your take.
I love this game! When it came out, wish I had beaten it the hard way but I was young and just ended up looking up the walkthrough after awhile. It was kinda nice to replay it in the remake with the puzzles just different enough to make it feel like I was figuring everything out again, but I already know the Dni number system and never had to learn it the hard way. Pretty much agree with all of your points, but I do think this is the definitive way to play the game now. While the character animations suck, the world feels like Riven and I'm blown away by the graphical fidelity on epic settings of the world itself. If it was just tweaked a little with better character animations and the re-implementation of the sounds and some of the logic of the world restored, it would be perfect! It's kinda surprising because Cyan never made a game that was anything like Riven ever again... I think maybe losing Gehn as an antagonist was a mistake. He's a pretty nuanced Character and replaying Riven I kind wish they had given us the option to join him instead... It kinda makes me question if it was morally correct for Gehn to have his people worship him as a God... I mean sure he's a pretty shady 'God' but part of me thinks it would have been morally incorrect for him NOT to do so... I mean, look at all the art that was created in Gehn's name by the people of Riven out of them thinking he was a God? Like the entire beauty of the world comes out of Gehn's over-inflated sense of self worth, without Gehn the "God of Riven" Riven would not be this culturally distinct masterpiece it became. Every other Age falls flat in comparison... some of Myst 3's Ages we're pretty good, but Riven is still the best. I don't know, I'm just thinking about this now upon playing the remake but they should have kept Gehn as the central antagonist throughout the series. With the worlds he creates always being these timeless wonders doomed to the fate of an inevitable slow death, while Atrus worlds would always be stable but fail to achieve the wonder his fathers works induced, solely because Gehn would infuse his worlds with religion... and that would just add that "spice of life" that makes the whole Age really pop.
I do hope they’ll improve on the character models at some point soon! Especially the absent acting on the faces. And please give onesie-man something else to wear! 😂
I think the graphics in the remake are fantastic, the visuals are some of the most beautiful in any game I've played. More than lived up to the original in my opinion, I found the atmosphere to be perfect. The cgi characters are a step down from the IRL actors in the original to be sure, but I think they are still fairly well done for what they are.
Absolutely agree My own thoughts: - I think that VR had a negative impact on this game, and I feel a lot of the interactable elements were watered down to make them mesh with someone who's just standing there. Fan vent was changed (tho replaced with something better tbh), crawling under the door was changed, I imagine some of the buttons were changed for this reason. - I miss the sounds too, and at first I thought they had made it so the corresponding animals were based on location, after seeing the fish hanging in the village. But no, it's just straight up symbols. Kind of disappointing, even if the lens itself is cool. - The starry expanse just looks bad, I'm afraid. The original was so mysterious, in the remake it looks way too bright and foggy. - Most of the new content (tho I agree about the spheres being worse, and I really miss that image of the book in the weird podium) is very good, the fire marble mine, the statues look awesome, walking around on Tay and 223 was fantastic, etc. - I actually think real-time is not the best way to experience this game. It feels video gamey, invisible walls etc, and the still frames really helped with the atmosphere compared to sprinting around making everything hard to register. I think the best format would have been what they did with Myst 3, where it was point and click, but locations were 3D prerendered skyboxes that you could look 360 degrees in. Best of both worlds, imo, especially since it's compatible with live actors. - Over all they really nailed it in terms of understanding the world, though the presentation I feel has suffered. It really just doesn't have the atmosphere of the original, but It's also easier to recommend to people. I think having them play the remake first makes sense, but I also worry it may water down the magic of seeing those scenes properly for the first time.
