Gameology 2.0

When Riven appeared on the shelves in 1997, I raced out to buy it. I'd heard plenty about its predecessor, Myst, and even though I hadn't played that game, I didn't want to miss out this time around. I was a bit shocked to see that the game included the official clue book. Looking back, I should have taken that inclusion as a sign of things to come—if the game came with a clue book, then people must have raising a considerable ruckus about the game's difficulty. Nonplussed, I installed the game and played for about an hour. I had never felt so lost and aimless playing a videogame before. I just didn't "get it." I resorted to the clue book, but when I realized that I would likely be spending more time with the clue book than the game, I quit in disgust. I figured I'd wait a few years until I forgot what I'd learned in the clue book, then try it again with a fresh perspective.

About a week ago, I did try the game again. This time I had more experience with this type of adventure game and had recently completed Myst. I figured I would be able to get through the puzzles and soon be installing the third game, Exile.

Boy, was I wrong. An hour later I was on the net looking for clues. In the course of that, I realized that I still had the old clue book, so I turned to it once again to figure out what the heck I was supposed to do in this game. It wasn't just that I didn't know how to solve the puzzles. I couldn't even find the puzzles. I didn't know the puzzles when I was staring right at them. I was puzzled before I even got to the puzzles! I guess I shouldn’t be using the term "puzzle" here anyway, since several reviews I read explained that Riven doesn't have puzzles, only mysterious devices. Oh boy.

The agony of Riven, for me, at least, is that you really have no idea what to do. Even when you start working at levers or buttons, you have to wonder if you're not doing something prematurely and should wait until later to do it. It was unclear to me what to do first, or what I could do even if I had the patience to try everything (as some of the hint sites recommended). After starting fresh a few times and assuring myself that "This time I will not use hints," I gave up and just used a walk-through to get me through the game. Even with that resource I was stumped a few times and had to really think about what I was doing wrong.

I'm not sure what Cyan was thinking with this one. The puzzles here are enough to stump a professional cryptologist. What's more, it felt at times as though the developers must have thought their puzzles were too easy and had thrown a monkey wrench or two in the equation to make them virtually unsolvable—at least by deductive means. An example of this occurs in the "Golden Dome Puzzle," which involves six colored marbles and a huge grid. The idea is to place the right colored marbles in just the right spots on this grid and pull the lever. The "monkey wrench" is that one of the marbles is actually not needed on the grid. How a player would discover this on his or her own is beyond me. More likely players will spend fruitless hours (if not weeks) trying to figure out where that extra marble goes, or else questioning their whole stratagem because there are six, not five, marbles—so something must be wrong with their initial approach.

Another puzzle is even more laughable. I finally found a schoolroom with a really clever and interesting device that I recognized as the clue to deciphering Riven's number system. I counted clicks and transcribed symbols, then rushed out and discovered that I didn't have all the symbols I needed. The device wasn't helpful, and I couldn't find anything else in the game to help either. A clue book revealed that these other numbers were the result of rotating and combining symbols to make new ones. It's a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea of how mind-blowing and frustrating this game can be.

After getting through the game and reflecting on it, I can see so many things Cyan did right with it. The puzzles were clever even if they were too difficult. A few hints or additional clues would have helped immensely. I suppose the developers thought they had done enough by making it impossible to die or really "screw up" playing Riven. With only a very few exceptions, you can't "die" in Riven or put a machine in a state that can't be reversed. This is comforting and helps encourage exploration.

What I really like about the game is the indirect manner in which you learn about your nemesis, G'hen. Slowly, and very subtly, you begin to discover how he's behaved himself in exile on Riven. A few moments in Riven are genuinely creepy—I really felt I was "trespassing" and was drawn on by my innate appreciation for the macabre. One scene involving a deadly fish nearly made me drop my swee (that's Barton for "sweet tea.")

The atmosphere of Riven is even more desolate and lonely than that of Myst, if such a thing is possible. The worlds seem dusty and forlorn, and even though you do encounter people from time to time, you don't get to interact with them. Even at the end, when you finally meet G'hen and Catherine, you can't talk back to them or respond in any way. You just watch. That's a pretty lame reward for sweating through all those puzzles, but so it goes. In a way it's very interesting, simply because the moments when you encounter others is when you are stripped of all agency. Your agency is tied to your alienation.

Most of the reviews I read of Riven were overwhelmingly positive (I don't want to say "myopic," but I felt that way about a few of them). The one review I read that was particularly nasty said the game was "boring" and stressed the slowness of getting around and the frequency of CD swapping (a problem that I didn't experience with the DVD version). I can appreciate this criticism. Riven can be a very dull place, and it does take a LOT of clicking and some loading time to traverse the worlds. The lack of clear goals or even a sense of what to do next can easily lead to boredom. What did Cyan expect you to do; wander around Riven in a sort of drop-jawed stupor until, miraculously, you discovered what to do? My neighbors may well have wondered why the guy next door was yelling, "Throw me a bone, Cyan!"

I guess for folks who really like that feeling of being lost, confused, stumped, and frustrated, Riven is a winner. For folks like me who want a more focused and channeled experience, this one's a no-go. I'm not sure what kind of being of super intelligence it would take to get through this game without cheating, but let's elect her President so we can all be filthy rich and warp around the galaxy in custom built star cruisers.