Riven

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted September 3, 2025 on Steam The gaming zeitgeist forever changed in ’93 with the release of Myst, a puzzle game that challenged all contemporary ideas of videogame success. It lacked the energy of Doom or the brand recognition of NBA Jam, yet it sold over 500,000 copies in the first year. Due to their unprecedented success, all industry eyes turned towards the Miller brothers in anticipation of Myst’s inevitable sequel. Four years and one painful development cycle later, it released as “Riven”. If there was a word to describe Riven, it would be “restraint”. This is reflected from its delayed release to the reduced number of Ages and puzzles. While this sounds like design suicide at a time when Myst was the best-selling PC game, it showcases a level of confidence at Cyan that few studios could have matched. Gone are the sporadic mechanical devices that seemingly served no function other than to impede player progress, Riven’s puzzles feel diegetic, making its world come alive. Within its five connected islands, Riven managed to tell a story rich in lore by balancing exposition with environmental storytelling that rewarded observant players. With these achievements, Riven might be the best classical puzzle game ever. While nothing can top the experience of playing the original for the first time, the remake is a compelling addition to Cyan’s library. It introduces new, smaller puzzles that balance the pacing for new players while giving veterans something to look forward to. There’s no better time to visit the Age of Riven, and one can hope that Cyan continues this level of quality for Myst III: Exile.
• Recommended Posted June 11, 2025 on Steam EDIT (2025.06.17): After playing the Myst remake (2021), I would suggest playing that game first before playing this one. It'll improve the overall world building experience and make a lot of this game make more sense. I think Riven is a better overall game, but Myst does a good job introducing the series and introducing the general gameplay loop/puzzle structure. Was recommended to me by my wife who had played (but did not finish) the 1997 original. I never played the 1997 original and would consider the prequel Myst after my experience with this game. Positives: - Great visuals and voice acting. - Good world building, easy to immerse yourself into. - Good puzzles, nothing too over-the-top in difficulty. Negatives: - Can be hard to notice interactable buttons and levers, causing you to get stuck by not looking twice in an area. - Missable achievements. - A few crashes on my PC while running an Intel processor (solved this by underclocking my CPU using Intel Extreme Tuning Utility) Suggestions: - Make multiple manual saves to allow for back-tracking, to allow for getting 100% completion in a single playthrough. - Take notes by both using the screenshot functionality and on pen and paper, refrain from looking up solutions as your notes will provide the answers once you've explored enough. Really refrain from looking up solutions until you're really stuck and make sure you've checked around areas for any buttons/levers you've missed.
• Recommended Posted November 2, 2025 on Steam One of the first games I ever played, and one of my favourites ever. I first played it though with my dad and I must have been around seven at the time. Every night he'd help me solve the puzzles and I remember being so immersed in the story, the worlds and the attention to detail. The excitement of putting a new disc with each island transition. The mesmerising sound track. Some discs you don't use till later in the story, and I remember wondering about them, what was on the disc? Where would it take us? It's has a special place in my life, that time spent with him, and the game that facilitated that. The remake is brilliant, and most importantly truly captures the ephemeral experience of being lost in an unknown and strange world, with it's intricate technology and elusive people. 10/10
• Recommended Posted December 2, 2025 on Steam Oh my God. Oh Great Yahvo. Oh Praise the Maker, and take it from this Myst Saga fan - this version of Riven. Is. Perfect. In every single possible way, Cyan has done it again - they created the definitive Myst, and now, they have created the definitive version of Riven. I'm going to assume if you're reading this, you have some familiarity with the Myst games or you like puzzle games. If that's you, and you have not played the original Riven, want to revisit the Islands you fell in love with in a new and more immersive way, or could not finish it, then this version is 100% FOR YOU. Because it improves every single flaw the original Riven had in every way. The puzzles are less obtuse, but still tease your brain until it cries and still have the exact same soul of revealing pieces of one big puzzle. The clues and storybuilding draw you in so much further. The music and the feel of Riven is 100% intact with some extra details and twists, including the BRILLIANT level of too-real-to-be-a-game detail the original had. The urgency and paranoia of your mission on Riven is so much more intense and nerve wracking. And yes, you FINALLY get to see some of the things you wanted to see, and more, adding yet more depth to the game. I promise you, your jaw will literally be dropping open