The brand new Riven remake is even higher than Myst

A remake of Riven: The Sequel to Myst launched this week, made by the unique recreation’s builders. It strikes an enchanting steadiness between re-creation and reinvention, and primarily based on a few hours of enjoying it, it is a resounding success.

Myst was the traditional most individuals remembered fondly from the early CD-ROM period, however for me, its sequel, Riven, was the spotlight. After that, the sequels declined in high quality. The sophomore effort was the apex.

It was definitely extra bold than Myst. As an alternative of a handful of tightly packed theme park worlds, it supplied a singular, cohesive one which felt lived in and steeped in historical past in a manner that Myst could not fairly match.

A worthy presentation

That was due to excellent artwork path but in addition to its iconic musical rating.

For probably the most half, the remake nails each of these issues. Whereas the unique recreation resembled the primary Myst in that you just needed to click on to scroll between static photographs to discover the sport’s world, the brand new one follows the 2020 Myst remake (and 2000’s oft-forgotten realMyst) in giving the participant full motion, akin to modern first-person puzzle video games like Portal, The Witness, or The Talos Precept. Since it is simple to re-create plenty of the unique digicam angles this fashion, it may need been cool if there had been an possibility to regulate the sport as you probably did initially, however I can see why that wasn’t a precedence.

It simply so occurs that right this moment’s graphics {hardware} does an excellent job of replicating beforehand static visuals in full 3D. (There’s even VR help, although I have not tried it but.) And the music is simply nearly as good because it was.

There are solely two downsides on the presentation entrance. First, I’ve heard that folk working on older machines might wrestle to realize passable constancy and efficiency. I performed it on each an M1 Max MacBook Professional and a Home windows 11 desktop with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. The MacBook Professional ran the sport at maxed-out settings on the laptop computer’s native decision at round 30 frames per second. The desktop did the identical at 4K at 120 fps. However these are each high-end, recent-ish machines, so your mileage might fluctuate.

Second, the full-motion video performances within the unique recreation have been changed with full 3D, video game-looking characters. It is a needed concession, however I really feel a number of the character was misplaced. They did a fairly good job matching the motions of the unique movies, although.