I remember playing through this with my dad when I was a little kid. It took us weeks if not months. It was so satisfying to watch you go through everything so quickly, and great commentary! it was very interesting. Brings back good memories!
@@ambersummer22 Atrus jumped into that same star fissure right before Myst because he was running away from Gehn, the intro to Myst shows that. Since the book fell into the hands of The Stranger after falling through the fissure, it makes sense that the path would lead him back to Earth.
@@ambersummer22 Because the Myst book that the stranger used to meet Atrus in the first videogame fell in the same fissure, so Atrus knowns that the fissure eventually leads to Earth. However, the funniest part is that...D'ni and Tomahna (the place where Atrus lives with his family) are actually both on planet Earth and very near to each other, so Atrus could have simply let the Stranger in the book before or after him, and he would have been back instantly. However the devs probably didn't even know, at the time, that D'ni and Tomahna were in the same place on Earth. The matter was arguably and definetely clarified in Myst 3, that, infact, begins with the Stranger that goes to Tomahna without using any book, because, well, after the events of Riven he successfully landed on Earth.
MrTaylork1 He really didn’t. He hopped into the fissure and linked out using the Myst Book, hoping itd be destroyed. Of course, it wasn’t, and the Stranger finds it on Earth. When they meet Atrus, he realizes that the Star Fissure leads to Earth and by reopening it, they can get home that way.
Atrus is a jerk! What is susposed to have happened to the stranger and the book that got away from him down the fissure anyway? Despite what Atrus says it looks like you'll die, or be trapped there forever like one of his sons. RIP the most beautiful age. What is it about game devs destroying their worlds at the end?
Yeah, that always gets me. It's like star fissures are interconnected with each other after an Age fails, or certain pages that the D'ni created have been falling into ruin. I wouldn't doubt that there would be thousands, if not millions, of Age books deteriorating from the elements in the caverns of the D'ni city or other places where they've created Ages.
I used to love stopping at every click point and just take in the amazing views...and you speedrun it. 😅 Different strokes. But your video is great. It reminds me of all the areas in Riven, and just how vast and deep this world is.
Incredible speed run and thanks for the interesting commentary along with it! I’ve just completed this game for the first time and it took me just under nine hours :) It’s interesting how huge it is and how little of it you really need to see to complete it. Thanks for mentioning the sound issue as well - I thought it was just me, but the game is mixed really weirdly with a ton of bass that drowns everything else out.
Very nice! This game kicked my butt because there were so many puzzles based on audio cues. In the original Myst, there were only a couple puzzles like that and they were fairly obvious. Good job putting this game in its place! :)
I actually played Riven again recently after many years, and I actually thought while playing it "this would be a pointless game to speedrun". Lol. Still, loved the vid.
Impressive, but the main attraction for the Cyan games for me is the immersive environments. I’d rather never finish and just keep enjoying the worlds.
wow, i didn't know anyone else ran this game. our times are pretty close. just wanted to leave a few comments. i'm going to have to pick up your two-handed mashing technique for the long sprints, because you do those parts so much faster than me. a lot of your moves are unoptimal in a few spots, there are a few locations where you can cut a corner by clicking on a different hotspot instead of going straight forward, which results in a "diagonal" turn. an example is the walkways around 0:43. you walk up to the corner and then turn, but you can skip the turn by on the path to the left as you're approaching the corner. this also works at the beetle pool: instead of walking next to the ladders and turning to face them, simply click on the ladders before you approach them. that glitch in the cave is bizarre, though. the GOG version (the one i run) doesn't have that glitch. also, it's really funny to me that we both came up with the idea of using flash cards to memorize the d'ni numbers! i used a browser-based deck, though.
***** Thanks! I'm aware of a lot of those diagonal shortcuts, but I couldn't get consistent enough on them to save time. I generally found the click spots to be hard to find at speed, and sprinting as far as I could go was much easier to think about than stopping just short and taking the diagonal.
That glitch at the end of the cave affected myself as well, but only on my old PC. When I downloaded Riven from Steam onto my new PC the glitch was no longer present. I can't say whether it was an issue with the PC itself, or if the Steam cloud has had a new version of Riven with the bug fixed.
"This really looks like an oversight by the maker sof this game" Or they were really proud of the time & effort that went into the creation of the game and hoped everyone would get as much enjoyment out of savouring the visuals as they did. Games aren't designed with speedruns in mind.
