🏆 Congrats to March's top contributors! Top 3: Koterminus, Plok and Tim Janssen

Riven: The Sequel to Myst

aka: Myst 2, Riven: A Sequência de Myst, Riven: Il Seguito Di Myst, Riven: La Suite De Myst
Moby ID: 1262
Windows Specs
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 4/10 2:31 AM )

Description official descriptions

After the Stranger has rescued Atrus, the master of "linking books", from the imprisonment caused by his sons, a new task awaits the hero. Atrus's wife, Catherine, has been taken by Gehn, his own father. Gehn has appointed himself as the one to rule the Age of Riven, and has driven his world to collapse. Now he holds Catherine hostage on Riven, hoping that his son will restore the book link to the Age and free him from there. The Stranger is requested by Atrus to travel to Riven and find a way to rescue Catherine.

Riven is a sequel to Myst, and is very similar to its predecessor in gameplay style, controls, and visual presentation. The game world is presented as a series of computer-generated still screens; the player explores it in a point-and-click fashion. Interaction with the environment is possible only when said environment is highlighted as a "hot spot", and is also performed by simple clicking. Like its predecessor, Riven is heavy on puzzles, which rarely include using inventory items, but usually involve understanding and manipulating the complex environments and machinery of the game world.

Spellings

  • リヴン  ザ シークェル トゥー ミスト - Japanese spelling
  • 神秘岛II - 星空断层 - Chinese spelling (simplified)
  • 迷霧之島II - Chinese spelling (traditional)

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Videos

See any errors or missing info for this game?

You can submit a correction, contribute trivia, add to a game group, add a related site or alternate title.

Credits (Windows version)

243 People (174 developers, 69 thanks) · View all

Lead Programmers
Application Programmers
Programming Directors
Senior Production Manager
Production Manager
Assistant Production Manager
Executive Publisher
Lead Sound Designer
Additional Sound Designer
Sound Processing
Video Processing
QuickTime Programmer
Systems Programmers
Production Tools Programmers
Installer Programmers
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 83% (based on 42 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 153 ratings with 10 reviews)

Let's get sucked up by a world so beautiful, it's creepy.

The Good
The graphics! Everything is much more detailed and realistic that Myst. You just want to be there and that's exactly how you should play (or experience) this game. It's still the pointing, clicking, exploring and puzzle solving. You need to look very carefully and learn to think in a special way to enjoy this and solve the mysteries of Riven. If you like thinking and exploring this is a gem for you, if not stop reading this. The game starts were Myst left of. Your friend Atrus sends you to the Riven age to rescue his beloved wife Catherine who is held captive on one of Riven's islands by Gehn, Atrus' evil father. You also need to trap Gehn with a prison book. However, if you make a mistake you may have a wrong ending. There are ten (!) different endings to Riven. The story from Myst continues and gets even more complex which is great. The sound is also great and plays a good part in gameplay.

The Bad
Pointing and clicking can sometimes be confusing and the disc-swapping really works badly on your nerves. If you want to buy this look for the DVD version first that doesn't have this problem. Some puzzles are too hard. Myst had this but here it's even worse.

The Bottom Line
A brilliant game that is very beautiful. If you enjoyed Myst or similar games you simply love this. Everything has been vastly improved from Myst. If you are more the action type and don't like thinking leave this !

Windows · by Rensch (203) · 2005

Myst times 5.....

The Good
Riven is the highly anticipated sequal to the award-winning game Myst.

In the game you are transported to the world of Riven to rescue Catherine, Atrus's wife from the first game. But as you land in the world, you find yourself trapped in a cage, with your book on the other side of the bars. A strangely dressed man appears, and is killed in front of your eyes, as an unseen assailant drags his lifeless body away. The bars of your cage open, and your quest starts...

Thus begins your stay in the IMMENSE world of Riven. And when I say immense, I mean IMMENSE. The game is huge. I wish I had a DVD-ROM in my computer, because the game comes on 5 - count 'em - 5 CD's. Riven's world consists of 5 islands, therefore you have 1 Island per CD. This is one of those few games (along with multimedia intensive games such as the Later parts of the Wing Commander series or Phantasmagoria) that seems like it would be better if it were on DVD. No disk swapping! :)

The graphics are in one word - breathtaking. If you thought the quality of graphics in Myst were incredible, it seems that Cyan outdid themselves this time. Beautiful locations take you throughout the world. And if you like rollercoasters, then you'll love the modes of transportation between the islands. The sensation of traveling between the islands is eerie. Cyan's work on this part alone is worth checking it out. Each locale, each picture has significance, just like in Myst.

