Pablanopepper

it’s hard to separate my feelings about the original from this review, but I love both. Even more than 20 years later, the world of Riven remains utterly unique: a little steampunk, a little fantasy, a little tropical, and a little Midwest American desert. And the design is still nearly unique, too. The game really only has two massive, map-spanning puzzles—the meat of your time should and will be spent in understanding the world and its factions through masterful environmental storytelling. Understand why the puzzles are in the world, who made them, and who is intended to solve them, and the solutions will slowly fall into place. All of that was true about the original, and all of it remains true in this excellent, thoughtfully updated remake. The world has been substantially expanded in ways that make it more internally consistent (the delineation between public and private spaces, for example, is now almost completely consistent and coherent in a way the original didn’t manage) and both main puzzles have been overhauled for the better. The high quality of the remade portions kept me in the same world, the changes renewed my sense of mystery and excitement to explore, and the additions all felt natural and awe-inspiring to encounter. It wasn’t all great. Even today, real-time 3D graphics can’t quite generate the same feeling of reality as the pre-rendered scenes of the original, and the necessary loss of FMV pulls you out of the world a little as well. Running the new game on an older CPU, I had fairly frequent crashes, but I think that was more the fault of my old rig than the game itself. In all, as a fan of the old game I would call this an incredibly successful release. I hope that a newcomer to the series will give it a chance, too. There’s really nothing like this on the market—give yourself a chance to get lost for a few hours, you won’t regret it.