Over the Christmas holidays, I was drawn into the world of Riven. My brother gave it to me as a present, and for the next week or so I spent too much time in front of my Mac into the wee hours of the morning trying to complete this challenge.
What is Riven?
It's the sequel to Myst, the best selling computer game of all time [which I have never played]. It is also the name for a world, and an age, and a group of islands which exist only in the minds of the game's creators and in the mind of anyone who plays along with them.
Riven is also a story. I don't own a lot of computer games, at $50 to $60 a pop I can't afford to, but what I do know is that the if a game is going to keep my interest for more than a few minutes there has to be a reason for me to stick around. A couple of years ago I played Marathon 2 all the way through, which took many hours. On one level Marathon 2 is just another "shoot-the-alien" game, but I kept coming back because it also had a reasonably interesting story weaved throughout. Without a decent story [ and we aren't talking Giller Prize material here, just a coherent plot told with a bit of flair], shooting the aliens quickly becomes dull.
Like Marathon 2, the story of Riven is not a masterpiece, and its elements [saving a doomed people, rescuing a woman imprisoned in a tower, capturing an evil scientist] are all recycled from countless bad novels and more bad movies than you can imagine. Nevertheless, there isn't anything inherently bad about these things...George Lucas turned similar elements into the monumentally popular Star Wars series. If a computer game aspires to be as sophisticated as Star Wars, then that is good enough for me.
Riven presents its story using a combination of leading edge computer technology and a simple intuitive point and click interface. The stage is set by a short on-screen movie where one of Riven's real life creators outlines the predicament on Riven:his wife, Katherine, has been captured by his father, the evil scientist Ghen, and the world of Riven is "unstable". Predictably, we are asked to travel to Riven to capture Ghen and save Katherine before Riven falls apart. Then we are plonked down in the midst of a series of beautifully crafted computer generated pictures and left more or less on our own to figure things out. The pictures invoke a world which looks realistic but which is, at the same time, fantastic. We zip from island to island on roller coaster like vehicles. We see and explore buildings: houses? temples? schools? and machines whose purpose we cannot quite fathom. We find hidden switches and levers and operate them, but often it seems than nothing changes.
We can move around Riven by clicking in the middle of the screen, and the picture will be replaced by a new one from a vantage point which is usually about 10-20 metres [or 1-2 metres if we are inside a building] ahead of the last one. We can "turn" left or right, by clicking on the side of the screen and sometimes we can look or climb up and down. Once you have mastered these navigation skills you know just about everything you need to know to navigate Riven.
But just navigating Riven isn't going to save Katherine or capture Ghen. To do that we have to solve a number of puzzles by observing and connecting bits of information from various places on the Riven islands. Solving the puzzles is necessary to give us the ability to travel to the places we need to go to to accomplish our mission. The puzzles aren't difficult, once you understand the rules. But on Riven, there is no one around to tell us the rules. We need to figure it out yourself, and this can take many hours spread over many days. Riven is not a game for those with short attention spans.
In fact this is where I started to get frustrated. I had discovered many of the puzzles, but was unable to solve any of them. I was overwhelmed by the number of puzzles and really had no idea what sort of clues I would need to begin to solve them. So I did what I suspect most people do in cases like this......I cheated.
Cheating is a funny word. If you know someone else who is facing the same problem as you, talking about the problem so that you can each take advantage of the others experiences isn't called cheating, its called co-operating. I didn't know anyone else who was tackling Riven at the same time as me, so I found a site on the internet where someone had put together a series of hints to help you through each of the puzzles. He didn't give you the answers right away, he made suggestions which would help you to find the answer on your own. I rationalized this as being essentially the same as talking to someone else who has more time on their hands than I. To his credit, they guy who wrote the hints claims to have solved everything himself, and it only took him about 18 hours.....18 HOURS!!! Using these clues, I was able to finish the game a bit faster than that, but it still preoccupied me for a good few days.
So is it any good?
Yes it is good. The graphics and soundtrack are very well done. The puzzles are infuriating [even with help it still takes forever to collect the necessary information]. As you solve the puzzles, more details are revealed through on-screen movies and from reading journals left by the main characters. It is interesting that, even in a highly sophisticated multi-media computer generated environment, most of the interesting character development and some of the key pieces of information are presented in a computer simulation of a hand written journal. More evidence that books will be around for a long long time still. And the story? Well..... the story is good enough. Everthing moves towards the expected happy ending, unless you make one of several crucial mistakes. There are many possible endings, each one filmed with live actors. In one which I stumbled on, Ghen triumphed, Katherine remained a prisoner and I died. Other endings are quite the opposite.
Riven is a game, it is a world, and like a good book or film, it is also a journey. You can come away from Riven with feeling as if the journey has been worthwhile.
SMB 28-12-98