Man, October 1997 was a good month for gaming. I’d just gotten my hands on a brand new Pentium 166MHz machine – yeah, I know, absolute powerhouse by ’97 standards – and I was feeling pretty good about my 32MB of RAM. Thought I was ready for anything the gaming world could throw at me. Then I walked into Babbage’s at the mall and saw it sitting there on the shelf: Riven. Five CDs in one of those thick jewel cases that felt like you were buying something genuinely important, not just another game.
I’d been obsessed with Myst since ’93. Played through it probably six times, bought those terrible novels Miller wrote (sorry Rand, but come on), spent hours just wandering around those Ages soaking up the atmosphere. So when Cyan announced the sequel, I was ready. Had my money saved, release date marked on my calendar, the whole nine yards. But holding that five-disc set in my hands, I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was in for.
The installation alone was an event. Five CDs meant I was basically chained to my computer for the better part of an hour, constantly swapping discs and watching that progress bar crawl forward. My buddy Jake called halfway through – we’d both bought it the same day because we’re nerds like that – and we spent twenty minutes comparing installation progress like it was some kind of competition. “Disc four,” he bragged. I was still on disc three, nervously eyeing my hard drive space. Had to delete Wing Commander III and a bunch of other stuff just to make room. No regrets though.
When it finally loaded and I saw that opening sequence – Atrus handing me the linking book, explaining about his father Gehn being trapped on Riven – I got that same feeling I’d had four years earlier with Myst. Like I was about to experience something genuinely special. Then came the linking effect, that distinctive sound and visual distortion that every Myst fan knew by heart, and suddenly I’m trapped in this bizarre metal contraption on an alien world.
No tutorial. No helpful hints. No “press F1 for help.” Just you, a cage, and absolutely no clue what you’re supposed to do. This was 1997 gaming at its most unforgiving, and I loved every frustrating minute of it.
The visuals hit me like a truck. I mean, Myst had been impressive for its time, but Riven was operating on a completely different level. The first time I got out of that cage and saw the ocean stretching to the horizon, with those distant islands barely visible through the mist, I actually said “holy crap” out loud. My girlfriend thought something was wrong with the computer. Nope, just having my mind blown by pre-rendered graphics that looked more realistic than anything I’d ever seen in a game.
And the details, man. Every single screen looked like someone had spent days perfecting the lighting, the composition, the little touches that made it feel real. The way water moved, how light filtered through trees, the weathered textures on metal and stone. This wasn’t just better graphics – it was like stepping into a living photograph.
Getting lost in Riven was part of the experience, but it was also genuinely terrifying. Not in a horror game way, but in that “I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing and I might have just broken something important” way. The world felt real enough that I was genuinely worried about pressing the wrong button or flipping the wrong switch. This wasn’t some cartoon game world where you could just mash buttons and see what happened. Actions felt like they had consequences.
The D’ni numbering system nearly drove me insane. Those symbols were everywhere – carved into walls, displayed on machines, embedded in puzzles – and they were clearly crucial to understanding everything. I went through about half a notebook trying to decode them before I finally realized it was base-25. When it clicked, when I suddenly understood how those dots and lines worked together, it was like solving a real archaeological puzzle. Felt like Howard Carter opening King Tut’s tomb or something.
That village on the jungle island was where Riven really showed its hand. This wasn’t just a puzzle game with pretty backgrounds – this was worldbuilding at a level games had never attempted before. Empty huts that told stories about the people who’d lived there, architectural details that suggested an entire culture with its own aesthetic principles, those creepy gold-masked wahrk figures that hinted at religious practices I couldn’t even begin to understand.
I spent hours just wandering around that village, not even trying to solve puzzles, just absorbing the atmosphere. My girlfriend would come over and find me staring at the screen, not even playing, just looking. “What are you doing?” “Trying to figure out what happened to these people.” She thought I was losing it. Maybe I was.
The linking books were pure genius. The metal clasps, the sounds they made when you opened them, those animated pages with their swirling patterns – every detail reinforced the idea that these were real artifacts from another world. When I first encountered one of Gehn’s crude imitations, I knew immediately something was wrong with it just from how it looked. The visual design told the story without needing any exposition.
