You may enter whenever you choose. Leaving however, is another matter.
Thank God you've returned. I need your help. There's a great deal of history that you should know, but I'm afraid that... I must continue my writing. Here. Most of what you'll need to know is in there. Keep it well hidden. For reasons you'll discover, I can't send you to Riven with a way out, but I can give you this. It appears to be a Linking Book, back here to D'ni, but it's actually a one-man prison. You'll need it, I'm afraid, to capture Gehn. Once you've found Catherine, signal me, and I'll come with a Linking Book to bring us back. There's also a chance, if this all goes well, that I might be able to get you back to the place that you came from.
— Atrus, explaining the plan to the Player Character in the intro.
Fully titled Riven: The Sequel to Myst, a 1997 PC-Mac game that is the sequel to the world-famous PC-Mac game Myst. The story of Riven continues exactly where Myst left off.
In the previous game, a man named Atrus is part of a splintered civilization called the "D'ni" (pronounced "Duh-NEE"), who have the ability to create portals to alternate realities within special books, simply by writing the description of the reality in the book. Atrus was trapped in a stone hall prison by his two twisted and evil sons, who in turn trapped themselves in separate Ages by accident. However, an unknown character only known later as "The Stranger" appeared on Atrus' home age of Myst. The Stranger pieced together the clues of what happened on the island of Myst, and rescued Atrus by freeing him from his stone prison.
But now Atrus's wife Catherine has been trapped on the Age of Riven by their sons. What's worse is that the Age was created and is ruled over by Atrus' twisted and deluded father Gehn, who sees himself as a god, and who has now imprisoned Catherine.
At the beginning of the game, you meet Atrus again who assigns you to the age of Riven with the goal to capture Gehn in a book that was specifically designed for this task, and to rescue Catherine. Atrus opens the descriptive book to Riven and it soon becomes apparent that Riven is unlike the previous Ages you have visited. The gateway image is badly distorted and it turns out Atrus is stuck writing in corrections to Riven's book to delay Armageddon due to Gehn's abysmal writing skills.
The instant you link to Riven, you trigger a trap and become stuck in a booth behind bars, and lose your trap book after a nearby guard demands it. The guard in turn ends up being hit by a tranquilizer dart and falls asleep. A rebel scout takes the trap book, frees you, and runs off. Now, stuck in Riven without your trap book, you must regain the trap book and find a way to lead Gehn into it. With Gehn safely in the prison (and Catherine free), you must then signal Atrus who will come with a linking book to bring everyone back home.
A fan-made Updated Re-release was in the works to recreate the game in a fully 3D engine, called The Starry Expanse Project
. Unlike many large-scale fan works, this one had the blessing and cooperation of the original creators. Cyan ultimately hired one of the Starry Expanse team members to work on an official 3D version of the game. This new version, now simply titled Riven, expands on the game's lore and includes new content that was not present in the original, including some of the puzzles being changed to "adjust the difficulty". It was released in 2024.
Definitely not to be confused with the champion from League of Legends.
This game provides examples of:
open/close all folders
Tropes relevant to both editions
- A God Am I: Most people who write linking books believe the Ages to which they link already exist, and they are simply providing a way to access them. Gehn, however, believes that the act of writing a linking book actually creates that Age out of whole cloth. Therefore, since he wrote Riven, he believes himself to be its god. The stained glass spyholes in the pentagonal "Gate Room" make this painfully clear.
- Alien Geometries:
- The Star Fissure. Gehn mentions in one of his journals that he doesn't understand how a cleft in a rock leads to a field of stars. When the player enters the Fissure in the finale of the game (or for one of the bad endings) it is revealed from the other side as a crack in a swirling black cloud, floating in the middle of a starry expanse.
- One piece of evidence that Gehn wrote a link to an unstable age is a continuity error on Survey Island. The golden elevator installed here travels a considerable distance up/down, but on each floor, you are always about 10 - meters above sea level. This anomaly alone may be a large portion of the instability on Riven. (Maybe the heat-hating bacteria in the waters of Riven have something to do with this.) The remake corrects this error, with the lower level actually being at sea level.
- All There in the Manual - A lot of the backstory and character motivation is explained in the prequel novel The Book of Atrus, which is never fully explained in the game. The novel also acts a prequel to Myst, in that it ends with Atrus jumping into the Star Fissure with the Myst book and linking himself to safety — the last entry in his journal ends with the very same monologue that opens Myst.
- And I Must Scream: Gehn is trapped forever in "the dark void of the Link" if you do things right.
- Arc Number: 5. Too many examples to list, but most notably the title (Riven has five letters, the full title has five words, the game in its original format came on 5 discs, and the V is made prominent.) Its use is prominent because Gehn believed 5 was the important number in D'ni civilization. It wasn't. (See Ignored Epiphany below.)
- Artistic License – Physics: After smashing the plate of glass in the iron plating covering the Star Fissure, the vacuum pressure of space manages to bend and suck in all of the metal surrounding it…but leaves the player and all other characters around the Fissure standing upright with only some wind blowing their clothes around. Then again, this is an unstable age we're talking about.
- Batman Gambit: You have to pull off one of these to get the Golden Ending. Convincing Gehn that the trap book you brought is really a linking book to another Age requires you to enter the trap book yourself first in order for Gehn to believe you. Once Gehn himself puts his hand on the portal in the trap book, he goes in and you go out, trapping him instead. Notably, this plan would have trapped you forever instead if Gehn had caught on, so it relied entirely on him acting according to what you've learned about him.
- Beautiful Void: Played with compared to the previous game. It's obvious that there are people living on Riven, and some of them are keeping careful watch on what you are doing. But all of these people, for various reasons, avoid direct contact with you.
- Bilingual Bonus: In a fictional language no less. When the player first arrives in Riven, they're confronted by a native guard who addresses them in an unknown language: "Tahgemah b'soo rekoah." He's expecting Atrus, so he's trying to communicate in broken D'ni. What he's trying to say is "Tahgemah b'zoo ah rekor." - "Give me the [linking] book [right now]!"
