The other puzzles I was fine with, even the big final puzzle (because by that time you are so familiar with the world its just stone-cold obvious), but not getting the number system - GAHHH! I kicked myself when I had to look it up, and when I saw the solution the clues all seemed so obvious. The other thing I'll always remember is that I just couldn't figure out the D'ni number system on my own. I wanna say it only has, like, 5? Everything else in the game is a little toy or doodad you can play with that just gives you context and information to help solve the main 5. The main thing that sticks with me about Riven is just how few actual puzzles it contains. If nothing else, it meant you had to think to yourself "Do I really need to get on this transport right now? Is there more I can see right here?", because yup, swapping disks on the PS1 was a bit of a chore. Spent a few solid weeks after Uni classes swapping disks while exploring each island. I will absolutely be checking out the rest of the games in the series, even though I hear they are not as good!Ĭlick to shrink.Heh, that's the version I played as well, more than 20 years ago on the PS1. Overall, this is absolutely the peak of the genre for me. However, if you go through, turn around, and close the doors again, you are able to see two passageways going to either side leading to new areas, and when I figured this out, it felt a little bit unfair.īut that is just a minor quibble in an overall spectacular game. The only thing that was a little annoying - and something that will automatically go away if there is ever a remake like for Myst - is the fact that sometimes due to single screen format it’s a little confusing where you can and can’t go.įor example, there is a set of double doors in this game that you open once and forget about. I have very, very few complaints about this game. However, because the buttons would occasionally trigger a roar, I spent ages trying to figure out the pattern of when specifically this would happen, because I thought that maybe you had to make the fish appear in a certain area. I now know that the two purposes of this puzzle were to (a) show you what the big fish looks and sounds like and (b) tell you what colors are associated with each symbol. One of the buttons calls over those big tusked fish, and the other buttons will, at random, trigger a roar from one of the fish. I spent a solid two hours in the underwater survey room with that contraption that maps symbols to colours. OK, so this is one of those things that I felt could have been a little better telegraphed. Most Annoying Puzzle That Turned Out Not To Be A Puzzle At All
That roar that it makes was so bored into my mind at that point that eventually when I went back to touch one the eyeballs on the surface it all came together in my head. It really requires you to have explored every single island, and I only really figured out that those little balls map to sounds of animals after I spent a long time trying to do something with that big tusked fish underwater. Instead, the animal pedestal puzzle was the hardest one for me. Once I made it to the puzzle, I had so much information that I was able to figure out what you needed to do pretty quickly. I looked around a little online and it looks like most people tend to say that the Fire Marble puzzle was the hardest one - however, by that point in the game I got stuck trying to lower the bridge to the dome, so I spent hours wandering around making notes of everything that I could see on every island. Sadly, I tried doing something similar with the alphabet but I don’t think that there is a way to decipher it. It gives you just the right amount of nudges in the right direction so that you can figure it out yourself, and by the end of the puzzle you feel like you’ve immersed yourself even further into the game’s world. With this in mind, the below is probably my favourite puzzle in any video game ever, and the feeling of accomplishment I got from it was massive.įiguring out the number system of the people of Riven was an absolutely amazing experience.
Now we are getting into spoiler territory a little bit, so if any of the above sounds interesting to you, I would strongly encourage you to play the game instead of reading the below.
0 kommentar(er)