How I rationalized the Star Fissure being repurposed... Gehn is a known hack. Read the books, especially the first one, and it's all there to see. He doesn't have a single original bone in his body. His writing style as a creator of Ages involves smashing known-good text segments together with basic "that'll do 'er" levels of spit-shine, whereas Atrus and most other decent users of the Art understand that the process really is akin to coding. It's also why Atrus' real-time patching of Riven is so involving and prevents him from assisting the player directly - every single fix he implements into Riven's Descriptive Book contradicts another passage written by Gehn. Stability is something he's left forever chasing after, seeing as the only way to create a stable Age would involve starting over from scratch. Can't do that if your goal is saving the Rivenese and Catherine, so... What Gehn has in common with Atrus, however, is having some patience when it comes to working problems. He has no patience for someone else's systems, yes, but faced with no other choice than to deal with the presence of the Star Fissure, Gehn did as Gehn does - and repurposed it for his own gains. It makes complete sense for the character, if you think about it. If he already has artwork commissioned that falsely depicts him as this godlike being that opened the Fissure to cast Atrus out, why wouldn't he claim ownership of what's actually intended to be Catherine's single, biggest middle finger to her people's tyrant?
Can't agree more. When I found out that Riven Remake would not run on my Intel Mac I was heartbroken, but after viewing with a walk -through of the new Riven, I had no desire to play the remake. In the original Riven I was swallowed up by the environment from the beginning. I cared about the inhabitants of that lonely world. In the remake, meeting Katherine wasn't particularity interesting (boring, actually), and Ghen wasn't menacing. I had no empathic investment in Katherine as a character or in her situation; I never bought into Ghen's malevolence, and the Moriety (sp?) were uninteresting. The environment was sterile and artificial. I particularly hated the ad hoc, unnecessary subterranean freeway from island to island.
Great review. I agree with everything you've said although not to some of the extremes (like the character models). I get that some over-exageration helps get the point across though! The CGI characters do make the "world" feel somewhat lifeless and flat and less "eerie" as if being watched. I totally agree and REALLY miss that aspect/feels/charm/atmosphere. But, because the remake's modeling and textures often have a slight painted effect in some areas and objects (to me anyway) then in that regard the characters sort of match the environment in that visual style. So it "kinda" works. Id still absolutely prefer FMV though. What do you think about a Riven remake using the Exile and Revelations type system, just with ultra realstic pre rendered stills, and hi-def FMV actors? There's also something LESS limiting in the sense of explorable space in the original, surprisingly, than here in navigatable 3d world of the remake. Ive always come back to thinking of this and i cant quit put my finger on it. Book vs movie.... fantasizing in the mind's eye vs real seeing " bumping into" kinda thing. Could just be the souring of invisible walls, whereas in the original the boundary was... something else less limiting, IDK. Maybe ill do a video myself on this topic!
the idea of an Exile-style remake is interesting. I'd have to think more about it. I agree that somehow the original's slideshow method of navigation somehow feels more open than the freely navigable 3d world of the remake. Not sure if I can quantify it but I think it's something to do with the fact that with the original, you kind of already buy into the idea that you're only going to go where the game lets you go, so when you run into a place where you can't look or move forward, it's sort of more acceptable. Being able to move freely makes it very jarring when you suddenly run into that invisible wall. Not thrilled with this explanation but it's the best I've got. You should make that video! I'd watch it.
I had the brightness too high at the start and that took me out of it but overall it looked good (other than the characters not being immersive), but yeah the original is better for the atmosphere, I'm playing them simultaneously because I beat the original as a kid and it left an impression, and the original stands above. The newer one has bad performance too.
I haven't played Riven in years. As a matter of fact, I only played it once, when it came out. In those circumstances, would you advise me to play the remake first, or would it be better to replay the original first, then wait some time and play the remake? For further context, I'd say the lore is the part that always fascinated me a bit more in the game, if that can help you give me a better advice. By the way, one of the thing that has increasingly frustrated me in this series is that the goal of "going home" in the first two games is basically dropped after that. I always wanted to know more of how the player fall in the rift in the first time and how come the book of Myst was there with us in the first place. Those are information that, as us, the player, doesn't make much sense to keep a veil of secrecy: the protagonist is supposed to know that in the first place. Also, when I finished Riven, I got really worried about what we did to this world by breaking the glass. Did we condemn all of its inhabitants by having all of their atmosphere sucked in? Did we do a massive fuck up by breaking that seal? Those worry are never addressed in the following games, unless I missed that out. Admittedly, I never read the complementary materials around this series, so maybe the answer is that? Still, one of my biggest frustration about this series is that the goal of "going back home" went to be completely forgotten as the series progressed.