- Bittersweet Ending: The canon ending of the game. Gehn is trapped, the people of the Age are freed from his tyranny, the Stranger goes home, and Atrus and Catherine are reunited. But the Age of Riven itself dies, along with all of its animals, and it seems unlikely that the Stranger and Atrus' family will meet again.
- Black Comedy: Multiple:
- The morbid children's game in the school.
- And the fact that Gehn uses juiced frogs as...inspiration in his writing.
- Bookends: The good ending has dialogue that directly mirrors the opening to Myst.
- "The Age of Riven is closed forever, but the people of Riven are free. And now, I am at rest - understanding that in Books, and Ages, and life, the ending can never truly be written."
- Cardboard Prison:
- After Catherine is fooled by Sirrus and Achenar into linking to Riven, she is imprisoned just as Gehn because, barring the intervention of Atrus, there's no linking book to leave the age. However, by the time the events of the game are set in motion, both Catherine and Gehn have successfully written another functional age to seek refuge into from the impending collapse of Riven, even though they are still trapped as much as before because the destruction of Riven would mean the loss of any descriptive book created there, and at that point Atrus would never be able to reach them again.
- The Jungle Island village prison is one of these, as the Moiety have commandeered it and built a tunnel leading to the Tay linking book, the Moiety Rebel Age. The original game allows a prisoner to escape by reaching into a false drain to pull up a handle, which moves a false wall. The remake changes the activation method to a stone button/switch in the wall, and makes the prison's security even worse by opening the tunnel into the blue cave you pass through to get into the village.
- Chekhov's Gun: The telescope is one of the very first things you encounter. Near the end of the game, you figure out how to open the latch underneath it and remove the safeties to break the glass between Riven and the Star Fissure, allowing you to escape from Riven and beat the game.
- Circle of Standing Stones: There's a circle of stones with animal symbols on them on Jungle Island. The stones must be pushed into the ground in a specific order to access the Age of the Moiety, Tay.
- Conlang: The D'ni people have another language, which goes untranslated throughout the game. Part of solving the game's puzzles involves, at the very least, learning what symbols are used for which numbers.
- The remake doubles up on this by having the player also learn the Rivenese number system alongside the D'ni one.
- Cool Chair: Gehn has many types of chairs around Riven, each of them fitted with buttons or levers for one purpose or another.
- Cosmic Keystone: The iron plating over the Star Fissure serves as this for the entirety of Riven. Any sufficiently-large opening on it triggers the start of the collapse of the age. Although, there is only one appropriate time to open it.
- Crazy-Prepared: Gehn prepares against people who might link into his Ages with special holding cages. There's the one you find yourself in at the beginning of the game, and there's also the one in Age 233.
- On a larger scale, Gehn wrote Riven (and every other Age he ever Wrote to) to contain the technology, manpower and raw materials to allow him to produce more Linking Books, just in case he ever found himself trapped in an Age without a book to get out.
- Death Glare: Gehn does this when he becomes annoyed or outraged by you. Make some specific choices in the game and he stares you down◊ and will promptly shoot you with his Heek, leading to a bad ending. Gehn does not tolerate being pranked away from his geology on age 233."Alright then, once, more...The only path open to you now is through this book, take it!"
- Developer's Foresight:
- On Jungle Island, knocking on the one accessible village door five times will rouse a response (albeit a frightened one) from the house's occupant.
- If you use the combination to the telescope hatch and trigger the ending as soon as you get it, you'll get a bad ending where Atrus shows up and Gehn fatally shoots both you and Atrus after he gets the signal. However, if you load an earlier save and use the combination, Atrus doesn't show up because the signal hasn't happened yet. Instead, you get a different ending where you say "Screw This, I'm Outta Here!" and jump into the rift, going back home but condemning Riven and everyone in it to die.
- Most of the bad endings involving the player using the trap book themselves are surprisingly clever.
- Diagnosis: Knowing Too Much: Gehn does this to Catherine, as the pieces for him to do so have fallen neatly into place: A splinter group of Rivenese, the Black Moiety, have, for the past 30 years, worshipped Catherine as a religious figure, and rebelled against Gehn, since they witnessed Catherine and Atrus defeating Gehn and trapping him on Riven in Myst: The Book of Atrus. To him, when Catherine returned (because of Sirrus and Achenar sending her there as part of their evil plan), the Moiety's rebellion intensified, so Gehn had to keep her isolated for, ostensibly his own, their's, and her safety. Catherine even points this out when you meet her for the first time. However, it is strongly implied that Gehn is doing this as a way to suppress the populace, and to bolster his own beliefs that he's doing the right thing, further bolstered by the grandeur-inducing effects of his smoking-pipe extract:Catherine: You made it. But how'd you get past Gehn? He must really believe I've gone mad.
- Downer Beginning: The moment you enter Riven, you're stuck behind bars, a guard steals the trap book you need to capture Gehn, then a rebel grabs the book and runs off. Now you have to find that member of La Résistance, avoid Gehn, and find Catherine, all while time is running out.
- "End Is Nigh" Ending: Your character falls into the Star Fissure just as it begins to spread, and thus miss witnessing the final breakup of that Age.
- The End of the World as We Know It: When you get a special hatch combination, access to a steam-powered activation lever, and the ability to lower a telescope too much, you can trigger this. However, there is only one correct time when you're supposed to do it.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The backstory in Myst: The Book of Atrus has Gehn truly grieving the loss of his wife. Not to mention his other diary in-game, which you find after trapping him, next to a recording and a photo of her.It's late and I cannot sleep.
- Evil Colonialist: Gehn certainly invokes this trope, whether or not he realizes it. He's an elderly British-accented narcissist who has infiltrated the Rivenese society and undermined it for his own needs. He's created technological wonders like the maglev and the hologram systems, but uses them to suppress the populace and spread propaganda. He has an extensive mining operation set up to create a resource to power his D'ni inventions, and has even infiltrated the education system to teach the children D'ni script over their native Rivenese language. His surveillance system does have holes, however- The Moiety have created a dye that's only visible through a specific lens, and used it to send codes to each other. They've even escaped to another Age called Tay, and are there planning a rebellion right under his nose.
- Extradimensional Emergency Exit: You end up having to make use a rare non-linking book example of this in the finale: with the eponymous Age collapsing around you without constant repairs and the linking book back to D'Ni having fallen into the void, you take a dive into the Star Fissure - thus following the path of the Myst book all the way back to your home world.
