Riven Remake Review

Way back in the early 90s, Cyan released MYST to little initial fanfare but eventual enormous popularity. In fact, for almost a decade it was the highest selling PC game ever made until The Sims came along and put it in a room with no windows, doors, or toilet. More than that, MYST helped push sales of CD-ROM drives for personal computers and would go on to be a culturally significant game and household name. Following MYST’s success, Cyan got to work on its sequel Riven and while you weren’t prompted to scream its name like its predecessor, it was a vastly superior game in every way all the same.

Riven would join 1997’s best-seller short list with 1.5 million copies sold in its first year and is considered by many to be one of if not the greatest puzzle-adventure game ever made and at the very least one of the most influential alongside MYST. As great as the subsequent games were (or in some cases were not), they were all held to the standard of Riven – a bar that none of them would ever successfully clear. Many fans felt that the genre itself never quite topped Riven and so when it became more and more challenging to play the original on modern hardware, the Starry Expanse fan remake got under way to try and rebuild it in full 3D – an ambitious project that had the blessing of Cyan. Now, here we are more than 25 years post launch with Cyan having full control over the MYST series once more. Having stepped in to take over the reins from the Starry Expanse project, Cyan released what many thought they’d never see again – a modern Riven.

I know I certainly never thought I’d see Riven brought back to life, let alone by Rand Miller and crew but here we are. I am a pretty big fan of the original game, in fact it’s one of my favourite games of all time and holds many great memories for me having played it with my father. Like many others, I also believe that Riven is the best puzzle-adventure game ever made and so being able to dive back into that world brought with it as much excitement as it did high expectations. I always said that Riven in VR would be the thing that got me to finally buy into the niche tech, and while I’d love to do so I also have to remember that milk costs more than a hip replacement right now, so I’ll save that for another day. Instead, I got comfortable and put Riven up on my big ol’ TV.

After being greeted by an updated and satisfyingly nostalgia-brain scratching Cyan Worlds logo reveal you’ll find out very quickly that Riven is a very pretty game. Unreal Engine 5 gets to stretch its legs quite a bit in the Fifth Age, and the team did a nearly flawless job producing the feel of the old pre-rendered scenes from over two decades ago. I say nearly flawless for a couple of nit-picky reasons. As great as the lighting is, in some areas it doesn’t quite provide the same level of gripping atmosphere the original did probably because it’s a nearly clinical representation of light for better or worse. The more glaring blemish for me is the character models which are just not up to snuff and look significantly dated by comparison. Cyan may be world class environmental artists, but character models have never been their strong suit. The delivery of many of the iconic lines like Gehn’s monologue or even Atrus’ opening words fall a bit flat as the models struggle to convey such emotions. I never thought I’d miss FMV characters but it’s hard to deny how much better they accomplished their task.

Robyn Miller has also returned to refresh and add to his phenomenal soundtrack which continues to provide much of Riven’s atmosphere and is the perfect partner to the visuals that make you feel like you’re really somewhere completely foreign to you. It’s hard to describe, but Robyn’s music is an exact auditory representation of the places you’ll visit in Riven and is so much more impactful than a typical orchestral soundscape most games have as a default. It’s as unique a sound as any you’ll hear in a video game, and I couldn’t imagine playing Riven without it as it would be significantly less memorable for it. Perhaps just as impactful in a game littered with levers, knobs, buttons, and grand machines is the sound design. The original did this wonderfully, and the remake does it even better thanks to a couple of decades worth of technological improvements and clearly an engineer or two who give a damn. There is great attention to detail when it comes to the sound design throughout the Fifth Age, and I would imagine that if you play Riven in VR this top-shelf sound design will make it all the more immersive.

If you played the original, you’ll feel entirely at home visually speaking as nearly the entire age is a one-to-one recreation with only a handful of changes that were necessary to facilitate others made in the puzzles and how the story and lore are provided. If you weren’t aware yet, 2024’s Riven Remake is less Resident Evil 2 Remake and more Final Fantasy VII Remake. When bringing Riven out of a 2D point and click world and into a full motion with optional VR 3D world there were of course changes that needed to be made to help make it work. The team also felt that this was a good opportunity to expand upon the lore of the characters, ages, and franchise in general in ways that they weren’t able to or hadn’t back in 1997. If you were hoping for an unaltered remake of the original game, you may be disappointed depending on how you take to what they’ve changed. Conversely, you could be thrilled. Personally, I was disappointed with some of the changes and outright frustrated with others. In fairness, it’s not to say that it’s because much of it is indicative of a bad game – it’s mostly just not what would have been my personal preference.

But maybe you haven’t played Riven before! As that’s very much a good possibility, I’ll not leave you stranded though I’ll assume you at least have a working understanding of the story thus far and the fundamentals of the series’ world building in general.

