(note: the camera mode in the remake was all over the place for gamma adjustment and had all sorts of oddities. i hope you get the impression from the pictures anyway. wtb a keyboard with a print screen button)
(also note: this is like my first ever post on this site, feel free to idk take it down if this is the wrong spot or something)
I love game environments. Here's a shortlist of games I love because of their environments:
- SOMA
- Subnautica
- probably other ocean games
- Skyrim (because I like snowy mountains, ask me about my childhood cross-country train ride)
- Riven
I probably wouldn't want to live in the world of PATHOS-II (SOMA), or on 4546B (Subnautica) because of the real actual dangers, but Riven's danger feels a lot more abstract. So the world is ending, whatever, that's Atrus' problem.
myst, cyan, etc.
I played Myst as a tiny thing, somewhere after Reader Rabbit and Mario is Missing and before Half-Life. I liked it fine, spent a bunch of time with it, but couldn't crack the puzzles. I was like not even 10 lol.
I remember being fascinated by the Making Of Myst video that came with the CD version of the game. The scene of the sound designer blowing bubbles into the toilet is a thing I think about a lot. It's 15 minutes, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5af74KuJZE
intro about the game
But, when I got older, my dad bought me a copy of Riven. The game came on 5 CDs (which I unfortunately no longer have, due to the Satanic Panic). I'm playing the Steam copy for this one, but I own the remake on gog due to drm-free.
Riven was my absolute jam. It Fucking Slaps. It Rules. It's a sequel, but it looks better. It's bigger. The puzzles are more intuitive. It includes a setup screen that instructs you how to not only calibrate your monitor but also your speakers, with examples of dark/quiet and bright/loud to compare.
The tram rides are sick as hell. Each island has its own vibe. The sound was such a huge factor and it felt so real to me on my tiny CRT and $5 computer speakers.
And, someone bought me the strategy guide. Here's a picture of it:
The graphics absolutely still hold up. Sometimes, when I look at Myst Island, I see how small the ages are these days, but by comparison, Riven has so many places to be.
Each island has its own CD, generally, and while there are 5 islands I actually can't remember what the 5th disc was used for, lol.
I'm not going for complete coverage of the game here, this post is already really long, and I doubt anyone is going to read it all, lol, so I'll just highlight some things.
temple island
Okay, so you start on what you'll later find is called Temple Island, and in here is the most infamous and ANNOYING puzzle of the game (you know, other than the math).
The Rotating Gate Room Puzzle sucks, imo. It is cool, if it's the first time you are playing the game. It is bearable, if you are able to skip the movement cutscene (I believe you had to time it right IIRC). In the remake, you cannot skip the movement animation. It is so tedious.
But it is iconic and it's one of the first puzzles in the game and sets the tone. This puzzle is a feast for the eyes and the ears. The gate room, it looks like this:
All of those scarabs on the wall have stained glass portraits in them, depicting the religion of the people of Riven.
Behind the first door is The Dome. THE DOME. It is gigantic. It is golden. It is the focal point of Riven, by far the most iconic landmark in the game. Here are two pictures of The Dome:
Here is a picture of the inside of the Dome (no, it's not as important. who cares, it's The Dome):
And, when you spin the gate room, there is a multi-layered, complex sound of stones moving, gears turning, the creaking of heavy things not normally willing to move. This sound teleports me back to being a tiny thing, before puberty, before dysphoria, before I learned that the way I acted, moved, and felt were "wrong." All that existed was this world, for me. And this annoying fucking room.
You interact with very few people in Riven. This is great for me, for reasons that should be obvious. I'm sure, to a lot of people, that this would creep them out. I find this calming, personally. I love these big and lived in environments, and I like being able to explore them without too many people to get in the way. There are still people in Riven, they're just hiding.
Sure, at the beginning, Atrus is all there talking about his wife, his dad, something about an apocalypse, and the plot is interesting, but I don't care about that. I want to fucking live here. I'm serious. I will live in those tiny fucking huts. Here's a picture of the tiny fucking huts:
(Yeah, how even do these houses on the left even work? like, the door is on the bottom? If you open the door, does all your shit fall out?)
Anyway, the gate puzzle isn't that complicated. Here's a picture from the strategy guide:
You just have to unlock the gates in the right order by spinning the room a billion times to get into the dome.
I get a bit fuzzy about the order of things on Temple Island, actually, because the layout of Temple Island changed in the remake a bit.
There's one more area on Temple Island. Look at this chamber:
It's neat. Says a lot about the world in its design. Of course, this isn't a happy game about good things. Maybe I should talk about the plot for a minute.
the plot
Okay, so you've probably played Myst. The idea is that you, the player, come across a random book at some point (I think this is supposed to be on Earth), touch the page and do a little whoopsie and you end up on the shores of Myst Island.
Where did that book come from? Well, my video game dad, Atrus, dropped it into a thing called the Star Fissure. This is the opening line of Myst:
I realized, the moment I fell into the fissure, that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, but I must admit, however— such conjecture is futile. Still, the question of whose hands might someday hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I know that my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps, the ending has not yet been written.
(wow, is this quote really that long? I only really remembered the first line)
Damn, that's intriguing, right? Well, fuck you, apparently, if you only played Myst, because there's barely an answer in that game. Only Riven explains this, so what is Riven?
Riven is a place, called an Age. It's like a planet or something. These Ages are created by only a very few people in the multiverse, who have the ability to "write Ages." There's a bit of confusion about what happens when you burn an Age book, though, which has come up - I think that there are actually two kinds of books: One that actually define the structure of an Age, and one that links to the existing Age. Atrus appears to be writing the source code for Riven as he talks to you. Cool, I can dig that.