Fair to say, and no disrespect to the frenzied_coder, but I thought the same thing. I can't imagine that the Miller brothers thought they should add a skip feature there in case someone wanted to blast through the immersive experience in 12 minutes.
Yo pongo bien las canicas de colores y sin embargo no puedo activar el transportador del domo o hay que ponerlas sin que se caigan , sin corregir? O sea, bien a la primera vez?
Awesome run with commentary. Well the GOG version has updated to ScummVM so that's the official version of this game now. I haven't tried it much but I bet a whole lot of those small details have changed (maybe more cutscenes are skippable?)
That's great. It's now the perfect game. Puzzle games like this can end up too easy, or too hard and no one finishes them. I like a game where you can take the short road or the very long to completion. Also with these very cryptic games it's a demystifying idea to allow the player to beat it quick, get the quick version of the whole game, and then get a true ending, then start the game over again, this time tackling the real game, which are the bonus puzzles and content.
You have to solve the Fire Marble puzzle to activate the books. Use the metallic topographic map and the color symbols you learn from the underwater observatory. This is solved in part 8/9 in my Let's Play around time 4:20.
likely, but the stranger was originally at the bottom of the fissure at the start of Myst. Atrus almost completly fell, but he did take the link book to Myst, just before the stranger found the book as well.
StirlingJohn612 The stranger starts out on earth and finds the myst book in a library in pennsylvania according to the strategy guide. Apparently someone found it in the new mexico desert, where the fissure spits you out, and it ended up in pennsylvania somehow.
I was the kid who played through the game and journaled my experience. I don't know what happened to that journal, but I'm hoping it never finds the light of day 🤣
Interesting. I did a run of this back in 2011 using virtualbox and the 5-cd version copied to the hard drive (I think. I might have used the DVD from the 10th anniversary set). It has a few blunders, such as stopping to check my notes in a couple of places. I didn't think about doing all the rotation from the outside, which also cost me some time (about 35 second, looking at my video).
22:36. Horrible. I flubbed the telescope code twice, entering 1 instead of 5. I took 10 seconds at one point checking my notes on the route through the sub to the switch room. And my general navigation was slow. And I had trouble with the dome code sliders and placing the fire marbles due to hotspot troubles.
Do you have a video link? it's fun to catalog people's interest in speedrunning a game here: www.speedrun.com/Riven . even if your time is not competitive, it'd br cool to have record of one more person interested in speedrunning the game.
Can't you "guess" the order for the telescope at the very end? I take the combination from the book is different every time but if as you start a new game right there couldn't you just guess till you "one-shot" it and get world fastest ?
Planetdune What you can do is to save the game at the very start, play it through until you know the combination, and reload the savepoint to enter it. (SPOILER) It works, and shows an otherwise unused ending: the fissure opens, but nobody appears (no Gehn, Catherine or Atrus). You just fall into it without any commentary.
Wonder if you could have a friend take a picture of the code for the domes with a phone or something, then have them comprehend and interpret it while you keep going?
I considered using my phone's camera, but I don't think it would have been any faster than what I did, due to camera software being so slow. A co-op run with a friend definitely would have helped, but of course, that requires a friend :) . Overall, I only spent 10 seconds looking at the password, and if you look at the leaderboards, I'm 30 seconds behind a faster run, and that's mostly due to mouse movement accuracy. So yes, it's an area for improvement, and it's not the only one.
I spent a lot of time in it before I totally gave up. Apparently a lot of people gave up on it. I watched a walk-through last night and though I remembered a fair amount of stuff I must have got stuck early on and got fed up going back and forth to trip valves.
Oh, that's interesting. That would save time, but it's probably not allowed. It isn't explicitly forbidden in the rules, but I would argue that should count as modding the game. If the game comes with the flash player installer, then uninstalling flash player means uninstalling part of the game, which is modding the game. Cool to know though.
yep. random spooky child. seems pretty out of place in this game. (not actually random. i think it's triggered by descending in the unskippable elevator.)
You can just input the code into the telescope and take the stopper out as soon as you enter riven bruh. Sure its not the good ending but it's a speedrun damnit.
an old tongue-twister (suitable for grandkids?) A skunk sat on a stump the stump thought the skunk stunk and the skunk thought that the stump stunk who stunk? the skunk or the stump?