Getting home is dropped in Myst III and later, because Tomahna is on the surface of Earth (the games do a poor job of communicating this fact, but it's canon as far as I can tell). You don't have to go home, because you were already there at the beginning of Myst III and IV (and in Myst V, you're no longer playing as The Stranger at all). (How did Atrus get to Earth? D'ni is also on Earth, just underground. In the books, Atrus was actually raised on the surface, so it makes logical sense that he might choose to return there.)
MYST 2,3,4 - will not be re-released, since they are not even close to aligning with Riven. So for now, Riven can be considered the final game in the series.
@@atrus3669 "MYST 2,3,4 - will not be re-released" uh? Riven IS Myst 2, though? And while I can understand considering Riven as the final game, it still ends on a cliffhanger that strongly indicate more is to come.
I'll be honest, at first I thought you looked too young to be commenting on Riven but I was happy to be proven wrong haha. Nice to watch a video like this from someone very experienced with the original.
The domes are activated by a visible pressure plate. It doesn’t open again bc the domes are loading screens. They open when the world is loaded
I'm not done with the video but I wanted to mention regarding the domes and how they open, there's actually a pressure plate inside that's what triggers it to open and close. It took me awhile to figure that out too, I would have preferred a button.
2:41: I think part of the idea is that Gehn is supposed to not know what he is doing. He just got lucky. He is just taking advantage of the powers that he found in the Starry Expanse, after he sealed the spatial rifts on Riven with the domes. He's the kind of person he always is: a predator looking for everything and anything to gain power, control, and an audience.
With regards to the bridge that breaks in the remake, it was one of the limiting factors of the 3D remake of the OG game (the bridge was about a mile long) it was a great way to "solve" the "problem".
Interesting, but what was the problem actually? Any source for this?
It's basically the best looking VR game ever. So even with its faults, it's still a unique experience for that given technology. Plus, new songs like the one on prison island enhance its atmosphere
I played Riven as a kid without internet access. The fire marble puzzle stumped me for a solid year.
For me, I didn't know about the remake - AT ALL. So this was pleasant surprise, when it came out, since I was wondering to play the Myst remake for the weekend, and what do you know. Just add to the thumnail "Yes, you should". Wanted to drop a video on this, but you have the exact title, I wanted to have. Good job sir! :)))
I have played the original close to 20 times during the last 25 years. I did enjoy many parts of the remake, but I don’t think I’m gonna play it again.
I was in the odd spot of having played the Myst remake first, but the Riven remake was still on "timeline TBD". I eventually went for the original, and I don't regret it, but it was amusing that the remake then began the full release process a couple of months afterwards. At least I can put the feather in my cap of solving the original fire marble puzzle. 😎
no one really gave a good energetic explanation of many of the MYST games. You did this one justice i think. its a good intro to help people save time or at least talk about it . Facilitating a talk in comments. etc
If they ever make a CyberWar (1995) remake, they should keep the original sound effects and music.
Such a thoughtful and in-depth video from someone who knows the game really well 🙂 Loved it.
It’s my favourite game of all time (first played when I was 26 back in ’96). Unfortunately I don’t have an M1 Mac so I’m watching playthrough’s.
Personally I don’t like that they made stuff easier. And took away some of the significance of the animals by changing those wooden balls. And yeah, as you say, the real people’s recorded parts in the original. There was no choice really as I know Catherine and Gehn are gone now (deceased)…so no way to re-do it.
I love Riven. I played it as a young teen in the 90s and have replayed it a couple times since. Overall I'm extremely pleased with the remake, despite the abysmal character models. I thought almost every change to the puzzles was well done. I was slightly disappointed by the simplification of the map puzzle grid from 25x25 to 5x5 as I thought finding the domes exact cell was a fun and pretty fair aspect of the puzzle. One of my favorite themes of Riven is the heavy use of 5 in every aspect of the world and I really enjoyed figuring out the base-5 number system as a kid. Now with the new native's number system that is kinda base-3-ish I don't know what to think. On the one hand I appreciated the puzzle, but on the other, I just couldn't square it with what I thought I knew about the world and the natives. A few pages in Ghen's journal about how despite all his efforts to integrate 5 into the age, the natives resist and use another system would have done wonders for the lore around this new puzzle change.
He already has a note in his workshop complaining about their number system for relying on a rotational reference and, as in the original, another comment straining to provide some explanation for how the number five could be forced into their six-color system. So I think it's pretty clear that he has no fondness for their systems that don't conform to his numerological expectations. (Also, the D'ni number system is actually base 25, not base 5, though it technically also has a single-digit 25.)
Totally agree with everything you say...
5:12 Oh boy, am I gonna blow your mind! Look down at the dome's floor, and you will see a pressure plate. A pressure plate with poor tactical feedback, but a pressure plate never with less
Is there the same thing inside of the boiler? I thought it was very weird that the door opened automatically from the inside when I approached it.
@@bmenrigh nah, that's one is just an automatic door... always has been, even in the original game
The thing is, that it’s not only Riven’s puzzles which have gotten easier on the remake. The trend is that every games’s difficulty has decreased steadily during the last 20 years or so, which is equally frustrating and concerning. There’s nothing wrong in challenging someone’s thinking abilities and gaming skills! Easy games are forgettable, hard ones are interesting and timeless.
I didn't play the original and I probably won't play the new one because I don't have adequate patience, but I find them fascinating and very much appreciate hearing your take.
I love this game! When it came out, wish I had beaten it the hard way but I was young and just ended up looking up the walkthrough after awhile.
It was kinda nice to replay it in the remake with the puzzles just different enough to make it feel like I was figuring everything out again, but I already know the Dni number system and never had to learn it the hard way. Pretty much agree with all of your points, but I do think this is the definitive way to play the game now. While the character animations suck, the world feels like Riven and I'm blown away by the graphical fidelity on epic settings of the world itself. If it was just tweaked a little with better character animations and the re-implementation of the sounds and some of the logic of the world restored, it would be perfect!
It's kinda surprising because Cyan never made a game that was anything like Riven ever again... I think maybe losing Gehn as an antagonist was a mistake. He's a pretty nuanced Character and replaying Riven I kind wish they had given us the option to join him instead... It kinda makes me question if it was morally correct for Gehn to have his people worship him as a God...
I mean sure he's a pretty shady 'God' but part of me thinks it would have been morally incorrect for him NOT to do so... I mean, look at all the art that was created in Gehn's name by the people of Riven out of them thinking he was a God? Like the entire beauty of the world comes out of Gehn's over-inflated sense of self worth, without Gehn the "God of Riven" Riven would not be this culturally distinct masterpiece it became. Every other Age falls flat in comparison... some of Myst 3's Ages we're pretty good, but Riven is still the best.
I don't know, I'm just thinking about this now upon playing the remake but they should have kept Gehn as the central antagonist throughout the series. With the worlds he creates always being these timeless wonders doomed to the fate of an inevitable slow death, while Atrus worlds would always be stable but fail to achieve the wonder his fathers works induced, solely because Gehn would infuse his worlds with religion... and that would just add that "spice of life" that makes the whole Age really pop.
It also makes the short cut much worse of a shortcut. To do a loop it takes way way longer then it used to.
I do hope they’ll improve on the character models at some point soon! Especially the absent acting on the faces. And please give onesie-man something else to wear! 😂
I think the graphics in the remake are fantastic, the visuals are some of the most beautiful in any game I've played. More than lived up to the original in my opinion, I found the atmosphere to be perfect. The cgi characters are a step down from the IRL actors in the original to be sure, but I think they are still fairly well done for what they are.
Absolutely agree
My own thoughts:
- I think that VR had a negative impact on this game, and I feel a lot of the interactable elements were watered down to make them mesh with someone who's just standing there. Fan vent was changed (tho replaced with something better tbh), crawling under the door was changed, I imagine some of the buttons were changed for this reason.
- I miss the sounds too, and at first I thought they had made it so the corresponding animals were based on location, after seeing the fish hanging in the village. But no, it's just straight up symbols. Kind of disappointing, even if the lens itself is cool.
- The starry expanse just looks bad, I'm afraid. The original was so mysterious, in the remake it looks way too bright and foggy.
- Most of the new content (tho I agree about the spheres being worse, and I really miss that image of the book in the weird podium) is very good, the fire marble mine, the statues look awesome, walking around on Tay and 223 was fantastic, etc.
- I actually think real-time is not the best way to experience this game. It feels video gamey, invisible walls etc, and the still frames really helped with the atmosphere compared to sprinting around making everything hard to register. I think the best format would have been what they did with Myst 3, where it was point and click, but locations were 3D prerendered skyboxes that you could look 360 degrees in. Best of both worlds, imo, especially since it's compatible with live actors.
- Over all they really nailed it in terms of understanding the world, though the presentation I feel has suffered. It really just doesn't have the atmosphere of the original, but It's also easier to recommend to people. I think having them play the remake first makes sense, but I also worry it may water down the magic of seeing those scenes properly for the first time.
Such a good video, I agreed with you 100% especially about the character models and opening ruining it.
The game is basically impossible to finish if you couldn't figure out the dni number system
That's why it literally sends you to school.
Yeah puzzle games are usually impossible to finish if you can't solve the puzzles.
If you can’t figure out this don’t play the witness lol
Riven is the best game of all time so far. The remake is meant to be played in VR. I haven't ....yet.
How I rationalized the Star Fissure being repurposed...
Gehn is a known hack. Read the books, especially the first one, and it's all there to see. He doesn't have a single original bone in his body. His writing style as a creator of Ages involves smashing known-good text segments together with basic "that'll do 'er" levels of spit-shine, whereas Atrus and most other decent users of the Art understand that the process really is akin to coding. It's also why Atrus' real-time patching of Riven is so involving and prevents him from assisting the player directly - every single fix he implements into Riven's Descriptive Book contradicts another passage written by Gehn. Stability is something he's left forever chasing after, seeing as the only way to create a stable Age would involve starting over from scratch. Can't do that if your goal is saving the Rivenese and Catherine, so...
What Gehn has in common with Atrus, however, is having some patience when it comes to working problems. He has no patience for someone else's systems, yes, but faced with no other choice than to deal with the presence of the Star Fissure, Gehn did as Gehn does - and repurposed it for his own gains. It makes complete sense for the character, if you think about it. If he already has artwork commissioned that falsely depicts him as this godlike being that opened the Fissure to cast Atrus out, why wouldn't he claim ownership of what's actually intended to be Catherine's single, biggest middle finger to her people's tyrant?
Can't agree more. When I found out that Riven Remake would not run on my Intel Mac I was heartbroken, but after viewing with a walk -through of the new Riven, I had no desire to play the remake. In the original Riven I was swallowed up by the environment from the beginning. I cared about the inhabitants of that lonely world. In the remake, meeting Katherine wasn't particularity interesting (boring, actually), and Ghen wasn't menacing. I had no empathic investment in Katherine as a character or in her situation; I never bought into Ghen's malevolence, and the Moriety (sp?) were uninteresting. The environment was sterile and artificial. I particularly hated the ad hoc, unnecessary subterranean freeway from island to island.
Great review. I agree with everything you've said although not to some of the extremes (like the character models). I get that some over-exageration helps get the point across though!
