8/13/2023 0 Comments Myst train puzzle![]() Spin a revolving chamber five times and nothing would happen-but spin it back once and you’d find a hidden door. An example: you had to find where a dome-shaped stone was located on each of five islands, then compare it to a hidden topographical map of the islands, then place colored marbles precisely on a 50×50 grid representing the domes. While Myst was solvable, given enough time and diligence, some of the puzzles in Riven were outlandishly obscure. The puzzles of Riven were legendarily fiendish. The gimmick of Riven- that these island worlds were in fact, written creations by a madman master creator, bound by his own imaginative limits - suited the limitations of their technology well. In Riven, the island motif worked because you could plausibly be trapped on these small land masses, surrounded by perfect cyan-blue seas. Like Main Street in the movie Pleasantville, which loops right back onto itself after a few blocks, the worlds of ‘90s computer games had to come up against walls, or cleverly loop on themselves to give the illusion of space. The makers of Riven and other games of the era were fighting a constant and cleverly-waged war against the limitations of hard drive and RAM space while CDs could hold an astonishing amount of data compared to previous disks, the speed and processing power of personal computers at the time kept most of the images static and the worlds tightly contained. It also felt like the kind of focused, curious, imaginative journey that I went on when I was trying to write stories of my own, solving the puzzles of sentences, writing with half creation, half discovery. The quiet, contemplative mindset I could find when I leaned close to the bright computer screen, ruining my eyes, moving image by image through the deserted world felt like meditation. It was a kind of playground for wandering, for putting together the clues of who had once lived here and what stories they had left behind. The setting was a sunny, semi-tropical world that seemed only recently abandoned, strewn with the debris of a hastily departed people. My mother’s little office darkened and quieted around me when the fuzzy blue-gray graphics of the Cyan logo resolved itself. Whenever I decided to pop one of the five Riven CD’s into my mom’s CD-ROM drive and start up a game that seemed to have no ending, I’d fall into an intense, quiet, and focused state. It’s your job to enter the dangerous, unstable world he’s running and trap him, helping the rebels wall him off in a different book that is secretly a prison. But the father has turned the local inhabitants of the world into his slaves, posing as a god of the realm, and is exploiting them through fear and violence. In Riven, a mad genius capable of designing worlds through the writing of books has been exiled in one of his own worlds by his son, who believes him twisted with power. Beneath the codes and puzzles and labyrinths is a surprisingly complex story, full of patricide, family rivalries, colonialism and Apocalypse Now-like riffs on Godhood and exploitation. You don’t know what might be significant to solve a different puzzle elsewhere on the island, and so you keep a notebook open by your keyboard, and scribble down strange symbols carved on the walls, or the number five popping up in odd places. ![]() You open steam valves and record musical note codes and collect keys. ![]() You move through a static world, like flipping through one matte painting after another. Unlike the fast-moving, pixelly platformers of this era, Myst and Riven relied almost entirely on clicking through still images of painstakingly drawn natural environments, making the most of limited ‘90s computer processors. Myst and Riven were revolutionary games for their time, and are still cult favorites today. I can only see a couple of decades out how Myst and Riven drove my own fixation on negative space in narrative, and showed me how it’s possible to tell a story in an empty room. The pop culture we absorb and obsess over has a funny way of shaping us when we’re not noticing. For those growing up in the ‘90s, just discovering the engrossing world of first-person computer games, Myst and its sequel, Riven, are a touchstone. In particular, I was a fan of Cyan’s original island-linking puzzler, Myst. I liked puzzle games, and the bigger the world to explore, the better. This meant I spent a lot of time alone, curled in my chair reading-but I spent nearly as many hours clicking and tapping on my mother’s beige, boxy computer, playing computer games. Nobody else I knew was simultaneously obsessed with learning HTML and parsing the sentences of F. In the 1990s I was a lonely, nerdy girl writer. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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