![[TAS] A Difficult Game About Climbing in 2m29s (OUTDATED)](/img/n.gif)
I remember playing through this with my dad when I was a little kid. It took us weeks if not months. It was so satisfying to watch you go through everything so quickly, and great commentary! it was very interesting. Brings back good memories!
"Once you find Cathrine, signal me."
"brb lol."
8 min later...
why the stranger intends to fall into the star fissure is beyond me.
@@ambersummer22 in a futile hope he lands somewhere in his home world, earth of 18 century?
@@multiz0rak ah
@@ambersummer22 Atrus jumped into that same star fissure right before Myst because he was running away from Gehn, the intro to Myst shows that. Since the book fell into the hands of The Stranger after falling through the fissure, it makes sense that the path would lead him back to Earth.
@@ambersummer22 Because the Myst book that the stranger used to meet Atrus in the first videogame fell in the same fissure, so Atrus knowns that the fissure eventually leads to Earth.
However, the funniest part is that...D'ni and Tomahna (the place where Atrus lives with his family) are actually both on planet Earth and very near to each other, so Atrus could have simply let the Stranger in the book before or after him, and he would have been back instantly. However the devs probably didn't even know, at the time, that D'ni and Tomahna were in the same place on Earth. The matter was arguably and definetely clarified in Myst 3, that, infact, begins with the Stranger that goes to Tomahna without using any book, because, well, after the events of Riven he successfully landed on Earth.
"I actually plugged in a second mouse for extra clicking speed for the long straight away sprints" - Next level strat, gg !
"Hey thanks for saving my wife! Now please hurl yourself into the cold vacuum of space while I escape. I'm sure you'll be fine, BYE." -Atrus
He knows you’ll fine. He did it himself when he trapped gehn there... He knows the other end of the star fissure is earth.
MrTaylork1 He really didn’t. He hopped into the fissure and linked out using the Myst Book, hoping itd be destroyed. Of course, it wasn’t, and the Stranger finds it on Earth. When they meet Atrus, he realizes that the Star Fissure leads to Earth and by reopening it, they can get home that way.
@@DoctorTex of course Atrus knew it was safe... he moonlights as the Cyan chief game designer on Earth in his spare time :p
Atrus is a jerk! What is susposed to have happened to the stranger and the book that got away from him down the fissure anyway? Despite what Atrus says it looks like you'll die, or be trapped there forever like one of his sons. RIP the most beautiful age. What is it about game devs destroying their worlds at the end?
And even though it's been nineteen years, I only now realized the star fissure has other dark spots that correspond to entrances from other ages...
Yeah, that always gets me.
It's like star fissures are interconnected with each other after an Age fails, or certain pages that the D'ni created have been falling into ruin.
I wouldn't doubt that there would be thousands, if not millions, of Age books deteriorating from the elements in the caverns of the D'ni city or other places where they've created Ages.
and now after all these years later Riven is being reopened and coming back...
I used to love stopping at every click point and just take in the amazing views...and you speedrun it. 😅 Different strokes. But your video is great. It reminds me of all the areas in Riven, and just how vast and deep this world is.
Incredible speed run and thanks for the interesting commentary along with it! I’ve just completed this game for the first time and it took me just under nine hours :) It’s interesting how huge it is and how little of it you really need to see to complete it.
Thanks for mentioning the sound issue as well - I thought it was just me, but the game is mixed really weirdly with a ton of bass that drowns everything else out.
Very nice! This game kicked my butt because there were so many puzzles based on audio cues. In the original Myst, there were only a couple puzzles like that and they were fairly obvious. Good job putting this game in its place! :)
I actually played Riven again recently after many years, and I actually thought while playing it "this would be a pointless game to speedrun". Lol. Still, loved the vid.
How did you play it? I absolutely love this game but haven't been able to play it, since I upgraded from Windows 95.
@@MrsSlocombesPuddyCat I just got it on Steam.
9 minutes??? i spent at least 2 hrs just making coffee while playing Riven....
I spent two hours looking for the key to unlock the gate :)
Impressive, but the main attraction for the Cyan games for me is the immersive environments. I’d rather never finish and just keep enjoying the worlds.
wow, i didn't know anyone else ran this game. our times are pretty close. just wanted to leave a few comments.
i'm going to have to pick up your two-handed mashing technique for the long sprints, because you do those parts so much faster than me.
a lot of your moves are unoptimal in a few spots, there are a few locations where you can cut a corner by clicking on a different hotspot instead of going straight forward, which results in a "diagonal" turn. an example is the walkways around 0:43. you walk up to the corner and then turn, but you can skip the turn by on the path to the left as you're approaching the corner. this also works at the beetle pool: instead of walking next to the ladders and turning to face them, simply click on the ladders before you approach them.
that glitch in the cave is bizarre, though. the GOG version (the one i run) doesn't have that glitch. also, it's really funny to me that we both came up with the idea of using flash cards to memorize the d'ni numbers! i used a browser-based deck, though.