The CGI characters do make the "world" feel somewhat lifeless and flat and less "eerie" as if being watched. I totally agree and REALLY miss that aspect/feels/charm/atmosphere. But, because the remake's modeling and textures often have a slight painted effect in some areas and objects (to me anyway) then in that regard the characters sort of match the environment in that visual style. So it "kinda" works. Id still absolutely prefer FMV though. What do you think about a Riven remake using the Exile and Revelations type system, just with ultra realstic pre rendered stills, and hi-def FMV actors?
There's also something LESS limiting in the sense of explorable space in the original, surprisingly, than here in navigatable 3d world of the remake. Ive always come back to thinking of this and i cant quit put my finger on it. Book vs movie.... fantasizing in the mind's eye vs real seeing " bumping into" kinda thing. Could just be the souring of invisible walls, whereas in the original the boundary was... something else less limiting, IDK. Maybe ill do a video myself on this topic!
the idea of an Exile-style remake is interesting. I'd have to think more about it.
I agree that somehow the original's slideshow method of navigation somehow feels more open than the freely navigable 3d world of the remake. Not sure if I can quantify it but I think it's something to do with the fact that with the original, you kind of already buy into the idea that you're only going to go where the game lets you go, so when you run into a place where you can't look or move forward, it's sort of more acceptable. Being able to move freely makes it very jarring when you suddenly run into that invisible wall. Not thrilled with this explanation but it's the best I've got. You should make that video! I'd watch it.
I had the brightness too high at the start and that took me out of it but overall it looked good (other than the characters not being immersive), but yeah the original is better for the atmosphere, I'm playing them simultaneously because I beat the original as a kid and it left an impression, and the original stands above. The newer one has bad performance too.
riven is the best game ever
Unfortunately you cant put greenscreened video into vr. You cant even do it in free rome games
I haven't played Riven in years. As a matter of fact, I only played it once, when it came out. In those circumstances, would you advise me to play the remake first, or would it be better to replay the original first, then wait some time and play the remake?
For further context, I'd say the lore is the part that always fascinated me a bit more in the game, if that can help you give me a better advice.
By the way, one of the thing that has increasingly frustrated me in this series is that the goal of "going home" in the first two games is basically dropped after that. I always wanted to know more of how the player fall in the rift in the first time and how come the book of Myst was there with us in the first place. Those are information that, as us, the player, doesn't make much sense to keep a veil of secrecy: the protagonist is supposed to know that in the first place.
Also, when I finished Riven, I got really worried about what we did to this world by breaking the glass. Did we condemn all of its inhabitants by having all of their atmosphere sucked in? Did we do a massive fuck up by breaking that seal? Those worry are never addressed in the following games, unless I missed that out. Admittedly, I never read the complementary materials around this series, so maybe the answer is that?
Still, one of my biggest frustration about this series is that the goal of "going back home" went to be completely forgotten as the series progressed.
Getting home is dropped in Myst III and later, because Tomahna is on the surface of Earth (the games do a poor job of communicating this fact, but it's canon as far as I can tell). You don't have to go home, because you were already there at the beginning of Myst III and IV (and in Myst V, you're no longer playing as The Stranger at all).
(How did Atrus get to Earth? D'ni is also on Earth, just underground. In the books, Atrus was actually raised on the surface, so it makes logical sense that he might choose to return there.)
@@NYKevin100 "and in Myst V, you're no longer playing as The Stranger at al" Yeah, I was never keen on that.
MYST 2,3,4 - will not be re-released, since they are not even close to aligning with Riven. So for now, Riven can be considered the final game in the series.
@@atrus3669 "MYST 2,3,4 - will not be re-released" uh? Riven IS Myst 2, though?
And while I can understand considering Riven as the final game, it still ends on a cliffhanger that strongly indicate more is to come.
Nice job spoiling the ending without spoiler warnings.
I don't understand why the characters modeling is so ugly in that remake compared to the rest of the game
How about a no-spoiler review. Sheesh.
In-terms of removing the sound element from the puzzle, that's a no-brainer in 2024, purely for accessibility reasons.
I don’t get it, why can’t identifying sounds be part of engagement with a world/puzzles in 2024?