He's writing in the book because Riven is falling apart, his wife is trapped there, and his dad is a jerk who wants to subjugate all the ages or something, really power-hungry shit. So, he sends you there, promising that you may end up "back where you came from" once all of this is through.
Okay, so how is Riven falling apart? Well, the age is literally splitting at the seams, but what is in between the seams is actually what's known as the Starry Expanse. At the bottom? Earth, apparently, which is how the Myst book got there in the first place. I wont go further into all the family drama, but it's there in various books in the game if you like to read. You probably like to read, right? Well, I won't blame you if you're only looking at the pictures in this post. It took me a very long time to upload all these pictures, so you're welcome!
jungle island
So, you make it across the tram and you enter the biggest island in the game, Jungle Island.
Jungle Island doesn't immediately start with the jungle, but instead makes you climb up a huge flight of stairs to a former forest full of stumps.
There's a lot that I like about this place. I like the forest shrine:
I like the village, with its strange houses (see above)
And I like the beach, with the lazy creatures: (called "sunners" in the stragedy guide):
But what I like best is the transit platform on the entrance from Temple Island. In VR, you can just walk (or teleport in my case) around, so when I came to the edge of this platform I just kinda sat down IRL. I happened to have a fan going, pointing at me from the direction of the wind, actually. It was chill. I was immersed. I wish I could bring a book and read here, or eat my lunch, watching the ocean. I used to live in a coastal city, and the only thing that stopped me from really enjoying the shore was all the people. Here, there is no one. It's perfect. (Oh, and the sun doesn't feel weird on my skin.)
Occassionally, earthquakes will happen, but so what? The world's not actually going to end, probably.
If I'm being honest, I dream of falling through the Starry Expanse. I imagine it is a nice temperature. Quiet. No one else around ... Peaceful. Just like the platform on Jungle Island, there's nothing chaotic or demanding of me, no one to judge me or make me feel stupid for the way I am even just with their existence, even when they're trying to be nice. On the platform, it's nothing but the sound of the waves, and a world that's falling apart. Only I can do something about the world falling apart, but it's too much pressure on me (and the solution involves math, blech), so I stay on the platform. In the end, even if you do learn how to count, Riven does fall apart, and Catherine evacuates its people so a safer Age. Atrus then shows up and takes her home, leaving you there to fall, fall out of the world, out of your responsibilites, out of people's expectations - so loud that they are - into the Starry Expanse, where, at the end, you might finally find your home.
Atrus to me feels like a friend, or my real dad, I don't know why. Maybe because I grew up seeing his dumb little desk in the chamber he's trapped in in D'ni, trying to fix Riven, and the mistakes of his family, feeling responsibility for their actions. Maybe I can relate to that feeling. Maybe I can relate to Rand Miller, the man behind Atrus and the creator of the game, who has devoted his life to making these kinds of worlds, even after his brother Robyn left to pursue other kinds of art, steadfastedly against game industry trends and the death of the adventure game.
I don't really imagine what lies at the bottom of my Starry Expanse to be Earth, but that's what's so captivating about it to me. I moved around a lot when I was young. There's some relief, when you make as many dumb mistakes and get ostracized as much as I did when I was young, to being able to just leave.
Okay, but you're not into shores and self-pity, so let me show you a couple more .jpgs and then wrap up.
crater island
Remember that stump photo above? Well, there's a minecart in a hole there that you can ride, presumably that's where the former forest went. When you ride it, you go fucking underwater and it's a total roller coaster. No, I haven't tried this in VR. I get sick if literally any motion happens whatsoever in VR (leave your tips below so that I can say I've already tried them!!). But, it's fucking sick in the original. You're underwater, and there's these heating rings (because all the water in Riven has some kind of temperature sensitive microbes in it) that push the water away, and the colours and the contrast and the motion are so fucking sick. I would take this ride back and forth repeatedly as a tiny thing. (sorry, the camera mode in game really broke the visuals here, but just imagine the coolest thing ever)
Anyway, I like crater island, because it looks sad on the surface:
Yep, nothing to see here. But, I like this anyway, maybe because I can relate to that. Check out this boiler (it's a puzzle!):
And... if you make it all the way through this, you find a bridge all the way back to Temple Island. This is necessary path, and it goes right back to The Dome. So that's cool. Crater island has a new area in the remake. I cut this image because of the rate limit and well I guess my excuse will be that it is spoilers for the remake haha not that I want 15 minutes back.
the remake
So, some further thoughts on the remake. The golden dome looks beautiful, and for the brief time that I got HDR working on Linux in order to play this game, it ruled. Inner child activated.
But, since you can move around at the speed of an FPS, the game world feels smaller. I spent most of my time stuck on Temple island because they moved a thing and I was in disbelief that they would move that room wtf, that's not where it goes. (Actually, the new location is better). I am glad some puzzles were changed, but I was really disappointed with how quickly I went through Plateau Island especially, since it's usually a bigger part of the game. I'm sure if I was trying to figure out what to do it'd be longer, but I feel like the iconic elevator ride was really short.
There's other changes. They're neat.
The VR mode runs like crap, it's super blurry too because they lower the resolution in VR mode. I can get 140fps in 1440p on this thing in flatscreen, but in VR it's like oh no 46fps for you, enjoy your nausea in the gate room. But I'll keep trying to get it running better.
One change is bad though: I miss the FMV characters. Everyone does. These characters are a bit uncanny. (better than Myst remake though imo)
Okay, I'm out of steam here. Thanks for reading my little disorganized rant. Hope you liked the screenshots. I didn't make the world, but I sure did take the pictures. I guess that makes me a Riven photographer.
