"Enter a deceptively beautiful world torn apart by age-old conflicts... where secrets lie hidden at every turn... and nothing is as it seems. You must search. You must explore. You must summon every spark of intellect and intuition. Only then will you learn the truth about this troubled land and its inhabitants. You must let Riven become your world -- before an entire world is lost." – Original game back of the box description
A monumental follow-up, originally released in 1997. Considered to be the highlight of the series. Interaction is via the same point-and-click interface as Myst. Riven starts right where Myst left off. Atrus needs your help to rescue his wife Catherine, who is trapped on the age of Riven, an age written by his mad father Gehn. A real-time 3D remake was released in 2024, including for VR.
Related: 1997 Wired Magazine feature before release | Salon magazine review of original game after release
Riven was initially released on five compact discs on October 31, 1997. And later, in 1998, a single DVD-ROM version came out. It was also released on a number of platforms including the Playstation and Sega Saturn.
While a Myst Masterpiece version was released with higher res renders, there was never one done for Riven. This was because a majority of original Riven data needed to do it was unfortunately lost.
The game was however bundled throughout the years:
As early as 2009, there was a fan effort to remake Riven into a realtime 3D game, known as "The Starry Expanse Project". They used camera-matching efforts and texture comparisons to the original to recreate Riven, essentially from scratch.
In 2019 Cyan spoke with the team about officially remaking Riven, with permission to reference some of the work they had already did to help jump-start their efforts. The team stopped their development on The Starry Expanse Project and kept their meeting a secret until Cyan was ready to make an official announcement.
On the 25th anniversary of Riven, on October 31, 2022, Cyan announced that Riven was officially in development.
A year before the release of the remake, at Mysterium, the Myst fan convention, Rand Miller explained what the new version is about:
"When we talk about Riven, it's because we're looking at documents and translating lore, getting more info about what happened. And the first generation of Riven was our best attempt to tell that story with what knowledge we had at the time. It just so happens that in intervening years we've gotten a lot more information. And a lot of it was right, and little bits were wrong, and a lot of it we can just dive a little deeper in."
"This is not a sequel, this is not something different, it is just new discoveries of Riven. You'll get there and it'll feel familiar and also be like, 'I don't know how to do this, this is something new'."
He also brought out an artifact as an example of their level of thinking behind the new version, a metal plate with the Garo-hevtee, or "great words" in D'ni. And explained what the plate was used for: "After Atrus and Catherine fell into the fissure and realized the book would not be destroyed as planned, Gehn was left with a hole in the ground that was problematic. What we postulate is that he very quickly began to seal up the fissure."
You can watch the full presentation with work-in-progress shots from the game along with a Q&A with Rand Miller and Richard Vander Wende:
A fan-made comparison of shots featured in the Riven remake trailer.
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All Myst, Riven, D'ni, Uru, End of Ages images, text, sound and music © Cyan Worlds, Inc. Myst III: Exile images, text, sound and music © 2001 Ubi Soft Entertainment, Inc. and Presto Studios, Inc. Myst IV: Revelation images, text, sound and music © 2004 Ubi Soft Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners.