Game: Riven (2024 Remake)
Target Audience: Fans of narrative-driven puzzle games, ages 13+, namely players who enjoy slow, exploratory gameplay and atmospheric storytelling.
Game Creator: Cyan Worlds
Platform: PC, Mac, and VR (Meta Quest, SteamVR, etc.) [I played on Mac with a controller]
Riven does an immensely great job at something essential (and often lacking) in puzzle games: immersion. Immediately, the player is thrown into a world with so little knowledge about what to do, how to move along, what to try, and you’re meant to have this discombobulation. Your character is discombobulated from the start, thrown into an unlocked cage with no memories and forced to amble around this people-less world, trying to piece together anything. Honestly, I was frustrated by this.
The total lack of any guidance was certainly a bit of a nuisance, especially as a player who wants stuff to be happening. I am a huge fan of puzzle games, so I am back and forth on this. The very first puzzle requires you to look at a door with a lock and try to open it. I tried what I thought was everything, but then I looked it up (I don’t consider this a failure), and the internet informed me that I was to be looking at the hinge itself, instead of the lock. Sure enough, a pop of the hinge, and the door opened.
This turned out to be one of Riven’s core puzzle types—what Bob Bates might call unusual use of ordinary objects. The game constantly asks you to reframe how you interact with the environment. Pipes and paintings aren’t just background decorations; they’re all clues. A crank might be meaningless now but important lat
That kind of design creates a unique player experience, built by the “aha” moments throughout. The rewards for solving the puzzles aren’t earned by trying every combination, but by slowly developing a mental map of how the world works. The puzzles don’t interrupt the narrative—they are the narrative.
Ethically, the game does a few things well, and a few things a bit less well. The accessibility options within the settings are robust, giving lots of different options for keybinds, different types of captions, and more—I was never worried I’d miss a puzzle due to my colorblindness, which felt assuring. I’m often worried I’m missing out on some aspect of a game, and often I am. Something that was a little more lacking was the expectation of the player to really understand the genre and the tropes of the genre. I’m meant to know how to traverse the landscape, looking for any type of clues, instead of just clicking around aimlessly for a few hours, which is what I ended up doing.
Riven rewards consistency, patience and curiosity, and that’s not a bad thing, just a specific thing. It closes the game off to certain players, which I assume is just intentional. It’s a small group of people who like something like this, and that allows the designers to build a challenging game with challenging puzzles and mechanics.
Once I got into the rhythm of it, the game actually began to click (with some walkthrough peeks). I began to slow down, to really look at things, to actually take notes. And when something finally did work—when a door opened, or a machine started to move—it felt earned in a way that more guided games rarely do. Riven isn’t trying to be friendly. It’s trying to be immersive. And for players willing to meet it on its own terms, that immersion can be incredibly rewarding.
