![]() ![]() The rollercoaster that was the Uru project is a fascinating history. ![]() Myst 5 also suffered from the fact that it was a "third season" excised at the last minute from Uru Live (on strange experiment network GameTap). Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an FPS shouldn't be first person - I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person perspective. Only with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person non-FPS gameplay. Before Portal the use of modern rendering technology and first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small) revival I think Portal started it. a certain pair of double doors was a pretty cheap trick, for example. ![]() (I ended up using one myself when I played it as a kid I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you need to work with. the game is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook. Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure games of the day pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context of the world that you're in. In my own personal mind-canon Riven is the end of the series. I never paid much attention to the sequels, since gur raqvat bs Evira onfvpnyyl cerpyhqrf frdhryf, and they weren't made by the Miller brothers. Riven was a real masterpiece, though after the success of Myst they went to town on it. It's written in such a way that you feel like you've got a companion guiding you along with its commentary, providing just enough information to "unblock" you when you're stuck). But, that was also the era of official strategy guides, so maybe acquiring those would provide adequate context (I know the one for Morrowind makes the game for me. If I wasn't able to find a walkthrough or guide, I don't think I would have been able to complete the game. I'm not sure how much of that was developer's being tricky or the low resolution of the game making it difficult to discern details, or the general shortcomings of the cursor-based UI. I ended up needing about 2 or 3 vague hints to point me to certain areas to advance the plot (luckily, though, IIRC no puzzle solutions), usually revolving around not understanding navigation options (like not knowing you could move through a certain part of a screen). I think the biggest shortcoming is the standard 90s adventure game trope of arbitrarily obtuse solutions to some puzzles. ![]() I played Riven about a year ago (never played Myst), and it held up pretty well. ![]()
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