![]() They were moving from the idea of abstract brain teasers towards puzzles that felt like a natural part of the environment puzzles that didn’t feel like puzzles. However, even towards the end of Myst’s development a shift was taking place in terms of the team’s design philosophy. Riven could have ended up very similar to Myst, and some of the early designs for puzzles followed Myst’s abstract, detached-from-the-world template. And what disappointed me was that Riven provided some perfect answers to the questions the community was asking, but no one was bringing it up. I don’t read any gaming sites anymore, but I remember that this was a discussion going on back in the day. I don’t know if the game community is still discussing how to merge narrative and gameplay, or how to keep gameplay and narrative from working against each other. That’s not to say that you need to know the story to solve the puzzles, but if you were to change Riven’s story or characters then you would also have to change Riven’s puzzles simultaneously. But Riven intertwines its narrative story and its gameplay in very elegant ways (and in my opinion its storytelling techniques are better than Half-life, which was released a year later). Which is a shame, because Riven is, in many ways, a massively superior game to Myst, and from a design perspective it is a completely different game altogether.Īll of Myst’s puzzles were standalone, surreal, abstract brain teasers, and if you removed Myst’s story then 99% of the puzzles would remain unchanged. One of the consequences of Myst being passed off as a novelty of its time is that its sequel, Riven, never got the intellectual and academic scrutiny it deserved. And then Doom came out and the only thing people cared about were those types of games. Its artistry has been overlooked by most people because at the time of release (1993) no one gave a damn about games as an art form. ![]() “Walking simulators” like the Stanley Parable, Dear Esther, and Gone Home owe their existence to Myst paving the path over a decade earlier. Myst was a great game and perhaps one of the first “art” games (I could probably write a whole blog post about this alone). So, I decided to look at one clever example of this. ![]() Riven (the sequel to Myst) has a game design philosophy in which the gameplay and narrative are the same thing.
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