- Extreme Speculative Stratification: Despite the massive technological advances Gehn's knowledge has brought to Riven, the native population still live in tiny crude huts plastered roughly to a cliff, while all of the spaces that Gehn has developed for his own use are refined with fine metalwork and stonework, complex machinery, electronic appliances, and every convenience imaginable. Though Gehn's actual living space on Age 233 is fairly spartan by comparison to his temples, it still provides far better living conditions than any other you visit.
- Fake Interactivity: In-universe example. The volumetric display in the classroom shows a recording of Gehn giving a speech, ending with him nodding pointedly at several locations where students would be seated during classes. Since the Rivenese have no way of knowing this is a recording, they would likely take this to mean Gehn was talking to them in real time.
- Fission Mailed:
- The very second you arrive in Riven, you're caught in a trap, then approached by one of Gehn's hapless guards who takes the trap book that you need to capture Gehn. Luckily, a member of La Résistance happens to be in the area and frees you.
- If you enter the trap book when Gehn asks you to, the screen goes black. And stays black for the better part of a minute before something happens. The development team apparently wanted to make it longer, but the testers thought their computers had crashed.
- Forbidden Chekhov's Gun: There's a reason that there is a cover on the viewing porthole on the plating covering the Star Fissure. There is also only one time that is appropriate for you to break that glass porthole.
- Foreign Ruling Class: Gehn is a dictator who forces the people of Riven to worship him as a God and learn his language, D'ni, or else they get fed to a whale-shark hybrid called a wahrk.
- Foreshadowing: A lot of later-game reveals can be picked up on early by examining the environment and looking at context clues.
- At the Rivenese school, you can find an extremely strange device. It's some kind of "clotheshanger" game, where two figures hang upside down suspended by their feet. Every time you activate the device, a dais in the center spins, and one of the two figures is lowered towards a wooden clamp below. Once they reach the bottom, the clamp shuts over one of the figures, and the device resets itself. While realizing that this is a device for teaching a number system is a minor "Eureka!" Moment in and of itself, astute players may realize that this device looks extremely similar to the strange raised platform outside... and this device is showing people being slowly lowered towards an aquatic predator.
- Similarly, the strange "dragon" statue in the darkest part of Jungle Island visibly looks like one of these aquatic predators.
- To unlock the Maglev to Jungle Island, the player has to sit in a strange observational chair with camera feeds linking to the bridge and boarding station. As they pass through the station, a giant cage in the shape of an orb can be seen taking up most of the room. A similar device can be found in the Rivenese school, which shows a projection of Gehn. Sure enough, a return trip through that temple will have him appear Wizard of Oz style to taunt you.
- In the remake, the player can come across an optional sliding tile puzzle on Survey Island that leads them down into a strange underwater observation room. Interacting with the console in the center reveals a series of cameras, as well as a series of lights associated with each island's fire marble dome. Both of these elements return in the Fire Marble puzzle to find Gehn- the sliding tile puzzle tells you where each marble needs to be inserted on a grid, while the colours of each light help identify what coloured marble represents what island.
- At the Rivenese school, you can find an extremely strange device. It's some kind of "clotheshanger" game, where two figures hang upside down suspended by their feet. Every time you activate the device, a dais in the center spins, and one of the two figures is lowered towards a wooden clamp below. Once they reach the bottom, the clamp shuts over one of the figures, and the device resets itself. While realizing that this is a device for teaching a number system is a minor "Eureka!" Moment in and of itself, astute players may realize that this device looks extremely similar to the strange raised platform outside... and this device is showing people being slowly lowered towards an aquatic predator.
- Gaia's Lament: A very small-scale example. It's difficult not to see parallels to islands on Earth that were devastated by a combination of human exploitation and external changes such as climate shifts.
- Go Back to the Source: The Fissure on Temple Island is both one of the first things a player will find after starting the game and the first thing a player sees upon starting a new game in the original Myst.
- God Guise: Gehn is one of the best examples out there.
- Grid Puzzle: The Fire Marble Puzzle is one of these. You must deduce where to place the six colored spheres in a 25x25 grid. Overlaps with Enter Solution Here, since you're just re-creating a map. The trick is gathering the information to make the map, then figuring out the precise positioning through trial and error. The remake simplifies it considerably by reducing it to a 5x5 grid, half of the solution of which is the solution to another puzzle on the other side of the age.
- Guns Do Not Work That Way: Gehn's Heek gun uses a pump trigger on the back of the weapon much like an old-fashioned hand pump sprayer. However, the Hollywood Silencer sound that the gun makes implies that it's loosely analogous to real firearms. The pump action in the back of the weapon, regardless of it being a rifle or smoothbore, would be very impractical as you have that mechanism instead of a stock to steady your aim, limiting the gun to a short-ranged weapon. Additionally, the Hollywood Silencer sound isn't emitted in every cutscene where it is fired and the projectile's killing speed is highly variable from delivering a delayed kill to an Instant Death Bullet.
- I Did What I Had to Do: Gehn believes that he did what was necessary to save Riven. Atrus would vehemently disagree, seeing as how he has to constantly keep writing in order for things just to remain stable.
- I Have No Son!: In the bad ending where Atrus is signaled before trapping Gehn.Atrus: Father.
Gehn: I am no longer your father because you are no longer my son! *shoots Atrus*. - Hollywood Silencer: Gehn's Heek gun makes a stereotypical *THWIP* like a highly suppressed hand gun. It doesn't do this consistently however as there is a cutscene where it no longer "has a suppressor".
- Ignored Epiphany: Gehn is obsessed with thinking the number 5 is the key to making linking books... even though all the physical evidence and Gehn's own research points to six as the true number. And if that isn't enough, the D'ni numbering system is base 25, but Gehn didn't know that much about the D'ni.
- Instant Sedation: In a way. It takes at least 3 seconds, but Cho is very quickly rendered unconscious by a blowdart tipped with ytram poison, before he tries to use the Prison Book that you brought with you.
