[Uehreka]

RIVEN SPOILERS

I actually didn't play Riven until about 5 years ago, when it came out on iOS (I played Myst on CD as a kid). Learning the game's number system was a fascinating exercise that I don't think I've ever had in any other game.

Basically, in your explorations you eventually happen upon a small empty one-room building, which (if you look at the arrangement of desks) you can deduce is some sort of schoolhouse. In that room you'll find a mechanical wooden-and-string toy on a table. If you interact with it, the symbol on the base changes, and the toy performs some sort of action (I think dropping a weight) some number of times. From that you can deduce that the symbols are numbers, and the toy is for teaching what number each of the symbols represents.

If you're playing correctly, you've got some scratch paper handy (I used a drawing app) and you can write down each symbol and what number it corresponds to. And you'd better do this, because you're going to see a lot of important numbers in the game, and this is the only way they are written.

Towards the end of the game, you find a journal from one of the characters, which is written in English. However, when referring to the Age (the game's term for different worlds) that they've gone to, they use these numerals. If you've done your homework, you'll know that they've named their new world "The 233rd Age".

[duskwuff]

The toy you're referring to is a model of the wahrk gallows you encounter in the Jungle Island lake. It's implied that it's used to execute/sacrifice prisoners by feeding them to the carnivorous Wahrk that live in the lake -- the "actions" you're referring to are discrete steps of lowering the prisoner to be eaten!

The numeral system is really interesting in its own regard, too. It's written as base-25, but each digit is composed of two base-5 subdigits superimposed on each other at right angles in a square frame. (The subdigits are all designed in a way that makes this unambiguous.) For example, 0 is an empty square and 1 is a vertical line, so 5 is written as a horizontal line, and 6 is a cross.

The game uses 5 as an "arc number" -- Riven is the "fifth age", the main game area consists of five islands, many objects and locations in the game are five-sided, and the game was originally distributed on five CDs -- so it's only natural for the number system to operate on base-5 as well. :)

There's also an alphabetical writing system present in game, but it's used with a constructed in-game language (not just a cipher for English text), so players aren't expected to understand it.

[djsumdog]

Yea. I liked Myst, but Riven is where I gave up on the series. I did complete it, but it was a long time ago and I remember giving up on puzzles and looking up a lot of hints.

Also the font for the books in Riven were terrible. I could read all the Myst books. They were relatively short and it was a neat device to learn the story. In Riven, they were painful to read and there were so many books everywhere.

I even bought a copy of Exile used at a bookstore for like $5, but never played more than 10 min of it. I would have liked to have finished the series, but Riven kinda was an example of why the entire 90s/early-2000s adventure game genre (Sierra, LucasArts, etc.) failed. LucasArts probably had the only games that were not over challenging and that could be solved with just time and persistence. Everyone else relied on sales of hint books (and no one wants to use a hint book; you want to figure it out for yourself).

The new era of adventure games fixed a lot of this. Telltale and Quantic Dream used their adventure games more to push story (not a lot of "puzzles" in the traditional sense), but there are others with a decent mix of story and puzzles.

A great example of the two game building attitudes in a single game is Broken Age. The first half: amazing. The puzzles were fun but not over challenging, the story drew you in, the graphics were beautiful and the characters were relatable. Part two: stupid-insane-difficult-terrible puzzles, story went to crap, didn't care what happened.

[gmueckl]

Riven was difficult, but that doesn't do the game justice in my book. To me the game is a masterpiece in how it integrates storytelling with the world design and the puzzles so tightly. I'd have to spoil parts of the game to give good examples. There's one particularly fiendish puzzle that connects the numbers puzzle with animals appearing all over the place and a series of places all over the world that have weird wooden spheres embedded in rocks. And you have to find a well-hidden secret chamber first to see that this connection might even be there.

This is also part of why the game is so difficult. It does expect the player go through a certain sequence of events to advance the plot. But all of this is in a very open world that presents you with a lot of puzzle pieces that you can't do anything with initially. This breadth of possible options makes it harder to identify those pieces that the game wants you to connect in the puzzles. I've read a long while ago that the Millers have underestimated how much this drives difficulty. They said that later Myst series titles are designed to be more sequential experiences with less interconnected pieces as a result.

[Uehreka]

Riven definitely has some next-to-impossible bits. Stuff that's just not fun where what you need to do is find the right pixel to click on. I definitely used hints a few times while playing, and my general attitude was: This game is fun when it's having me explore or solve puzzles, so I won't cheat on those, but if I feel really confident that I've looked everywhere and the game is acting like a brick wall, I'll take a hint.

[StillBored]

Well by the time of riven you could look up the puzzle solutions on the internet, which is what I did when I got stuck one of the problem that turned out to be audio (and silly me I though they were just playing sound effects).

Anyway, I really view those games as the last of the nearly impossible games that were everywhere in the 1980s. And not just adventure games, a lot of arcade games were the same way, I played conan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan:_Hall_of_Volta for probably 4 months straight before I beat its 7 (?) lousy screens. 99% of the difficulty was basically being able to play it perfectly for the ~15 mins it takes to win. If you added a save game feature it would have probably only taken a couple hours.

If you watch the playthroughs on youtube, the difficulty is completely not evident. Another one like that was Dragons Liar.

On the plus side, the incredible rush one got when figuring out a puzzle after spending days on it is maybe part of the reason a lot of modern games simply aren't fun.

[WorldMaker]

Riven was among the last games in a category where I included its official strategy guide in the base cost of the game. I had a bad habit of reading the "novelization" part of the official strategy guides as a book in school before I could actually play the game. The only game I recall that this sort of spoiler "ruined" the experience was the original Myst when the problem solving part of my brain untangled the dependency map of the game and arrived at the "ten minute solution" speed run of the game, which was my first playthrough because I couldn't believe it would work.

(It's possibly something that helped my love of Myst itself long term for me, though, in that I really struggled with the tone puzzles in later playthroughs, and it was good knowing they didn't keep me from the end of the game. Relatedly, that a tone puzzle is the reason I recall having never yet finished Myst IV.)

The official strategy guide as a book that a kid could read in school, with a full first person retelling of the narrative, was such an interesting artifact of a past age. I believe I've kept a bunch in a box somewhere as interesting tokens.

[smrq]

MORE SPOILERS

What's really interesting to me is how the numbers are encoded when they get larger than 25. The game requires you to understand the basic pattern of system in order to generalize from numbers in the schoolhouse (1-10) to the numbers required to complete the game (1-25 at most). But even understanding this, there is something off about how this Age number is written: just reading the numerals, it appears to be written as "98rd". But what the game doesn't explicitly tell you is that the number system is actually in base 25! So, "98rd" is actually "9*25 + 8"rd, or "233rd", making the grammar work out.

[phillco]

As an added bonus, the whole number system is base 25 (logical, since there are symbols for 1 - 25), but this is sort of an easter egg that you don't have to know to beat the game. This is hinted at in an English journal that mentions an age numbered "<Riven symbol for 233>rd". If you assume incorrectly that it's base 10, it'd read "98rd", which sounds wrong.

I wonder if they ever playtested a base 25 puzzle and judged it too difficult.

[QuinnWilton]

One of their newer games, Obduction, also has an alien number system. Each number is represented as paths on a 3x3 grid, and you're given access to what's essentially an oracle for the system in order to learn it. Throughout the game, the numbering system is used to control alien machinery to solve various puzzles.

Deciphering it made for a reasonably fun exercise, and I wish more games had puzzles like that.