That being said, the grand story of the MYST series is quite unique and has an equally unique, almost literal origin – no pun intended. What started as a story built on top of a game that was designed around a specific technology of the era called HyperCard, the MYST universe was expanded and elaborated upon in ways that make for a compelling narrative that leaves much room for the imagination to wander. This is rarified air in the world of puzzle adventures even today and the remake does great service to expand upon concepts the original did not. I’m always in favour of erring on the side of leaving some things to the reader’s/player’s imagination, so some of these elaborations crossed a line or two for me personally, but I do think that in general the good of it outweighs the bad.

Riven is the direct sequel to MYST from a story perspective and sees the player character helping Atrus accomplish what seems to be an almost impossible task. You see, Atrus and his wife Catherine trapped Atrus’ father on Riven – an age of Gehn’s own writing. Gehn fundamentally believes that The Art is not just merely linking to existing places, but instead creating them and as such has a tinge of the ol’ god complex because of it. Gehn is unfortunately about as good a writer as I am, and so many of the descriptive books he wrote end up eventually falling apart – such as it is with Riven. Catherine, being from Riven herself, has taken it upon herself to help relocate her people to a safer Age before its too late but was unfortunately captured by Gehn in the process. Atrus, frantically writing fixes to Riven as fast as he can to prolong the inevitable, has entrusted us with trapping Gehn in a prison book, freeing Catherine, and allowing the evacuation of the Fifth Age to be completed before it’s too late. You know – a casual Tuesday sort of thing.

How the hell are you going to accomplish all of that, you ask? By solving puzzles, of course! Not in the sense that you’ll be walking from room to room solving a series of similar puzzles of increasing difficulty, mind you – that’s reserved for most other games in the genre. Riven sticks to its roots and leans further in the direction of having a smaller selection of more grand and interconnected puzzles to unravel through investigation and interpretation than its genre’s counterparts. This deft blending of the puzzles and the world around you is precisely what made the original Riven remarkable and the remake strives to achieve the same. You’re a stranger to these lands. There are clearly things here that the locals know how to interpret, operate, and navigate, but to you it’s completely foreign. Paying attention to the world around you, noting culturally significant things, and weaponizing a lot of deduction to solve the mysteries of the island; Riven will have you looking at puzzle games differently.

On its own merits, Riven remake’s puzzles are challenging but approachable for a broad range of player skillsets. While some puzzle games wander into territories that assume players are math majors or programmers, Riven doesn’t expect you to be able to do anything more than use your powers of observation and your ability to connect the dots that your investigations surface. This has been the basis of Cyan’s design philosophy since MYST, but in this remake they took some of that perhaps a bit too literally.

As mentioned before, Riven Remake shares much of the original’s general structure and some foundational pieces of puzzles but is substantially different in a number of very key ways. One of these ways is the Moiety Lens. This isn’t an addition as much as it’s a replacement that supplants an original puzzle and lays a new basis for the entire mid game. Without giving too much away, this tool is a looking glass version of the Bat Vision mechanic from the Arkham games and, in my opinion, is one of the two worst changes made to the original formula.

The implementation itself is fine – it’s not that Cyan managed to break or misuse the mechanic in some way. I take issue with this mechanic at a base level in the majority of ways in which it’s used in many games as I believe it’s almost impossible to use it without inadvertently leading to poor game design. When you rely on this mechanic to have your player surface information that is necessary to progress, it rewards using the mechanic at all times, at which point the player decides between having a distorted view of the game the majority of the time or risking missing out on vital information. Ironically, the way to solve this problem is to hamstring it by leading the player by the nose to make areas in which you want them to use the mechanic much more obvious. Cyan tried to walk the line between doing this and not making it painfully obvious, but the result of all of this is an exacerbation of another problem I have with this remake.

When you build out puzzle games like Cyan which rely heavily on observation and investigation, retreading your footsteps to re-examine areas for things you may have missed is common. In the original Riven this wasn’t a huge issue because you could get from point A to point B quickly and efficiently whether you simply clicked through or used the fast-travel zip system to get to some locations even faster. In the remake, you’re walking everywhere which is significantly slower, and there is no proper fast travel which means whenever you feel you’re missing something and want to quickly go re-examine an area there is no way to do so. Some locations in Riven are quite remote to one another, and despite another significant change that acts as a poor-man’s fast travel system, it still takes far too long and at times dissuaded me from backtracking. Combine this with the Moeity Lens mechanic, and you can begin to perhaps see how things could get frustrating for some players in unsatisfying ways relative to actually solving the mysteries of the Fifth Age.