- Irony: Gehn spent years trying to write a new Age to escape from Riven and ultimately succeeded. Although he experimented with the Star Fissure by tossing some of the villagers into it, he never worked up the courage to jump into it like Atrus did. If he had, not only would he have made it back to Earth (and thus D'ni), he would have found the Myst linking book and been able to confront (and possibly even kill) both Atrus and Catherine.
- It's a Wonderful Failure: Many. Some involve Nonstandard Game Overs.
- Opening the Star Fissure before going to Tay: falling into the fissure with an immediate Non-Standard Game Over. It should be noted that technically this would produce a happy ending for the player character as they are returned to their home, as they are in the Golden Ending. But it means that Riven and everyone in it are doomed.
- Using the prison book immediately upon acquiring it on Tay: a member of the Moiety opens the book and almost uses it but is prevented by another Moiety member. The book is in the process of being burned as this happens.
- Opening the Star Fissure after going to Tay but before trapping Gehn: Atrus shows up but is shot (along with the player) by Gehn.
- Opening the Star Fissure after trapping Gehn but before rescuing Catherine: Atrus shows up but is dismayed to be without Catherine. His closing monologue mourns her unknown fate, trapped in Riven.
- Refusing to use the prison book when offered by Gehn three times: Gehn shoots the player out of distrust/frustration from wasting his time for doing research.
- Using the prison book on Riven: Gehn uses one of his minions to free the player from the book (he wants to test it to see if it is a trap), then shoots them, nonchalantly monologuing about your "brilliant idea to trap yourself in the book", while the poison from the dart kills them.Gehn: My one wish before I die, would be to see [Atrus] assume some responsibility for his actions. Perhaps it will happen some day. In the meantime, you have my sympathies. *screen goes completely black*
- Having your first meeting with Gehn without possessing the prison book, then recovering it, only to trap yourself in it on Riven. Similar to the ending above, but with new dialog.Gehn: I see you found the book. Thank you for returning it to me. It seems however circumstances have changed. *Gehn shoots you*.
- Using the prison book on Riven or Age 233 after Gehn is trapped in it: Gehn is released, stunned at your stupidity, gloatingly thanking the player before closing the book for good.
- Using the prison book on Tay after Gehn is trapped in it: The same speech, but Gehn is now holding his rifle, intent on killing off the rebels in their home age.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Did you play this game before reading Book of Atrus? Guess what: You've got the ending spoiled.
- La Résistance: The Moiety are rebelling against Gehn for his tyrannical rule. As such, they attempt to help you free Catherine and stop Gehn, despite the language barrier.
- Leitmotif: Gehn's appears primarily as a figure on the oboe and is teased throughout the entirety of the game (starting, believe it or not, with Cyan's Vanity Plate at the very beginning). The full song isn't heard until the player meets Gehn.
- In fact, it's implied that the motif originates with Gehn himself — there's an oboe-like wind instrument in his private quarters, and a music player in his lab with a recording of him playing it.
- Lock and Key Puzzle:
- The fire marble press requires you to place up to six colored marbles into a 25x25 grid. The number of combinations sits in the range of quadrillions. Technically, any entry with a specific marble and any other marble in their correct positions will grant access to the final stretch of the game, but that hardly makes a brute-force approach any more practical. Knowing a few more of the criteria does narrow the number of possible combinations down from quadrillions to a "mere" 93 trillion and 850 billion possibilities.
- The animal puzzle has 6,375,600 possible codes (although it's not hard to guess the fifth animal). This is made harder by the fact that some of the clues are encountered out of context, and can only be put together by process of elimination, or a lot of guessing (or resorting to Guide Dang It!).
- There are 3125 possible codes to unlock the hatch beneath the fissure periscope. The combination is randomized when you begin a new game.
- There are 53,130 possible codes to unlock the book domes. This combination is also randomized.
- There are 243 possible codes to unlock Catherine's prison. This combination is also randomized.
- Merry in Minor Key:
- "Catherine's Freedom", when you do indeed free Catherine, Atrus' wife, from her prison, is very complex in its delivery. The music is very solemn, but its tone, tempo, and scenario usage gives joyous gravitas to not only Catherine's freedom, but also the fact that you have freed her entire world's people from his despotic rule.
- The ending theme (Atrus' Theme) when you get the best case scenario; trap Gehn, free Catherine, and signal Atrus, which in turn, starts the destruction of the age of Riven, is very mournful and mystical. However, the ending itself is not necessarily bad: the age of Riven is collapsing in on itself, but everyone important is safe, including Atrus, Catherine, the innocent villagers, and the rebels who fought against the oppressive rule of Gehn. Plus, Atrus has gone on a hunch that you, the player, will be taken home as well by the enigmatic Star Fissure, as his Myst Book fell into that very same fissure, and found its way into your hands, somehow, kicking off the events that brought you together to save Atrus, his family, and the people of Riven, which also brings about a contemplative air to the theme.
- Minecart Madness: The lumber cart that goes from Village to Crater Island and vice versa can be used as transportation, treating the player to a Rollercoaster Mine experience. The 2024 remake adds a much slower one in an all-new area of Crater Island that has a companion lift which enables the cart to go up to Gehn's laboratory.
- Metapuzzle:
- The Fire Marble puzzle. At the top of a building lies a grid where you place marbles. The solution is the geographical positions of several domes on the islands.
- The stone circle puzzle. In a cave stands several stones in a circle, each with a symbol. Finding the correct symbols require finding stone eyes in the environment and connecting them to symbols via sound and/or the shape of the environment around them.
- Myopic Architecture: A gate on the starting island, leading to an alternate entrance to the rotating room, is securely locked, yet easily bypassed. In the original game this is done by clicking on the ground to climb under it. The remake, lacking the ability to replicate this feat in real 3d, presents an even more poetic solution: the lone hinge opposite the padlock is easily removed, causing the whole gate to fall aside. In both cases, the bypass is brought to your attention by a strategically-placed Moiety dagger.
- Never Say "Die": Zig-Zagged, Atrus assigns you to "capture" Gehn in a prison book but this is to keep The Stranger heroic rather than outright hiring them as hitman, even if the prison book is a similar end result. However, Gehn is very willing to kill villagers and will even explicitly shoot you if your false pretenses are revealed or he becomes upset with you.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Searching through Gehn's study, mainly if you're a first time player expecting Gehn to walk in on you at any second. Bonus points that both his laboratory on Crater Island and his office on 233 have a very unique type of ambient wind sound effect in the background.