Getting stuck in Riven meant being properly stuck. This was before GameFAQs was really a thing, before YouTube walkthroughs, before you could just Google your way out of any problem. When I couldn’t figure out how to progress, my options were: keep trying, call Jake to see if he’d gotten further, or cave and buy the official strategy guide for fifteen bucks. I chose stubbornness, sometimes to an unhealthy degree.
Spent an entire weekend trying to figure out the wahrk gallows before I realized how they connected to the submarine system. My girlfriend found me at 2 AM surrounded by notebook pages covered in diagrams, muttering about “rotating domes” and “wahrk calls.” She was genuinely concerned about my mental health. Probably should have been.
That marble puzzle. Jesus. If you’ve played Riven, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, imagine trying to recreate a pattern you glimpsed once, hours ago, in a completely different location, using colored marbles that reset if you screw up. It took me three days. Three days of my life I’ll never get back, but when I finally got it, the satisfaction was incredible. Like solving a Rubik’s cube while blindfolded.
The submarine sequences were pure movie magic. Watching the water rise around you, traveling through those underwater passages while weird sea creatures swam by outside – it was cinematic in a way games just didn’t do in 1997. I showed it to my dad, who thinks video games are a waste of time, and even he was impressed. “It’s like watching a movie,” he said. That was about the highest praise a game could get from him.
What made Riven special wasn’t just individual puzzles – it was how everything connected. You couldn’t just solve one thing and move on. You needed to understand the whole system: the island layout, the power grid, the D’ni numbering, scattered clues that might not make sense until hours later. This wasn’t “find key, open door” gaming. This was “understand an entire alien civilization” gaming.
Gehn was a perfect villain precisely because he wasn’t obviously villainous. No cackling, no over-the-top evil speeches. Just a guy who’d been alone too long, convinced of his own godhood, trapped in his delusions of grandeur. By the time I finally confronted him in his office, I understood him well enough to be genuinely unsettled by the conversation. That’s character development you don’t see in many games, even today.
The sound design deserves special mention. I played most of Riven with headphones, which transformed it from a visual experience into something that surrounded you completely. Every ambient noise, every mechanical sound, every wahrk call was crafted with obsessive attention to detail. And half the puzzles required you to actually listen, not just look. Revolutionary stuff for 1997.
The ending felt earned in a way few game endings do. Trapping Gehn, making the choice about Catherine – it had weight because I’d spent forty-plus hours in that world, coming to understand its history and rules. When I finally linked away from Riven for the last time, I felt like I was leaving a real place I’d gotten to know intimately.
I’ve replayed Riven several times over the years. Set up an old Windows 98 machine a few years back specifically to run it as it was meant to be played. The visuals still hold up, not because they compete with modern graphics – they don’t – but because they were created with such artistic vision that they transcend their technical limitations. Good art direction ages better than good technology.
You can see Riven’s influence everywhere in modern gaming. Environmental storytelling, puzzles that require genuine observation and deduction, games that trust the player to figure things out without constant hand-holding. The Witness, Outer Wilds, even parts of BioShock and Portal – they all learned lessons from what Cyan accomplished in 1997.
There’s been talk about a Riven remake for years. Part of me wants to explore those islands in full 3D, but another part worries something essential would be lost. Those pre-rendered screens were composed like individual photographs, each one crafted with obsessive attention to detail. Can you replicate that magic with real-time rendering? I’m not sure.
What I remember most clearly isn’t any specific puzzle or visual moment – it’s the feeling. For those dozens of hours in late 1997, hunched over my computer with my notebook full of diagrams and theories, I wasn’t just playing a game. I was somewhere else entirely, an explorer trying to understand an alien world through careful observation and logical deduction.
When people ask me why I still care about games as an adult, why I think they’re more than just entertainment, Riven is my go-to example. Five CDs of proof that the medium can create experiences as rich and meaningful as any other art form. Twenty-five years later, and I still haven’t played anything quite like it.
Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”
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