The sound, again, is incredible. Each sound has a purpose (like Myst), and the background music (which I found out can actually be purchased as a soundtrack), is fantastic.

There is a lot more interaction with people in this game, unlike the original. The world is alive. You meet people, you talk with them (sorta) and you learn informaton. The is this one part where you see someone, but they end up runnign away from you. So what do you do? Obviously you follow them. But it's this type of interaction that makes the game feel, not like a game, but alive.

The Bad
The conrtol, the control, the control. The contol problems that plagued the original are apparent here as well. It's not quite as bad, but the problems are still there, especially with going up and down stairs.

The Bottom Line
If you absolutely hated Myst, then don't bother with Riven. It's more of the game, and you'll have absolutely no fun.

But if you enjoyed Myst (like I did), then by all means play Riven. You'll love it.

Windows · by Chris Martin (1155) · 2001

The most difficult game of the trilogy... But oh, so rewarding!

The Good
First, the generic graphics-and-sound review:

Riven, as is to be expected, featured stunning graphics and sound effects for its time. But even by today's standards, exploring the islands of Riven is still a very pleasant experience. For the most part, the video sequences integrate with the pre-rendered backgrounds nearly seamlessly, with only minimal choppiness. I have a few problems with the graphics, however, which I'll outline in the next section.

Alright. With that standard stuff out of the way, lemme tell you a story.

I first played Riven back in '97 or '98, around when it was released. The game world was a blast to explore, but I quickly became frustrated by all of the puzzles. Very few of them seemed to make any sense; they were even worse than Myst's arbitrary puzzles.

I solved a number of puzzles, but none of the "major" ones. I didn't even know where to begin figuring out the Fire Marble puzzle (which, in fact, I stumbled upon by accident long before I was supposed to), and I had no clue whatsoever about the wooden eyeballs.

I shelved the game in frustration. Many years passed, bringing us to present day.

A couple of weeks ago, I re-installed Riven. I wandered about exploring, as I did before, solving the occasional puzzle. Then I started finding things I must have overlooked before. A notebook here, some symbolic images there, and entire areas I've never explored before. Then, suddenly, everything clicked. Everything started to make sense!

So this time around, I took copious notes. If I saw something that looked like a symbolic image, I sketched it out, whereas before I just thought "Neat graphic!" and moved on. Being older and wiser now, I had realised that it probably took hours to painstakingly arrange and render each individual screen in the game; the developers wouldn't put more textured polygons in the camera's field of view if the object didn't mean something. Armed with this new perspective, I proceeded to look at my surroundings with a lot more care, and proceed to bulldoze my way through the game's puzzles, many of which I never grasped before. I then went on to complete the game in short order.

Lemme tell ya, as I walked up to the Fire Marble puzzle again, knowing precisely what to do this time, I had a great feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction. BOOYAH!

The Bad
As you've gathered by now, the puzzles in this game are HARD, much more so than Myst, or Myst III. Single puzzles are sometimes spread out all over the landscape too, which makes things even more frustrating. Take the wooden-eyeball puzzle, for example: you'll see these things all over the place, but unless you look around them very, very carefully you'll never figure out what to do with them. I practically figured them out by accident, when I accidently turned around and saw... The Symbol. "Oh, hey, so that's how this works! Neat!"

Additionally, as I've mentioned earlier, while the video usually integrates well with the backgrounds, it fails spectacularly when there's any large animation going on. For example, a switch or a lever moving won't cause any noticeable display artifacts. But when you're riding around in the inter-island transport system, your screen will turn into a washed-out, pixellated mess. You can sortof tell where you're moving, but the quality goes way down. Still, this is a very minor part of the game, since you don't really see video sequences of that size very often.

And finally, puzzles and video aside, my biggest gripe with this game is:

Please insert disc 2. Please insert disc 1. Please insert disc 3. Please insert disc 2. Please insert disc 4. Please insert disc 3. Please insert disc 2.

The game ships on five CDs, one for each island in Riven. However, since you tend to move around from island to island, you end up swapping CDs fairly often. There is no way to install the entire game to your hard drive, either - it's explicitly designed to look for actual CDs. However, there is... or perhaps, there was a DVD-ROM version of this game. I'd recommend tracking it down instead of the CD version, if anyone wants to play this old game on a modern system.

The Bottom Line
This game requires an enormous amount of patience. The way the puzzles are structured, you don't just need to know how to put two and two together to get four -- you need the ability to put one and two and five and negative three and six together, and get eleven.

Along your journey, you'll need to learn an alien numbering system, an alien system of color representation, learn the meanings of sounds, and analytically observe everything you come across.

Now that I've completed this game, everything in it makes sense (in its own way). The workings of the world are explained through notebooks you find as you progress. But it certainly doesn't start out that way; nothing in Riven is readily explained until you find your first notebook, which doesn't happen until some time into the game.

To summarise: die-hard puzzle-lovers will undoubtedly love this game, but I wouldn't really recommend it for the casual gamer. It's a brain-breaker, to be sure.

Windows · by Dave Schenet (134) · 2003

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Trivia

Saturn version

While the Mac, Windows and Playstation versions were released on five CDs, the Sega Saturn version was released on only four. The layout is as follows:

Disc 1: Intro, Temple Island

Disc 2: Jungle Island, Tay

Disc 3: Book Assembly Island, Survey Island

Disc 4: Prison Island, 233rd Age

The bad endings originally on Disc 5 are now on every disc.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack for this game was composed and performed by Robyn Miller. Also, this soundtrack contains recently recovered d'ni archaeological information. Release date is 1998.

Tracklist: 1. Link 2. Atrus Theme 3. Gateroom 4. Jungle Totem 5. Survey Island Theme 6. Temple 7. Village Entrance Theme 8. Moeity Caves 9. Moeity Theme 10. Boat Ride 11. Moeity Prison 12. The Red Cave 13. Wahrk Room 14. Catherine's Prelude 15. Catherine's Theme 16. Catherine's Freedom 17. Gehn Speaks 18. Gehn's Theme 19. Fissure 20. Bonus Track

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #12 Top Vaporware Title in Computer Game History

Information also contributed by MAT and Techademus

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Ages of Myst
Released 1998 on Windows, Windows 3.x, Macintosh
Myst
Released 1994 on Windows 3.x, Windows, 1995 on PlayStation...
Myst Trilogy
Released 2002 on Windows, Macintosh
Myst IV: Revelation
Released 2004 on Windows, Macintosh, Xbox
Myst III: Exile
Released 2001 on Windows, 2002 on Xbox, PlayStation 2
Myst: Masterpiece Edition
Released 1999 on Windows, 2000 on Macintosh
Myst V: End of Ages
Released 2005 on Windows, Macintosh
Myst: The Collection
Released 2006 on Windows, 2007 on Macintosh
Uru: Ages Beyond Myst
Released 2003 on Windows

Related Sites +

  • Acclaim website
    Official Acclaim site for Riven.
  • GameFAQs
    Walkthroughs and tips for Riven.
  • Riven EPK (archived)
    Electronic press kit for the game featuring in game footage, behind the scenes look and more.
  • Riven UHS Hints
    A collection of hints for the game provided by the Universal Hint System (UHS). UHS hints are structured in such a way as not to give away the answer immediately but, instead, to provide the player with increasingly more revealing hints before finally providing a complete solution.
  • Riven X (archived)
    An open source project that allows Macintosh users to run both the CD and DVD versions of Riven on their modern operating systems.
  • The Myst Guidebook
    The Riven subsection of the Guidebook fansite that provides information about the game and a brief background on the game's production in addition to game hints and a walkthrough.
  • The Starry Expanse Project
    A fan-organized project attempting re-create Riven as a realtime 3D game in a fashion similar to realMYST. The project is currently still active.
  • Zarf's Review
    An unscored review of the Macintosh version of Riven by IF-creator Andrew Plotkin (November, 1997)."

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 1262
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by MAT.

iPhone added by Techademus. SEGA Saturn added by Kohler 86. Windows Mobile added by Kabushi. Macintosh added by Xoleras. PlayStation added by Grant McLellan. iPad added by me3D31337.

Additional contributors: Swordmaster, Jeanne, Apogee IV, chirinea, Zeppin, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Nightson Blaze, Techademus, HelloMrKearns.

Game added April 2, 2000. Last modified March 20, 2024.