- Notice This: The daggers used by the Moiety are planted in the environment in certain places to clue the player in to hidden solutions. For instance, on Temple Island, a locked door with a large gap underneath it has a Moiety dagger placed in the ground in front of it, showing that the door can be crawled under.
- In the 2024 Remake, the dagger is now embedded in the side of the door, cluing the player in that the new solution isn't under the door, but beside it.
- Oddball in the Series: This is the only game in the series to predominantly take place across one main age instead of regularly flipping between multiple. It is also the only one to deal with Atrus's ancestry instead of his descendents.
- One-Word Title: As The Place where the game takes place.
- Palmtree Panic: Noticable first on Temple Island where most of the literal palmtrees reside. There's even Riven's version of a shark, the wahrk, in Survey Island's aquarium and a lush beach on Jungle Island further adds to the theme.
- The Place: The game's title refers to the name of the Age that 90% of the game is spent in, Riven.
- Press X to Die: Using the Trap Book from your inventory at any point in Riven nets you a bad ending. There is one point where you do have to use it, but then it's being offered to you by Gehn and it isn't in your possession.
- Reality-Writing Book: The premise of the game is that Atrus is constantly writing and re-writing Riven in order to keep it stable enough for his wife Catherine to be safe. But, Atrus can't actually go in to save her, because if he stops writing, it's The End of the World as We Know It for Riven, and everyone in that Age will die. That's where you come in — you can go into Riven to find Catherine and capture Gehn while Atrus keeps everything stable enough for you to complete your mission.
- The Reveal: Where have the Moiety all disappeared to? All the rebelling Moiety are hidden away in Tay, another Age.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: The "ytram" frog.
- Saving the World with Art: Or rather the Art. The world of Riven is unstable and Atrus staves off its collapse by frantically writing small changes into its book in hope of stabilizing it. Riven ultimately falls apart anyway, but he keeps it intact long enough for its people to escape.
- Scenery Porn:
- Unlike the original Myst this game still looks gorgeous. Riven has received praise for aging well with its photo realistic scenes that look like they came from the real world. The main limitation is that the scenes are rendered only in standard definition.
- The 2024 remake heavily recaptures the feel of the original in the Unreal 5 Engine, and brought the series even closer to realizing real-time 3d and photo realistic scenes.
- Scenery Gorn: It's an incredibly beautiful and detailed game, depicting a world that is literally falling apart and stripped of almost all its natural resources, leaving nothing but a bunch of jagged rocks.
- Schmuck Bait: Riven presents some interesting twists on the trope. There are at least two major pieces of Schmuck Bait in the game, and by the time you've found them, you should have figured out why they're dangerous. And yet, in order to win the game, you must use them anyway. The key here is figuring out for whom and when they are to be used as such.
- Seal the Breach: What Gehn has done to the Star Fissure, with thick iron plating, to prevent Riven from collapsing.
- Sequel Hook: Before Atrus links away, he says "Perhaps we'll meet again someday".
- Signs of the End Times: Gehn has been monitoring the Age's decay during his imprisonment, and wrote "The end of this world is near" in D'ni, along the perimeter of the Golden Dome.
- Shoddy Knockoff Product: In universe, Gehn's descriptive books to his Ages are compromised by his poor grasp of "The Art", enabling links to unstable worlds that eventually collapse. His books also require clunky external power sources. Poor quality book materials may be partly to blame, but Gehn's poor writing creates many of the problems. This is assuming a book even works in the first place. The 233'rd age was Gehn's first relatively successful book since writing Riven, though he still had a ways to go in learning The Art since his destination is very desolate and harsh, barely suitable for his new office.
Catharine writes the book for the age of Tay by making corrections to one of Gehn's "dead" books but the book still needs some power due to low quality materials. She specified a particular power crystal in the age description so that she could eliminate the need to use Gehn's Fire Marble Domes after the first link-in and have a power source for books that is extremely portable. - Spectacular Spinning:
- The pentagonal rotating room.
- Gehn's fire marble domes spin as an external security measure, unlocked by timing its color symbol with a viewer.
- Too Clever by Half: If the player has recovered the trap book, but hasn't solved the infamous Fire Marble Dome puzzle to reach Gehn, they might have the bright idea from reading the diary Atrus left them to use the trap book themself, counting on it being found and brought to Gehn, who will then use it himself, setting them free and bypassing the problem of having to solve the puzzle! Unfortunately, whatever his many flaws as a person, Gehn is no fool, and would never use such a book without testing it on someone else first. Rather than him, the player is greeted by the hapless guard from the start of the game, who Gehn badgers into using the book first. When the guard switches places with the player, Gehn then calmly pumps a Fire Marble into the player with his gun, having determined that whatever the trap book is, it isn't a linking book to D'ni, and therefore the player is some kind of agent sent to remove him from play.
- Too Dumb to Live: In one of the the bad endings caused by a blatant act of stupidity, you used the prison book with Gehn trapped in it, and set him free, taking his place in the book. Gehn wonders why exactly you released him (when you had him at your mercy), and gloatingly congratulates you for your act of self sacrifice.
- Tree Top Town: The village in the Moiety Age, situated in the middle of a giant tree, as seen on the cover art. There used to be a similar tree on Riven where Catherine's prison is now, but Gehn had it cut down.
- Unwanted False Faith: Catherine is this, to her own people. The first Myst novel details the conflict that left Gehn trapped on Riven, by Catherine escaping to Myst and Atrus jumping into the Star Fissure with the last book out of Riven. Catherine's journal in the game details what happened during this and afterwards, with two of the villagers witnessing Atrus and Catherine's counterstrike. This account ballooned into a religious narrative among the rest of the village, with Atrus and Catherine being deified as true gods, stripping Gehn, the false god, of his powers, when they trapped him on Riven. Catherine, on the other hand, has tried time and time again to sway the opinions of her bretheren, but to no avail.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: There are a few opportunities to be a dick. You are punished for one instance.