***** Thanks! I'm aware of a lot of those diagonal shortcuts, but I couldn't get consistent enough on them to save time. I generally found the click spots to be hard to find at speed, and sprinting as far as I could go was much easier to think about than stopping just short and taking the diagonal.
Is the use of an auto click not allowed?
Finally I see the hole game after all those years ago. I gave up then and quit the game - so thank you!
Remenber the time when having to change the cd to move to the next location was considered acceptable?
I never beat Up this Game.
Was hard as hell, and you beated in 8 minutes.
RESPECT.
This speed run makes the game look like it's in realtime 3D.
I think we found our new Game director for all of the seriesez
*Appears in Age 233*
*Presses button*
*Waits*
*Gehn pops up like a damn houdini* “Which brings me to the point of all this”
Uh oh it’s puro
That glitch at the end of the cave affected myself as well, but only on my old PC. When I downloaded Riven from Steam onto my new PC the glitch was no longer present. I can't say whether it was an issue with the PC itself, or if the Steam cloud has had a new version of Riven with the bug fixed.
I absolutely love Riven but not been able to play it since upgrading my computer. Never heard of Steam.
"This really looks like an oversight by the maker sof this game"
Or they were really proud of the time & effort that went into the creation of the game and hoped everyone would get as much enjoyment out of savouring the visuals as they did. Games aren't designed with speedruns in mind.
roflmao.
Fair to say, and no disrespect to the frenzied_coder, but I thought the same thing. I can't imagine that the Miller brothers thought they should add a skip feature there in case someone wanted to blast through the immersive experience in 12 minutes.
Yeah, I think that being able to speed run this master piece in under 10 minutes might be an oversight
¿What is the trap at the end of the dark hallway?
Yo pongo bien las canicas de colores y sin embargo no puedo activar el transportador del domo o hay que ponerlas sin que se caigan , sin corregir? O sea, bien a la primera vez?
1:24 YOU CAN OPEN THE MOUTH FROM THAT SIDE??? My entire life has been changed
I loved playing this game as a kid. Never did beat it though. I think I got stuck in the jail cell or something.
I didn't know you could skip the cutscenes. That would have been really good to know.
this game is awesome
2:24 / 2:17(game clock) I remember that bs. Was the beginning of my frustration chapters before throwing in the towel for good
Had to rewatch that intro a couple times I'm dying lmao
I guess they updated the Steam version, I did not run into that glitch.
Awesome run with commentary. Well the GOG version has updated to ScummVM so that's the official version of this game now. I haven't tried it much but I bet a whole lot of those small details have changed (maybe more cutscenes are skippable?)
You are dead on with your speculation. Best version to speedrun on and the glitch he mentioned doesn't happen for me in it.
That's great. It's now the perfect game. Puzzle games like this can end up too easy, or too hard and no one finishes them. I like a game where you can take the short road or the very long to completion. Also with these very cryptic games it's a demystifying idea to allow the player to beat it quick, get the quick version of the whole game, and then get a true ending, then start the game over again, this time tackling the real game, which are the bonus puzzles and content.
what a weired idea to SPEEDRUN through this most beautiful game ...
Subscribed for the into alone.
Puedo abrir los domos. Pero el libro no me lleva a ni una parte. No se activa
You have to solve the Fire Marble puzzle to activate the books. Use the metallic topographic map and the color symbols you learn from the underwater observatory. This is solved in part 8/9 in my Let's Play around time 4:20.
Lo hice, aún así, no puedo entrar al libro del domo😢
Haha I remember your channels intro. I really, really like it. And I hate most things on youtube :P
i got the impression that Stranger was already on this island before...
likely, but the stranger was originally at the bottom of the fissure at the start of Myst. Atrus almost completly fell, but he did take the link book to Myst, just before the stranger found the book as well.
StirlingJohn612 The stranger starts out on earth and finds the myst book in a library in pennsylvania according to the strategy guide. Apparently someone found it in the new mexico desert, where the fissure spits you out, and it ended up in pennsylvania somehow.