every five seconds as more and more beauty and truths reveal themselves and as Riven slowly draws you into its irresistibly cryptic grasp. For those who have not played Riven but have played Myst, Riven is its sequel. The story is more complex - Atrus tasks you, his close friend, with undertaking a dangerous mission to the dying Age of Riven to save his wife from death, rescue an oppressed native population, and capture his tyrant father Gehn. But unlike Myst, you are not alone on Riven and the puzzles aren't quite so simple - Riven is an Age tearing itself apart at the seams of reality, where everything is an enigma wrapped in a paranoid conspiracy of a mystery and everyone has secrets and eyes on you. The puzzles melt more into the environment feeling less like a game and more like a world you conduct digital archaeology on, a world in its final days. As you move along, you begin to realize that because you're not alone you're being watched, and because of that... you aren't safe. You're not in an archipelago paradise, you are in the brutal regime of a tyrant that is a living hell for its people. You're in a liminal space that isn't liminal because it's weird, but liminal because it's dying and not quite right, and you don't belong there. Riven's puzzles live in infamy, but here, they feel approachable. There's even some brand new ones! Touches like a fast travel system (which I cannot bear spoiling for you save to say it's a SPECTACLE) really help the player get around while not making it too easy. You even get a built in screenshot key and notepad for all the details you have to be looking out for - and really, the changes to the puzzles here still keep their spirit while making them enjoyably different for returning fans. I cannot emphasize either how GORGEOUS this game is, in VR or in original format now with freeroam for the first time. Riven now more than ever feels ALIVE in every way, like a place you are in, a world you have gone to - not just a game. I really, truly could be lost in it for hours in a way I never was in the original, though I still do love the original and its five discs. Cyan has OUTDONE itself with the details, the vibe, and the weird little touches that show how Riven is dying here. It all breeds this absolutely oppressive, brooding, "time is running out" atmosphere in a way that builds on the already paranoid and tense "I absolutely should NOT be here in this world" atmosphere of the original. Riven is beautiful, tragic, and peaceful yes... but it's also dangerous, deceptive, and unnerving in ways that feel almost Lynchian in this interpretation. Ways that might make Uru/Myst V's Bahro look natural and realistic in comparison. It's creepy and unsettling in ALL the right ways, my jaw was dropping just as much as I was wondering "Is Gehn or one of his cronies about to turn the corner and face me RIGHT NOW?" The only two flaws I really have with it are to do with glitches and the 3D models. For the glitches, it seems to mainly rendering and pop-in glitches, though it's likely a raytracing issue and I can forgive it because Riven is literally falling apart, so it's fine. You shouldn't encounter anything gamebreaking like a puzzle not working, though I did once have it crash while idling above the Fire Marble Dome on Boiler Island. Otherwise the game is really smooth, I noticed no chugging or lag at all in any way. You might also want to, like I did, turn OFF the motion blur feature - yes it's immersive, but I found my gaming laptop disliked that combined with recording video for it. It also made me really queasy. As for the 3D models, it's sad that we don't have the FMV anymore but understandable - it wouldn't have worked here and wouldn't have fit. Plus, two of the actors - the great John Keston and Sheila Goould, who play Gehn and Katran/Catherine respectively, have since shuffled off this mortal coil and could not have come back even if they wanted to. This is tragic, but well... not unexpected. As Riven itself shows us, everything changes, and everything dies. These flaws really are just quibbles though. This game is otherwise the PERFECT recreation of Riven for the modern day in LITERALLY LITERALLY every possible way. It's weird and unnerving and beautiful and brain-teasing and still just a masterpiece of world-building and puzzle design. It is a spectacle built on the great shoulders of a game that is already a spectacle, a polishing of an already golden standard for point and click adventure and puzzle games. It sets the bar ONCE AGAIN for puzzle and logic games of its nature, and throws back to the classic era of CD-ROM games across several discs while moving boldly forward into the future. If someone asked me in the past, "Hey, are games art?" It used to be I would point to the original Riven. I can still do that now. But now, for my money, pound for pound, if you ask me now "hey, are games art?" Odds are, I'm going to point to this version of Riven and say, "I dunno, Stranger... what do you think?" What are you waiting for, already? If you love puzzle games, if you loved Myst, if you're an old returning fan or a newcomer just getting into this fantastic series of games with such deep lore you could drown in that Starry Expanse of it... come to Riven. And let it become your paranoid, beautiful, terrible, mysterious, and compellingly strange world.
• Recommended Posted October 8, 2025 on Steam Riven is more than just your usual remake of an old game. In the same way as other great examples of “actually interesting” remakes finally made when no one else thought that would be possible (Another World comes to mind) the developers of Riven (the original 1997 release) got together again and made things happen… once more. It did help that Cyan worlds, as a company, was still around and was holding the original content (2d, fixed pictures, 1990s fmv) and avoided making any unnecessary remasters all these years, waiting for the right time to really translate that world into a fully modern look, without losing its spirit. The time was right, as this is Riven like you never played it before (or actually, as you experienced it 20 years before, but with all the bells and whistles of a modern 3d world). It may not sound like an exciting thing to say, but making Riven full 3d with the same quality as the original (or better in some ways) was a long overdue translation and it succeeded in all the right ways. It’s not just a nice visual trick, it’s the fact that you will see things you were not able to see before, it’s almost like a first-time experience. The world of Riven is full of details and this new version is not just the same game, as it has new puzzles, (with new places and scenes to explore as well within the expanded story) and even some of the old puzzles will surprise you as the solution may have been slightly changed or appear not exactly as you expect it. This does not change at all the core experience of Riven (specially coming from the original game). In fact, having the original devs for the remake, makes it better, because they don’t just “get” what Riven was and still is, but also, they actually get what games are in 2024, so they are able to take Riven into that frame, make it an interesting playable experience regardless of the genre or what your personal abilities and limitations are. Having played some remakes over the years, (being something inevitable as games become more older and as a medium we start looking back at the past and what has changed) I now believe a good remake is not just the upgraded technical path, but the narrative as well. The way we tell our stories changes, especially in games where we play with the narrative, we touch it, we interact. If ever so subtle. Games today don’t tell its stories in the same way older games did twenty years ago. So it is a great opportunity when we are able to see a game from the past again, under a new light, play it again and see it like never before, but still, without changing what fundamentally made that game what it is. That is where the artistry of the original creators for the game come into play, since its fundamental to have them as the narrators and the creators once again. Not just as the fathers of the story, but in hopes that, they know, once again, what their original game means still today. Riven succeeds in this, almost to a complete degree, in ways very few remakes do. The level design is still the best of its kind, and even if you played it before, thanks to its new scenes and puzzles it will gift you with one or two eureka! moments of sudden discovery which is the best sensation in the whole world. Its music will accompany you as well during your stay and will envelope you. The one missed step sadly (as much as I like this remake it is not a perfect one) is the remake of the main characters. That is, the very few scenes where there’s someone on screen besides you. These scenes originally were fmv (full motion video) with real actors blended with green screen. That worked great before with 2d in the 90s, but unless you find a way to really blend fmv (like Alan Wake 2 did for example) real time 3d characters was the way to go. And so they did. But in a very low quality of expression and movement, which contrast very sharply to the otherwise excellent quality you see in everything else. It is just a few scenes in the whole game, so the experience doesn’t get completely ruined but it, but it certainly deflates the very important beginning and specially the final moments where the final confrontation happens. Again, it doesn’t fully take away from the rest of the game, and you could think it may even be patchable someday, in the future, when they get hold of some better performance capture technology like, I don’t know… metahuman? (think of Hellblade II, since the game already uses unreal 5) or they could hire a third party team to take care of performance capture and redo just those scenes. (For example, the great work that Deck nine did with Tell Tale’s The expanse in which they collaborated with Telltale just making the characters design and performance capture). Sadly, the possibility for this as of October 2025 has become very limited (if not highly unlikable) as Cyan due to financial difficulties has reduced its team earlier in 2025 and more later to a bare minimum and for the time being is not working on any new games, much less upgrading their existing ones, but they still exist, so the possibility for them to return in the future still remains a possibility. As it stands out, this is an imperfect but highly remarkable effort created after an old puzzle game made by a team of people in another era. The path to Riven was not always easy, and revealing its secrets may seem impossible, but if you pay attention, if you let yourself exist in the fifth age, you may find that Riven has become your world. [i] "Now I understand... Endings and beginnings are within the Fissure, And, though I am unable to understand how, the very flow of stars that brought my Myst Book into worthy hands, I am sure served as a safe passage home for my friend. The Age of Riven has come to a close, but the people of Riven are free. And now, I am at rest... understanding that... in Books, and Ages, and life, the ending can never truly be written." [/i] [b] This review written in candlelight ©2025 Aleena. [/b]
• Recommended Posted April 11, 2026 on Steam This game was unfinished business. I started it almost 30 years ago in a time so different from now. It was a delight to return, using technology I could never have imagined, to complete an experience that was beyond words.