- If you lower the Star Fissure telescope to breach Riven's reality, before capturing Gehn but after regaining the prison book, you can signal Atrus early. Congratulations, you got Gehn's attention, causing him appear and shoot Atrus dead. He takes his linking book and you get shot too.
- You can do the same as above, capturing Gehn but ignoring Catherine's rescue. How does it feel to condemn Atrus to the futile task of keeping Riven stable, with his wife trapped in Riven but no way of getting her out?
- You can guess the combination code to the Star Fissure, or load an earlier save to input the code, before regaining your prison book. Nobody shows up. Then you automatically jump into the fissure and chicken out of your mission. You get to go back home, but you do it by saying "Screw This, I'm Outta Here!" and condemning Riven to its fate.
- Once you have Gehn trapped, you can use it to switch places with him, releasing him wherever you are. He has a special reaction if you do this in Tay, smirking and gloating about how he and the Moiety will now have a chance to "settle [their] differences after all."
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: There's a bit of dysfunction between Atrus and his father.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: In Catherine's journal, she mentions that Gehn threw some of the Rivenese villagers into the Star Fissure in an attempt to find out what happened to Atrus and the Myst linking book. They most likely ended up in the New Mexico desert, since that is where the fissure leads. No subsequent entry in the franchise has explored what became of them.
- Words Do Not Make The Magic: Gehn tries to use the D'ni art of writing linking books without really understanding the full effects of the phrases that he uses to write them, resulting in links to unstable worlds. This causes the ever-looming threat of Riven falling apart during the player's attempt to rescue Catherine, as well as the conflict in the novel Myst: The Book of Atrus.
- World Tree: The Riven Age was once dominated by a great tree, which the people worshipped, but Gehn's faulty writing caused it to die and he cut it down. When Catherine wrote a new Age for the Moiety, it was dominated by a similar tree.
- Yet Another Stupid Death: There are multiple ways to proverbially Press X to Die. For example, use the trap book right after regaining it, and a pair of Moiety people get ready to burn the book, possibly discussing your stupidity for trapping yourself in it.
Tropes relevant to the 1997 edition
- Air-Vent Passageway: The Stranger uses such a way to access one of Gehn's offices and it appears to be high off the ground implying some acrobatics.
- Artifact Title: Myst is only mentioned on its game box, in the subtitle "The Sequel to Myst", as Myst Island is otherwise nowhere to be seen in this game. This subtitle does not appear in the game itself.
- Covers Always Lie: The Age of Tay is shown on the box art, but in-game, your only exploration of it is the shoreline, and a small prison cell, where you can look out into the Age's inner village, but never explore it.
- Guide Dang It!:
- Riven in general is seen as much harder (and, in some cases, more obtuse) than Myst, so there are several spots in the game that could qualify. The most well-known, however, is the notorious "Waffle Iron" puzzle, where the player must correctly place five coloured marbles on a 25x25 grid, with very little indication as to what the marbles or the grid represent. And yes, the colour of the marbles does matter, yielding a total of 93,850,000,000,000 (that's ninety-three trillion eight-hundred-fifty billion in short-count, or ninety-three billion eight-hundred-fifty milliard in long-count) combinations, according to the behind-the-scenes coffee-table-book "from Myst to Riven: the Creations and Inspirations".
- Listening to various animals throughout the game and remembering their noises is required. Two sea-dwelling animals are particularly annoying because if you approach them too quickly, they run without making the noise you need to hear. In order to hear them properly, you have to wait until their animation finishes before moving forward.
In this case, this can be mostly avoided. You need five specific animal noises to figure out a code based on stones resembling animals. But when finding five stones that give away the noises you are looking for, you can also see shapes that resemble the animals. That leaves you with only finding the one remaining animal. - Accessing the whark elevator on Jungle Island may also be a major hurdle due to the Pixel Hunt involved and perhaps the shrine seeming like just a piece of backstory. Without a hint guide, there's no in-game clue that a hidden switch is on top one of the lamp posts flanking you to the left and you need to take this elevator to reach the catwalks above to ultimately close the floor hatch at the gallows and thus open another route.
- Book Assembly Island throws a curve ball by relying upon the player noticing the only doors that don't close automatically like most doors. Given that this game doesn't have full 3D exploration to let you notice the passages behind the open doors, this may be surprisingly easy to overlook because no other doors, besides one more close by, have this feature.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: A given, considering the original came on multiple CDs, which the player had to swap mid-game whenever travelling to a different island. Or, in one case, the other half of the same island. This is obviously fixed in the DVD-ROM, Steam and GOG.com releases. Another trick is to copy the contents of the 5 CD's into the Riven installation directory (if your version is this edition), and alter the configuration file to tell the game to read the files there.
- Monster-Shaped Mountain: Several of the animal-sound spheres are located near natural or artificial terrain that resembles the animal they mimic.
- Off-the-Shelf FX: Several of the books are real-life books repurposed into props.
- The Riven Descriptive Book is a 1953 Webster's Dictionary.
- The Trap Book that Atrus gives you is actually a real book titled "Omar Khayyam, A Life", written by Harold Lamb and published by Doubleday-Doran in 1936.
- Catherine's Journal is a Webster's Pocket Dictionary.
- Point of No Return: At the end, when Catherine is freed. She detours through Gehn's 233rd Age and rips out the page containing the linking panel of four of Gehn's five Riven books, leaving only the Temple Island intact. Similarly, the catwalk in the dome and Mag Lev on the island are locked out as well.
- Steampunk: Since he doesn't have the materials for proper linking books (or rather, since Gehn is unwilling to admit the problem might be him and needs to throw more power at the problem to get around the flaws in his writing style), Gehn's Riven-made linking books are literally powered by steam.
Tropes relevant to the 2024 edition
- Achievement Mockery: There are achievements for various ways you can meet an untimely end. Whether it's summoning Atrus early, getting yourself trapped in the trap book, or getting shot by Gehn. There is a less dire, but no less teasing achievement. Try and enter the combination of symbols to access Tay from the original release, and you'll get the achivement "Not the way you remember it". Another is earned by getting distracted by the fire marble polishing device in Gehn's lab for fifteen minutes in a single playthrough.
- Adaptational Early Appearance:
- Prison Island is available right from the start via its Dome along with access to the Temple Island Dome into the Starry Expanse to reach said dome. It is now possible to meet Catherine early and learn that The Moiety have your prison book in safe keeping.
- Gehn is now easier to meet even earlier thanks to less busy work needed to power up the linking book to Age 233. Gehn even implies that he's interested in meeting with you by broadcasting himself when you return to the Temple Shrine via the maglev tram and leaving the drawbridge to the giant dome extended so that you may power up the giant dome soon after and follow him to Age 233.
- Adaptational Heroism: In the original version of the ending where you signal Atrus without freeing Catherine, he gives up on finding her almost immediately. This version has him risk his life to find her by exploring Riven even as it collapses around him. note
- Adaptational Villainy: In the original version of the ending where you signal Atrus without trapping Gehn, Gehn walks away with the D'ni linking book while leaving you to die, leaving open the possibility that he allowed the villagers or at least his followers to evacuate with him. In this version, not only does he link to D'ni immediately, he does so while deliberately holding the book over the fissure so that it will fall into it and prevent anyone else from following him.
- Adaptation Expansion: Comes with being able to freely walk around Riven rather than being locked to moving from screen-to-screen. The player also can see more of Tay, walking in the city for a bit to get to the linking book back to Riven. They also can explore outside of Gehn's office in the 233rd age, and the interior of Catherine's prison.
- Adapted Out: The little girl you encounter in the jungle is not present in this version.
- Alien Geometries: The Fire Marble domes are now home to this. Inside each is an airlock that opens into a Star Expanse rift. Inside of the Expanse is now a cacophony of floating walkways that are tilted every which way, in no particular direction or placement that matches their locations on Riven, as if its order and structure was shattered. Furthermore, there is one rift on Jungle Island that is uncovered. For that particular one, it is an omni-directional hole; you can see the same things inside, whatever is within in your line of sight.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- The infamous Fire Marble puzzle is simplified. It uses a 5x5 grid instead of a 25x25 one. Furthermore, a solution to one of the game's puzzles in Survey Island gives you the locations of the marbles on the grid outright. You still need to match the locations with the proper color and set the correct compensation values.
- Once you open up the Fire Marble domes and extend their bridges in the Star Fissure, the player can use them as shortcuts across Riven. This is much quicker compared to the original where you needed to complete the Fire Marble puzzle to power the books and meet Gehn before you could freely use the domes to travel from place to place.
- Once you acquire the Rebel Lens, using it while looking at a Fire Marble dome reveals what symbol you need to press on the related zoetrope, eliminating the need to constantly refer to your in-game notebook or notes for that information.
- The Rebel Lens will glow red once a full animal image is visible in it, ensuring you can capture an accurate image of one.
- The Artifact: Even though it isn't required anymore to reduce the number of possible screen-states for developers to account for, automatic-closing doors are still present on Riven, perhaps justified by them being horizontal sliding doors and presumably having a mechanism that closes the door behind you.
- Bookends: The game does begin with Atrus giving you the most important items for your mission. However, the intro instead ends with him linking back to Myst, but using his linking-away to let the book drop into a special security box that the player is unable to open. This mirrors both the original and remake's finale where Atrus used his dematerialization to let the D'ni book fall into Riven's Star Fissure, to keep the player from following him.
- Continuity Nod: Gehn's imager is given two additional recordings from his father and mother; these recordings reference events from the novel The Book of Ti'ana, so a player who hasn't read this will be lost to their context.
- Eldritch Location:
- The Starry Expanse. In this edition, you enter it through the Fire Marble Domes, before you even complete your mission by reopening the Star Fissure. You are even required to enter it in order to progress, as attached to each dome is a walkway with a special fire marble dispenser used to power the marbles, and each walkway is tilted and turned every-which-way in relation to the others, without any rhyme or reason related to their placement in Riven's reality.
- Riven itself in any of the climaxes. The dimensional fabric of the Age starts tearing apart, punctuated by large Star Expanse rifts opening in the distance! Furthermore, these ones are much larger than the ones that the player encounters under the domes, and the one that the player can encounter early on Jungle Island!
- Extra-Dimensional Shortcut: The Starry Expanse is this, once you find the other Fire Marble Domes and extend the bridges that reach out from them.
- It's a Wonderful Failure:
- Right out of the gate, when Atrus leaves you in K'veer, you can use the Prison Book as soon as you can get to your inventory. Atrus will then open the book with you in it, scoffing and lamenting your stupidity.:Atrus: What...? What have you done?! No, no, no! Oh, God, no! [He sighs, then shakes his head in disbelief and closes the cover on you forever.]
- In this version, the ending with the player trapping Gehn, but failing to release Catherine, makes the point of your failure much more depressing. Not only does Atrus go forth in desperation into the rapidly-decaying Riven to attempt to find Catherine, but his ending narration is no longer poetic, and is much more somber and downcast:Atrus: [extremely dejected] Gehn is at last defeated... But at what cost?... [scoffs in disbelief] The age of Riven is gone... and,... [what of] Catherine?... [exhales shakily] ...There are no words...
- Right out of the gate, when Atrus leaves you in K'veer, you can use the Prison Book as soon as you can get to your inventory. Atrus will then open the book with you in it, scoffing and lamenting your stupidity.:
- Negative Space Wedgie: An entry from Gehn's journal details this. Furthermore, the domes now cover one each, and there is one that you can find uncovered on Jungle Island!:Journal Entry: A spatial anomaly occurred yesterday, about five spans above the north shore...
- Much like with Gehn's pipe and gun being moved from his office on a return visit in the original game, on returning to that point later Gehn's followers will have built a containment shield around it that matches the ones under the domes.
- In any of the Fissure-based climaxes, as Riven is tearing itself apart, more of them visibly form off in the distance!
- No OSHA Compliance: Averted where it came to being played straight in the original. In the original game, the only thing that stands between Riven and total destruction is the flimsy pane of glass that the telescope observes through, easily broken. In the remake, no such flaw exists, as the telescope is physically attached to the plates covering the Star Fissure, and the break is done by moving a crane into position and physically ripping the telescope from the barrier.
