Myst Series

Published: 28 Aug 2024
Last updated: 29 Apr 2026

Myst (Masterpiece Edition)

Myst Steam banner

A very beautiful and very enjoyable puzzle game. Perhaps a bit clunky to move around (making copious notes will help!) and was occasionally tripped up by the movement clunkiness, but the puzzles themselves never really did (although that underground maze did suck!), once you got past the first few you intuitively build up an expectation of how a puzzle may look like, what may be clues etc. and it never really drifts from that intuition, even if again inputting the solution was clunky.

The different worlds/ages and general atmosphere/ambience is just absolutely fantastic, and is really a great incentive to stick around, stay immersed and get those puzzles solved.

If this is just a warmup to Riven, I’d better plan to play it sooner rather than later.

Riven: The Sequel to Myst

Riven: The Sequel to Myst Steam banner

On the surface, Riven may “just” be a sequel to Myst with some extra graphical fidelity - you’re dropped into an island once again with little backstory and no obvious goals, with plenty opportunity to explore and interact with many mechanical contraptions scattered throughout. But for all of Myst’s innovation, influence and mystical environment - both the worldbuilding and the puzzles feel a little rudimentary - the design of Myst’s ages are often radically different and take a “whatever goes” approach while the segmented ages split the puzzles of Myst into small and manageable chunks, and once beyond the veil of Myst’s deliberate obtuseness, rather simple all-in-all. Riven, by contrast, pushes the integration between the environment and puzzle far beyond Myst’s wildest dreams - effectively turning the game into something more approaching a full anthropological expedition of an alien civilization.

This anthropology angle makes for an incredible slow burn, a deliberately slow and methodical pace guided by the sprawling mass of locations whilst providing a slow drip-feed of information to puzzles yet to be discovered, manifesting in sounds, symbols, visuals, scrawled notes and the very real, very living ecosystem of Riven and its inhabitants - and you must immerse yourself into the world created to have any hope of understanding Riven and the few puzzles within. Whilst Myst was eerie in its sheer lifelessness and didn’t care for your presence, in Riven you are constantly getting the feeling of being watched by the denizens with… suspicion? fear? Its unknown exactly, but there’s clearly more going on than the emptiness of Myst, and being told repeatedly that the age of Riven is slowly falling apart gives a sense of urgency and importance to uncovering the isles’ mysteries.

Leaving the immaculately designed atmosphere and environments to one side, its worth looking at how simple the goals outset to ‘beat’ Riven are: save Catherine, trap Gehn, signal Atrus. To actually achieve this however, requires fully exploring the island (a major undertaking in itself), learning and deriving key facts about the world’s cultures, and finally deducing the nature, location and solution to the few puzzles presented with all of Riven to pull from for clues. Its very ambitious and… almost works entirely, but not quite. Most of my trouble with actually completing Riven came from missing an interactable object/magic screen to either continue progressing exploration or pick up a clue. I chalk this up to the limits of the point-and-click interface since it happened with Myst as well, although the more constrained puzzle nature meant you could quickly intuit whether you were “missing” something, whereas Riven’s sprawling nature makes no such concessions and gives you plenty freedom to drive yourself mad running in circles due to missing an inconspicuous lever. This continues in a similar vein onto the puzzles themselves given there’s not much “clue redundancy” and also deliberately withholds some information back for you to infer from all the other previous deductions you’ve made - none of this is bad in concept and making connections one-by-one to break the puzzle down chunk-by-chunk is incredibly rewarding, but there’ll almost certainly come a time where you’re either missing one last clue or need to make one final “leap of logic” that the game has done so well to avoid requiring up until that point.

Above all though, all my complaints and analysis comes through from a truly deep appreciation for Riven and what it is trying to achieve, especially as it flirts with perfection. Myst was also interesting to revisit in a historical sense, and I was impressed at how well it held up, but ultimately that is “just” a puzzle game - Riven is an entirely different beast, and all the more better for it.