I will give Cyan credit for at least allowing players to take screenshots and annotate them in a journal of sorts, but without a hotkey to bring these up, and no way to overlay these notes on screen, using the journal was sometimes more effective by way of taking a picture of my notes on my phone. There’s nothing stopping you from doing it the old-fashioned way with pen and paper, but there are points in the game clearly designed with this in-game journal in mind. It’s a step in the right direction but could use an iteration or two.

Moiety Lens and its knock-on effects aside, I’ve heard a fair amount of talk about the remake being significantly easier than the original Riven and I would tend to agree. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is nearly entirely based on player preference, and in my opinion Cyan hurt the satisfaction of the original with their puzzle changes that culminate in a severely hamstrung penultimate puzzle. It’s essentially impossible to discuss the exact reasons behind this without spoiling both the remake and the original, but I’ll do my best to explain why I believe what I do.

The original Riven’s centerpiece puzzle is arguably one of, if not the most well-crafted, satisfying puzzles in the history of the genre. It is the pinnacle of Cyan’s puzzle philosophy and is a culmination of several other puzzles not just directly, but indirectly. It combines a multitude of different angles of logical puzzle solving, and I have yet to hear anyone who solves it say anything other than it was one of the most gratifying experiences they’ve had in a game. Make no mistake, it’s a very challenging puzzle, but it’s also a fair puzzle which is what makes it so satisfying. In the midst of the other changes Cyan made in the remake for a number of reasons, this puzzle got reduced to only two variables, one of which is a new addition to the puzzle that, by virtue of its existence, eliminates an entire portion of the puzzle that existed before.

That is to say, this once monumental puzzle has been made trivial by all accounts – a real shame and perhaps my biggest frustration and disappointment with the remake. In real terms, if you made this a pure numbers game, there are some several orders of magnitude difference between the new puzzle and the old, where the old is far more numerous in available selections. You could feasibly accidentally brute force the new puzzle, whereas the old puzzle you’d be some 2,675 times more likely to win the Powerball lottery than you would be able to guess the solution of the puzzle. The average person would take nearly 124 million years to brute force the solution. You knew with great certainty that you were never going to brute force the old puzzle. You knew you had to have everything fall into place and understand what was placed before you and that’s not insignificant – that plays a huge role in both communicating to a player that there is no room for interpretation as well as providing that magnificent payoff when the player overcomes this hurdle. That’s not nearly as evident and represented with the new version, and I find that to be a real shame.

I appreciate what Cyan was trying to accomplish with these changes, many of which were directly tied to elaborating on world building and lore, but I wish they could have done so without these detrimental effects. For the record, the new puzzle would take the average person about three days to brute force in comparison. Ultimately, Riven remake’s puzzles are not particularly awful – I’d say they’re anywhere ranging from fine to good, with the implementation of the Moiety Len’s likely being the thing that will be the most variable between players as far as satisfaction goes.

The Riven remake has me torn. As a major fan of the original, I never thought I’d see a modernized version get a release. I was happy when Cyan was able to make the original run far more easily on modern hardware, let alone finding out they would be able to bring it fully into the modern era in Unreal Engine 5 and VR. I’ve always pointed people to Riven when they’re a fan of puzzle adventure games and haven’t played it before, but as it continued to age it of course became a harder sell. I think that if I was to be asked which version I recommend playing first today, I’d still tell most people to experience the original before playing this remake. The original I believe to be at a base level a better game, though that’s not to say the remake is bad – it’s quite good.

Riven remake feels like walking through a museum dedicated to an event that happened a long time ago. Everything is made beautiful – fully restored and properly placed to simulate the original. Those who are visiting the museum were likely never there originally. This version is all they know, and they can’t know what they don’t know. Ignorance is bliss. Some folks visiting may have in fact lived through the events themselves – some may like the interpretation of events and others may be put off by its inaccuracies even if it’s done with care and from a place of good intentions. I am beyond thrilled that it appears Cyan Worlds has a huge hit on their hands with this Riven remake because I’d love nothing more than to see that team continue to make games and thrive. Having said that, I can’t help but feel disappointed with the remake in ways that probably leave me in the minority, but I feel that way all the same.

I find it almost poetic that, to me, Gehn’s experience trying to write stable linking books mirrors that of Riven remake’s development. The remake is a less perfect version of Riven that is propped up and gives the appearance of stability and an improvement upon the original by way of technology much in the way that Gehn required great feats of engineering to overcome his inability to write functioning linking books. Even given a blueprint, Gehn would almost assuredly attempt to improve upon it out of hubris. To some extent, Cyan attempting to improve upon aspects of Riven in the remake mirrors this – though with far less cynicism and world-ending machinations of course.

Riven remake is a good game, made by good people with good intentions, but for me there’s still no beating the original. If you’re a lover of puzzle adventure games, it’s unlikely you’ll be wholly disappointed but be aware this is not the same game that you’ve heard people talk about so fondly for over 25 years.