- Non-Standard Game Over: In the INTRO, no less! Atrus is shocked if he finds that you, the player, foolishly used the Prison Book while in D'ni in the intro.
- Not His Sled: Cyan themselves have said and shown that there are major story and environment differences between the original 1997 version, and the 2024 remake.
- From the outset of the intro, with Atrus' speech being changed quite a bit, and also being re-recordednote :Atrus: Thank God you've returned. I need your help. There's a great deal of history that you should know, but I'm afraid that there's no time to explain. [pulls out a book satchel and shows you a small journal] Most of what you'll need to know is in here. And... For reasons you will discover, I can't send you to Riven with a way out... But... I can give you this. It appears to be a Linking Book, back here to D'ni, but it's actually a one-person prison. It's the only way to capture Gehn. Here. [hands you the satchel] Once you've freed Catherine, I'll come with a linking book. She'll know how to signal me. [opens the Riven book and pushes it towards you] There's a very good chance, if all of this goes well, that you'll be returned to the place that you came from. [pulls out his Myst book and opens it] Until we meet again. Take care, my friend. [He touches the gateway image and disappears, with the book falling into a metal security box that locks itself]
- Another example shown at the start of the game: in the original game, the side entrance to the rotating room on Temple Island was blocked by a locked gate, but there was a gap underneath that you could just duck under. That won't work in this version, because someone was a bit wiser and built it without a gap this time. That being said, you can just remove the one hinge pin holding it together instead.
- The number-sound-eyeball puzzle that unlocked the linking book to Tay is gone completely, replaced with a different puzzle that has the player learn the Rivenese numbering system (which is at minimum base-12). There's also six symbols involved this time, meaning that the old code no longer works.
- Going into the golden dome on Temple Island has a linking book that wasn't there in the original. It's the linking book to Gehn's 233rd age. If you decide to open up one of the fire marble domes, you won't find a book there. The domes are now built on rifts leading into the Starry Expanse, all connected with a series of walkways and extendable bridges.
- The submarine on Jungle Island is now inaccessible until the player approaches Jungle Island from the direction of Survey Island.
- The old man seen in a photo in Age 233 is, by strong implication, NOT Aitrus/Atrus Sr. Instead, the honor of actually revealing Aitrus' true appearance goes to a 3-D recording in Gehn's imager, where a love-letter recording addressed to Anna (who also appears in another recording) has been left. This leaves the identity of the old man unclear.
- From the outset of the intro, with Atrus' speech being changed quite a bit, and also being re-recordednote :
- Shoddy Knockoff Product: It's been suggested by Cyan that the symbol seals on the iron platings covering the Star Fissure as well as the bases of the Fire Marble Domes may be counterfeit gahrohevtee (the words used to write linking books); instead of applying them in their proper use in writing, Gehn is using them as physical symbol seals as a mitigating attempt to keep Riven from collapsing.
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Gehn really dropped the ball on password security at the relief map controls on Survey Island. Solving the relatively easy 15 Puzzle where you need to place the symbols for the five Rivenese Islands in the correct spots tells you the password for an elevator nearby so that it takes you to a secure area. Apparently Gehn was overconfident that unauthorized personnel wouldn't be able to roam freely but the Moiety rebels prove otherwise.
- Pyrrhic Victory: In the ending where you open the fissure without trapping Gehn, he kills Atrus and uses the linking book Atrus brought with him to escape to D'ni. However, in this version, Atrus sealed the Myst linking book inside a locked box. So unless Atrus left the key behind, Gehn will be trapped on K'veer just like Atrus was before the Stranger freed him.
- The Remake: Justified In-Universe. As Cyan likes to blur the lines between fiction and reality, a presentation made at the Myst-related fan convention, Mysterium, in 2023, "revealed" that a review of "historical documents" showed discrepancies in the original "portrayal" of the game, such as the "existence" of a real-life torn iron plate with D'ni writing, thought to be a portion of the plating covering the Star Fissure, with the symbol being Gehn's attempt to mitigate the destruction of Riven.
- Scenery Gorn: The remake makes a much better impression of making it look like Riven is an age that's falling apart. Aside from the random tremors, there are huge tears in the ocean with steam rising from them, there are littered remnants of a maglev track that once ran from Temple Island to Prison Island, the player can cause some more to happen by destroying the bridge between Temple Island and Book Assembly Island... and that's all visible from the first island, and doesn't even start getting into the rifts in space.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: If you summon Atrus before Gehn is trapped, when Gehn finds the linking book to D'ni he wastes no time in getting ready to use it. Only pausing to give his "thanks" to the player for freeing him.
- Supernatural Sealing: Again, instead of applying them in their proper use in writing, Gehn is using what is assumed to be gahrohevtee (the beyond-abstraction D'ni words used to write linking books) as physical symbol seals on iron plates as a mitigating attempt to keep Riven from collapsing.
- Tear-Stained Stationery: A very subtle instance; Atrus, an artisan bookwriter, tasks you with rescuing his captive wife and the population of the dying world of Riven, from the clutches of his evil father, Gehn. After possibly many hours of gameplay, finding a way into Gehn's inner sanctum and capturing him in an inescapable prison, one of the records you can find is a personal journal from him, detailing the painful aspects of his life that brought him to this state, with what appears to be a large teardrop next to an entry about his deceased wife.
- Unseen No More: The imager in Gehn's office, which in the original only plays a recording of Keta (Gehn's wife), now also has recordings of both Aitrus (Gehn's father) and Anna (Gehn's mother and Atrus's grandmother) in their first "physical" appearances in the games outside of the photographic portrait of Aitrus on Gehn's wall (which previously was used to depict him as a much older man).
- Wham Shot: For those who played the original game, the revelation of the the Fire Marble Domes being gateways into the Starry Expanse, probably because the player started from the dome on Temple Island, can be very jarring, given those expecting to see a book inside based on the original game.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: A revision to the ending where the fissure is opened before Gehn is trapped has him pull this on everyone in Riven. Rather than keep the book to D'Ni for the villagers or even his loyal men to escape along with him, he uses it right over the Star Fissure, dropping the book into the expanse and leaving everyone else to die with no way to escape a collapsing age.
