![]() Basically, even the numeral system itself is a visual, mechanical puzzle, which is absolutely genius and brilliant, and I could write a whole blog post on that, but I won’t.) If you take the symbol for 1 and rotate it 90° you get 5 and if you take 5 and superimpose it on 1 you get 6, and so on. So, with these first ten symbols the player has to notice that there is a mechanism in the numeral system for generating more numbers, which is that (spoilers again) low numbers can be rotated to create higher numbers, and low numbers and high numbers can be overlayed to create even higher numbers. The toy only has symbols from one to ten, but he needs to learn the symbols as high as twenty five. (Sidenote: The player’s work isn’t done when he maps each symbol to a number. So, if a wooden man drops down three clicks then the symbol that is showing represents the number 3. What the player has to figure out (spoilers) is that the number of clicks the wooden man drops is related to the symbol that pops up on the toy. (Here’s a youtube walkthrough of the puzzle.) The men take turns dropping down until the first one to reach the bottom gets eaten by the whale. You flip a switch, the whale switches sides, a random symbol pops up, and then one of the men drops down several clicks. Below them is a wooden whale, waiting to eat them. There are two wooden men, each hanging from a gallows. In the school there is a toy that the children can play with (the visual/mechanical design of the toy is actually rather creative, but I’m not going to get into that). Near the Rivenese village there is a schoolhouse where the children go to learn their D’ni reading and writing. You learn to read the numbers by going to school. ![]() ![]() Luckily, Cyan’s dedication to their new design philosophy made sure that learning moments like these were dynamic, immersive, and engaging. This would have been lazy on the part of the developers, and boring for the players. If this was Myst there probably would just be a chart somewhere with D’ni numerals in one column and Arabic numerals in the other column. So, how do you learn to read D’ni numbers (which is necessary to solve many of the puzzles in Riven)? It has its own writing system and its own numeral system. In Riven there is a fictional culture called the D’ni. There are many examples of how Riven’s storytelling and gameplay are interwoven, but I’m going to focus on one: the number learning toy. This change in design philosophy was brought to fruition in Riven, where the goal was to create what felt like a real world, not just a blank canvas for various brain teasers. They were moving from the idea of abstract brain teasers towards puzzles that felt like a natural part of the environment puzzles that didn’t feel like puzzles. However, even towards the end of Myst’s development a shift was taking place in terms of the team’s design philosophy. Riven could have ended up very similar to Myst, and some of the early designs for puzzles followed Myst’s abstract, detached-from-the-world template. And what disappointed me was that Riven provided some perfect answers to the questions the community was asking, but no one was bringing it up. I don’t read any gaming sites anymore, but I remember that this was a discussion going on back in the day. I don’t know if the game community is still discussing how to merge narrative and gameplay, or how to keep gameplay and narrative from working against each other. That’s not to say that you need to know the story to solve the puzzles, but if you were to change Riven’s story or characters then you would also have to change Riven’s puzzles simultaneously. But Riven intertwines its narrative story and its gameplay in very elegant ways (and in my opinion its storytelling techniques are better than Half-life, which was released a year later). Which is a shame, because Riven is, in many ways, a massively superior game to Myst, and from a design perspective it is a completely different game altogether.Īll of Myst’s puzzles were standalone, surreal, abstract brain teasers, and if you removed Myst’s story then 99% of the puzzles would remain unchanged. One of the consequences of Myst being passed off as a novelty of its time is that its sequel, Riven, never got the intellectual and academic scrutiny it deserved. And then Doom came out and the only thing people cared about were those types of games. ![]() Its artistry has been overlooked by most people because at the time of release (1993) no one gave a damn about games as an art form. ![]() “Walking simulators” like the Stanley Parable, Dear Esther, and Gone Home owe their existence to Myst paving the path over a decade earlier. Myst was a great game and perhaps one of the first “art” games (I could probably write a whole blog post about this alone). So, I decided to look at one clever example of this. Riven (the sequel to Myst) has a game design philosophy in which the gameplay and narrative are the same thing. ![]()
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