The bestselling PC game of 1997, Riven now seems like an artefact from a lost creative era. Set on a sun-baked archipelago – the sort to which flocks of Instagram influencers would now stampede, were it real – it combined computer-generated postcard stills with live-action footage to form an elaborate, island-scale escape room. Spread across five compact discs, it was a technological marvel, albeit one whose depths would only be witnessed by the tenacious and persistent who also excelled at lateral thinking. Few other designers since have had the ingenuity or capacity to make Riven-alikes; its memory sank like a pebble in a still sea.
Three decades on and this remake resurfaces Riven’s arcane, alluring world as a fully realised destination. No longer are these islands explored by clicking through a series of richly rendered stills, but by walking along its baked clifftops and stone-cool tunnels (with the option to play via a VR headset, for those with the stomach and equipment for it). The essential beats and rhythms will be familiar to fans: again, you must play with a mouse in one hand and notebook in the other, unscrambling ciphers and figuring out how the world’s creaking, underlying mechanisms fit together. But a great deal has changed too, including the solutions to several puzzles. There are also new characters, including a star turn from real-life investigative journalist Ronan Farrow (who, with his mother, the actor Mia Farrow, is a keen fan of Riven and its predecessor, Myst).
The ponderous, obscure pacing will not be to everyone’s taste, and you’ll need a powerful machine to reproduce the world as its creators intended, but – surprisingly, perhaps – Riven’s mystical power has only intensified with age. There is nothing else quite like it. And as many of us count the days until the summer holidays, here is a destination free of tourists, with plentiful vistas and a clockwork conundrum that, when solved, provides a revitalising blast of satisfaction.
