Back In The Fifth Age Agehn
HIGH Supreme visual artistry and fantasy aesthetic. Dense, layered worldbuilding.
LOW The large-scale puzzles are hugely demanding.
WTF The “fast travel system.”
Cyan Worlds’s Myst etched a permanent sigil onto my brain. That hardly makes me unique, of course, and I was well behind the curve – we got a copy in ‘95 or ‘96, after Myst was a certified hit and soon-to-be mother to a thousand imitators (including P.Y.S.T., a direct parody of Myst featuring John Goodman in his one and only FMV performance!)
However, none of that impinged on my relationship with Myst. I was a kid when it came out, and like nearly everything I encountered as a child, it existed in a kind of holy vacuum, complete unto itself. I played it in short, wayward sessions with no eye for goals and no ear for plot — I was merely clicking around, wondering what’s this rocket ship doing here? Why is this model ship in the well? If I stand in the woods long enough, will creatures peel themselves from behind the skinny pines and come slouching towards me?
That brief, lambent encounter counted for the totality of my experience with the Myst series for decades, but every so often I’d feel a twinge, revisit the little room in my memory palace dedicated to that strange world, and desire to go back — which I finally did this month, in the form of Riven ’24, a revision/remake of the 1997 sequel to Myst, following on from Cyan’s reboot of that game in 2021.
While the world is the main draw in Riven ‘24, it’s also a puzzle game of the sort descended from ’80s point-and-click adventures and computer RPGs. These were titles that demanded players solve riddles, unravel ciphers, and make formidable leaps of logic based on careful, minute observation, sometimes accumulated over weeks of play. That’s all here in Riven ‘24. Players explore a series of connected islands, ferreting out the problems with each and solving them using a simple point-and-click interface. In a major departure from the standard adventure game format, however, there’s no player inventory in Riven ‘24; all the tools needed to solve the islands’ puzzles are in the world itself, or contained as clues within several discoverable documents and logs.
Like the Myst remake, Riven ’24 takes the ‘97 original’s world — which consists of painstakingly layered, pre-rendered images interspersed with FMV elements that were clicked through forward and back — and brings it into lush, realtime Unreal Engine 5 3D. Players can now walk around the world of Riven as they would in any modern first-person title….
…And it is a world.
As was the case in ‘97, the broken land of Riven is an aesthetic achievement in creating its vivid, deep, uncanny dream-place. Like all great fantasy work, Riven ’24 touches something universal through its impossible vistas – a shrine hidden by a wall of towering, waving fronds, a meadow of dun-colored moths that flutter away at the player’s approach, a lagoon bristling with eruptions of sharp rock and spires of twisting horn, an impossibly huge sword driven into a stone plateau…
The newfound 3D solidity is where the remake justifies itself… mostly. Exploring these incredible spaces fluidly and looking at anything from any angle and any perspective sheds a new light on the Fifth Age – a new light, but not, critically, a better one.
I’m critical towards modern remake culture. I think it’s damaging, I think it’s manipulative, and I think that it’s leading to some bad places for the art form. Now, there’s nothing cynical about Riven ‘24– in fact it seems to’ve been made with joy and love and reverence, but, like most remakes, it doesn’t really need to exist. Everything that makes Riven ’24 truly beautiful is fully present in the original, and if I had to choose one version of Riven for posterity, it would be 1997’s without hesitation.
Why? It comes down to the aesthetic. The new 3D is striking, undoubtedly, but it is less distinct than the original’s pre-rendered look. There is something painstaking and handmade-feeling about Riven’s original pre-rendered tableaux, and I don’t think it’s merely nostalgia speaking when I say that. In moving towards more traditionally ‘realistic’ graphic styles, we lose an element of artistic interest, no matter what else we may gain.
But we don’t have to choose, so Riven ’24 can (and should!) be enjoyed alongside the original. Control-wise, Riven ’24 will also be more palatable to gamers who aren’t down with the UI archaisms of the ’90s (clicking laboriously from place to place, and angle to angle, does get old) and some puzzles have been retooled, including the two biggest ones in the game.
Now, the puzzles in Riven ‘24 begin gently enough and most are quite satisfying to solve, but these two ‘capstone’ challenges nearly broke me. Solving them became a slog – the kind of ravenous, cancerous slog that devours the goodwill a game builds up in its best bits. I turned to a walkthrough, but this was of limited use because, in a change from the original, Riven ’24 randomizes key elements. In other words, even if one does know what to do, they’ll still have to break out pen and paper and do the work.
In a roundabout way, this is praise for the puzzles because this is not a case of the kind of nonsensical ‘moon logic’ that helped drive the genre to near-extinction, but instead a dense, intricate mystery asking for something most games do not – someone’s total, undivided attention.
As players progress through Riven ’24, they’re learning about this disintegrating world and the nature of Gehn, the tyrant who brought it to its current low state. They’ll find long journals, and are expected to read them – in fact, they need to read them as pivotal clues are hidden in seemingly throwaway lines.
Players also have to understand not only the physical space of Riven, but its people, its numerals, and the metaphysical powers at work. Then, these two end-game puzzles demand players bring everything they’ve learned and observed up to that point and bring it all to bear in order to solve them. It’s immersion on a level that modern titles simply do not dare require – for good or for ill – and it caught me off guard, frustrated me for a long time, and then, in the end, kind of impressed me.
Ultimately, my advice to anyone interested would be to try Riven ’24, but to give it only quiet evenings, with nothing on in the background and a notepad at hand. Savor the world, take in all of its wind-kissed, sea-girt coasts, jewel-like lagoons, and its bright stone facades cut with geometric planes of sun and shade. Prepare to go slowly, prepare to think, and prepare to synthesize. Also, prepare to get stuck. Even with its modernizations, Riven ’24 is an uncompromising experience, though it has incredible things to show those willing to make the journey.
7.5 out of 10
— Ben Schwartz
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Cyan Worlds, Inc. It is currently available on MacOS, Meta Quest, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 11 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E 10+ and contains Mild Language and Mild Violence. The ESRB summary states: This is a puzzle-adventure game in which players search various islands and worlds in order to rescue a character. From a first-person perspective, players interact with characters, solve puzzles, and perform actions that affect the story. Some actions result in failure scenarios in which players are shot by darts as the screen fades to black. One area depicts a body on the side of a cliff. The word “damn” appears in the game.
Colorblind Modes: The game offers Color Context Subtitles which are recommended for those with moderate to severe colorblindness.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. There is a separate toggle for Sound Context Subtitles which display important sound cues for puzzles as subtitles on the screen. I’d say it’s fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.
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