RIVEN’s greatest trait is that it’ll make you feel S-T-U-P-I-D
You’ll go to an Age and won’t need ID
A terrible myth about nerds is that we’re smart, but if that were true, then Zuckerberg, Altman, and Musk wouldn’t be speedrunning humanity to extinction. I would say that we’re actually dumber than non-nerds. Just look at what would be in the Early Life section of my non-existent Wikipedia page: Calculus class – failed that, felt stupid. Learning DnD – got bored, had my bard just play My Heart Will Go On with every attack, felt stupid. Auditioning for high school theater – passed my audition, tried to make a career in showbiz, felt really stupid. Nerds love doing dumb shit, and one of the dumbest things to do is love adventure games.
Remember adventure games? The point-and-clicks of the 80s and 90s? Focused on puzzles and storytelling, this was a genre that was the absolute peak of PC gaming before technology moved along enough to give Blizzard and Epic a chance to make the platform a sweat-fest. And the peak of this peak was Myst: something that completely broke the genre in the way that Jaws did with the blockbuster, both elevating the medium and simultaneously dooming the industry to try and replicate its success into oblivion (the concept ‘oblivion,’ not the game). But unlike Jaws, Myst’s sequel ended up becoming so iconic that it is spoken of in hushed tones: Riven. It had never-before-seen levels of environmental storytelling, robust world-building, and puzzles so brilliant that you felt unbelievably stupid. My friends: hell yeah. Hell yeah. Riven received a remake recently, and I have wonderful news to the nerds in the audience: you will feel just as stupid as you did nearly thirty years ago, which may sound awful to folks, but the payoff for enduring that pain is astronomical.
Myst is such an interesting phenomenon, because it completely changed not only videogames, but consumer computers in general – and yet no one other than old videogame fans even remember it today. It was so big that there is a “before Myst” and an “after Myst.” Before Myst, most PC games were idiosyncratic and unique, reserved only for nerds and basement dwellers, often requiring inventory management to solve puzzles that were strung together by mediocre stories. There were exceptions to these bad stories, mainly LucasArts fare like Monkey Island, but the puzzles always were a little too weird, requiring you to combine things in your inventory like meat and flower petals.
Then came Myst: chatty characters robotically spouting exposition or jokes were nowhere to be seen. In fact, all characters were gone. It was just you on an island, and you had to decide when to interact with simplified puzzles that were a part of the environment, when to watch video recordings of real life actors playing characters, and when to read the in-game books that dictated the entire story. The story-telling choices were very strong and interesting, and the puzzles were more interesting than they were difficult, but most importantly, the game was patient. It didn’t constantly harangue you to talk to someone or solve something, you were left to your own devices on when to do anything. And all of this combined to make a game that sold so many copies and crossed into the fabled demographics known as ‘adults’ and ‘women’, that people started buying CD drives for their computers.
That’s right, Myst is one of the main reasons CDs took off for computers. People fucking loved this game. Even the New York Times referred to the game as evidence that games could become art – an extremely gatekeep-y thing to say (the writer of that article calls themselves immature for the crime of giving a shit), but getting any acknowledgement from the NYT for the detestable form of videogames means that a huge crossover happened here. Even Matt Damon liked it so much that he wanted the Bourne Identity tie-in game to be more like Myst than Call of Duty. So when Riven came out four years later (again a modest amount of time these days, but this was a lifetime back in ye olde age of Boyz II Men), everyone wondered how it would top the OG. The answer was to make us feel monumentally stupid. And it worked.
Riven raised the stakes in every way: instead of reading the journal of an altruistic explorer, you now read the journal of a ruthless, narcissistic colonialist. Instead of exploring worlds that have already been destroyed, you explore a world that is currently being destroyed. And most important of all, instead of solving several disparate puzzles in separate locations, you solve only a few puzzles spread out across an entire world. This meant that you truly needed to understand every single goddamn grain of sand, to know about different peoples’ motivations for survival, to understand foreign number symbols. Solving the puzzles meant knowing the story, creating an astounding level of audience immersion. There was no avoiding the storytelling - the gameplay was the storytelling.
Such a high achievement does have a consequence, and you may have guessed it at this point: there are times where you will feel dumb. Not just dumb, but stupid. Idiotic, even. Requiring such a strong understanding of a world will lead to impatience, because you need to understand everything. It affected me pretty strongly in this latest iteration of Riven: I repeatedly missed very trivial things, like a door hinge I needed to remove, or a little spyglass that I needed to pick up on a wall, or a gear I needed to press. At first, I was fuming from these misses, as I figured that they were leftovers from the old design of the original 1997 release of the game. “Why didn’t they update this,” I said through gritted teeth as I browsed threads and guides while trying not to spoil the actual puzzles. “What’s wrong with them? Why not modernize the game in a full remake?” I then decided to buy and install the original version of the game, and to my surprise, none of these problems were present. Instead, entirely different problems were around, because the team had modernized the game, and apparently they had even updated the story and revamped puzzles and had gated players to make sure they understood puzzles in a proper progression. It wasn’t the game that was dumb, it was me. I had been tearing through the fictional island of the game looking for a sign that said “I’m stupid” when I had been the one wearing the sign the whole time.
It became clear that I needed to learn more patience, the 233rd time I’ve learned this lesson in my life. I would say that it’s because I’m a parent and have less time these days, but I’m pretty sure I was this impatient in college when I played the original version as well. I needed to just accept the game world as it was, and trust that I would find the answer eventually. And I did. The feeling of understanding the puzzles, and thus the world and story, was a high I rarely feel anywhere. It’s something I only have felt a few times, such as when playing the similar puzzle-immersion game, Outer Wilds.
It made me realize that I could even learn to accept this level of patience in parenthood, which would make me a better parent, which would give my child a better attitude towards life.
Feeling dumb is not only good, it’s important. At least, that’s what I say when I can’t find my keys to the car.
Be Nice
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - A visual novel featuring high school students who pilot robots to fight aliens while solving a mystery involving time travel. From VanillaWare, this follows their formula of interesting gameplay, gorgeous art, and mediocre storytelling. Spoilers on the game’s themes, but it’s about how we’re all stuck in cycles and the way to break free of that is through art. This is a lovely sentiment, but the story itself repeats that cyclical nature without giving a real solution on how its characters could learn to break that cycle with agency. Instead, the characters just stumble onto a solution and go with it. This is a very common case of a story having grand ambitions, while not executing those ambitions even remotely. Saying you want to do something important is very different from actually doing it. But again, the strategy gameplay is interesting, the writing is passable, and the art is beautiful. I will absolutely be playing Unicorn Overlord some time this year.
Oh, Good
Despelote - You explore Quito, Ecuador in 2001, kicking a soccer ball around and seeing how people react to it. It just came out, and it seems absolutely beautiful, authentic, and relaxing. Can’t wait to play it at some point.