The new Riven remake is better than Myst

Remake Riven: Sequel to Myst launched this week by the developers of the original game. It strikes a wonderful balance between reinvention and reinvention, and based on a few hours of playing it, it’s a huge success.

Mist was a classic that most people fondly remember from the early CD-ROM era, but for me its sequel, Riven, was the highlight. After that, the sequels dropped in quality. The sophomore effort was the pinnacle.

It was definitely more ambitious Mist. Instead of a handful of tightly packed theme park worlds, it offered a single, unified world that felt lived in and steeped in history. Mist could not quite adapt.

A decent presentation

This was due to its outstanding art direction, but also due to its iconic musical score.

For the most part, the remake nails these two things. The original game was similar to the first one Mist The new one follows 2020 as you have to click to move between static images to explore the game’s world Mist remake (and the 2000s are often forgotten realMyst) to give the player full action, similar to modern first-person puzzles Portal, Witnessor The Talos Principle. Since it’s easy to recreate many of the original camera angles this way, it would be great if there was an option to control the game as you originally did, but I understand why it’s not a priority.

It just so happens that today’s graphics hardware does an excellent job of replicating previously static visuals in full 3D. (There’s even VR support, though I haven’t tried it yet.) And the music is as good as ever.

There are only two downsides on the presentation front. First, I’ve heard that people working on older machines can struggle to achieve satisfactory fidelity and performance. I played it on both an M1 Max MacBook Pro and a Windows 11 desktop with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. The MacBook Pro ran the game at maximum settings at 30 frames per second at the laptop’s native resolution. . The desktop did the same in 4K at 120fps. However, these are both high-end, state-of-the-art machines, so your mileage may vary.

Second, the full-motion video performances from the original game have been replaced with full 3D, video game-looking characters. It’s a necessary compromise, but I feel like some character is lost. They did a pretty good job of matching the moves from the original videos though.