I was the kid who played through the game and journaled my experience. I don't know what happened to that journal, but I'm hoping it never finds the light of day 🤣
I'm surprised the 7 second offset timer doesn't bother you!
wait, wtf 3:51 i've never seen that airduct entrance!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how is this even?
Interesting. I did a run of this back in 2011 using virtualbox and the 5-cd version copied to the hard drive (I think. I might have used the DVD from the 10th anniversary set). It has a few blunders, such as stopping to check my notes in a couple of places. I didn't think about doing all the rotation from the outside, which also cost me some time (about 35 second, looking at my video).
I also too too much time with navigating at times, particularly corners.
22:36. Horrible. I flubbed the telescope code twice, entering 1 instead of 5. I took 10 seconds at one point checking my notes on the route through the sub to the switch room. And my general navigation was slow. And I had trouble with the dome code sliders and placing the fire marbles due to hotspot troubles.
Do you have a video link? it's fun to catalog people's interest in speedrunning a game here: www.speedrun.com/Riven . even if your time is not competitive, it'd br cool to have record of one more person interested in speedrunning the game.
+frenzied_coder Just uploaded it. dJGdPJDxZEc
+Coderjoe Just sent you a message through UA-cam. (wanted to notify you here, in case the message got filtered as spam or something.)
W intro
In books, in Ages, and in life, the ending can never truly be written.
I really love this quote from the game.
at least he doesn't have to change out the disks.
Tbf it only took a 17 years to complete. With a physical hint book present..
8 hours 47 minutes?
it took me 8 months and another 47 days
but one of my all time favorites.
8 minutes 47 seconds.
Atrus runs like a little girl 9:27
did he dieded?
Can't you "guess" the order for the telescope at the very end? I take the combination from the book is different every time but if as you start a new game right there couldn't you just guess till you "one-shot" it and get world fastest ?
You can guess, but it's 3125 possible combinations, so it would probably take a while.
Planetdune What you can do is to save the game at the very start, play it through until you know the combination, and reload the savepoint to enter it.
(SPOILER)
It works, and shows an otherwise unused ending: the fissure opens, but nobody appears (no Gehn, Catherine or Atrus). You just fall into it without any commentary.
there were a number of puzzles I never did figure out before eventually giving up.
I'm pretty sure I bought myself the game, so I must have been pretty fed up to abandon it and it must be the only game I ever did that with.
Wonder if you could have a friend take a picture of the code for the domes with a phone or something, then have them comprehend and interpret it while you keep going?
I considered using my phone's camera, but I don't think it would have been any faster than what I did, due to camera software being so slow. A co-op run with a friend definitely would have helped, but of course, that requires a friend :) . Overall, I only spent 10 seconds looking at the password, and if you look at the leaderboards, I'm 30 seconds behind a faster run, and that's mostly due to mouse movement accuracy. So yes, it's an area for improvement, and it's not the only one.
We must support small You Tuber :)
Impossible...
3 years of development, 8 minutes of gameplay
I spent a lot of time in it before I totally gave up.
Apparently a lot of people gave up on it.
I watched a walk-through last night and though I remembered a fair amount of stuff I must have got stuck early on and got fed up going back and forth to trip valves.
If you uninstall flash player, those cut scenes will not be played.
Oh, that's interesting. That would save time, but it's probably not allowed. It isn't explicitly forbidden in the rules, but I would argue that should count as modding the game. If the game comes with the flash player installer, then uninstalling flash player means uninstalling part of the game, which is modding the game. Cool to know though.
frenzied_coder modding? Moderating?
@@MsKTMvalley modifying rather
fallout mininuke eastereggs 5:45!
1:51 O_O wth is that?
yep. random spooky child. seems pretty out of place in this game. (not actually random. i think it's triggered by descending in the unskippable elevator.)
Nice vid
I came here for a destiny 2 speed run lmao
da hat einer aber trainiert...
You can just input the code into the telescope and take the stopper out as soon as you enter riven bruh.
Sure its not the good ending but it's a speedrun damnit.
bruh.
The code for the hatch is randomly generated bruh.
an old tongue-twister (suitable for grandkids?)
A skunk sat on a stump
the stump thought the skunk stunk
and the skunk thought that the stump stunk
who stunk?
the skunk or the stump?
If you found this video because of Destiny 2... Like