Riven has been a long time in the making. After the unexpected success of Myst in 1991, a great number of "Myst clones" began to pop up. Myst remained on the Top 10 lists until 1997. Its high-quality graphics made it stand out in a crowd of mostly VGA resolution games. It also took advantage of the new CD-ROM format. First becoming a hit on Macintosh systems, the PC version was released to rave reviews and eager buyers looking for a game with family level content. Riven returns the player to the mysterious worlds of D'Ni, where writing in books makes imagination become reality.

The vague plot of the game starts as a direct continuation from Myst. Atrus' (the father of the two brothers in Myst) wife has been kidnapped, or somehow held in the world of Riven. You, as the mysterious Stranger, fresh from exploring the worlds of Myst, are sent to Riven via a linking book to find Catherine (Atrus' wife), and capture Gehn (Atrus' evil father). Once there, you are sent on a mission of piecing together Gehn's own private world. He has set himself up as God over the natives in Riven, but recently retreated to another world of his creation. Much of the plot is hard to piece together with its massive amount of hints and diaries that only give minor clues to the story. Catherine has been gathering the support of the natives of Riven against the tyranny of Gehn's rule. However, Gehn is difficult to remove from power since he is the leader of a strange cult of devoted followers who appear from time to time in the game. After a period of gathering support and creating unrest in the already unstable world of Riven (the dimension's fabric is weak and constantly in danger of falling apart), Catherine was captured by Gehn's followers and imprisoned in a location that you must find.

For long periods of time, the story all but disappears from the exploration of the world itself. Sometimes you will find a small amount of information about the events in Riven, but no real-time action regarding the plot occurs until very late in the game. At a few points, there are some extended speeches or movies that move the plot along quickly and allow you to see and hear from the actual characters, but don't expect any interactive conversation. The story is 100% linear. I doubt that there are any multiple paths -- one action leads to another action, and so on for the whole game.

The primary selling point of Riven is its graphics, which are top-of-the-line by today's 2D picture standards, but still lack real motion or ambience. The game plays out like a series of beautiful paintings, but nothing more. Once I entered the world of Riven, I quickly realized how truly boring and uneventful it is. Myst's original storage-space restraints held it back from being full of motion or high quality graphical content, but now the slideshow design is a long dead type of game play that has been replaced with animated environments such as those found in games like The 11th Hour. Riven's choppy animations (what few there are) only detract from the generally boring exploration of this fantasy world. In many ways, this game could have easily been placed online with its small amount of real motion and pure content of JPEG pictures. A game cannot be made up of 2 thousand JPEG images anymore. The computer gaming world desires fully explorable 3D environments. At least, Cyan, the developers responsible for this game, could have considered a 180-degree pan type interface to save some CD space.

The only explanation during the game for it's complete lack of interaction with the vast number of "Rivenese" natives is that their leader, Gehn, has banned them from talking to you. Occasionally, you encounter one or two of the natives fleeing from you, which they do successfully. It could have made for an interesting experience if some type of interaction with these natives was possible, but we are trapped in a barren world of boring landscape paintings instead, where discoveries are limited to mysterious switches or levers. Taking place on a vast chain of islands that make up the world of Riven, there are around two hundred different ominous switches or levers to discover and investigate.

The overall value of Riven is quite limited. I could probably recommend this to the few hardcore Myst addicts who want to see what happens after that game's conclusion, but I am sure the taste would be bitter-sweet. It's just more of the same eye-candy, but without the content that warrants taking up 5 CDs.

System Requirements: Pentium 100, 16 MB RAM, 4X CD-ROM, minimum 75 MB of disk space, Sound Card, Mouse, High Color (16 bit) palette, DirectX compatible, and Windows 95.

Tested on a: Intel Pentium 166, 32 MB RAM, 8X CD-ROM, Sound Blaster AWE64, 800x600 True Color (24-bit) color palette, a Microsoft mouse, and Windows 95