Galactic ManRiven Remake – Facing the Fear
[Author Note: This article contains mild spoilers for one of Riven’s puzzles]
For the longest time I’ve been scared of Riven.
I went through it once, not long after release, and I remember only a protracted nightmare of the game making me feel very stupid (looking back, perhaps that was also true). I was constantly leaning on help guides and at the end of the game was a puzzle so fiendish it basically asked the less observant of us players — namely me –to revisit the entire map to gather information we’d missed. I outright cheated on that one so I could end the torture.
I suspect this is why I’ve only ever pecked at Mysts 3 to 5. Myst I can do. Riven I could not. I adore the series but I know my place.
But playing the remake I’m doing far better than I thought I would. Maybe it helps having played the Myst remake directly beforehand; I’ve definitely been given a leg up by playing Uru as well, which has taught me D’ni numerals, a BIG part of Riven, I’m pleased to [re]discover.
Sidenote: D’ni is pronounced “Dunny”, which has always tickled me as the same word as the Australian slang for toilet.
What most people won’t know is I’ve had a recent health breakthrough that has produced, literally, a “new” me. Much more energy, more drive, and what feels like a sharper intellect finally unshackled at long long last. It’s been a revelation, a god-gifted miracle, but I frankly didn’t expect to see it manifest positive effects in my gaming!
Last night was a perfect example. I was awake for an hour in the small hours staring at my phone at a numeric cipher Riven had placed in a Jungle Island classroom. Twelve digits. Two sets of unique symbols (both created for this game) stared back at me and methodically began to surrender their secrets!
We don’t encounter different number systems very often, so used are we now to good old Base 10. Here were two new ones! Base 5 on one side and Base 3, 6 or even 12 on the other! This is exotic, unusual in our experience: perfect fodder for describing fictional not-we cultures.
I love the simplicity of the square D’ni icons, the elegant way they interrelate to each other, e.g. the glyph for 7 is the glyph for 2 combined pictorially with the glyph for 5. My exploration and appreciation of this took me further online (being very careful of spoilers) whereupon I was informed it’s actually a Base 25 number system, but under 25 it uses Base 5 “Quintads”, with 25 and over adopting a double glyph system, the first counting multiples of 25 and the second adding the remainder! All this for a video game!
The other system, belonging to the in-game indigenous tribe (Atrus’ father, Gehn, being a reluctant import), is based on a revolving conical projection, which took me longer to work out. It’s not as intuitive, I think. Fiddly and awkward to write, too. And who knows how it handles numbers larger than 12 at this point? Does it keep adding parts exponentially? You’d be running out of space on a page describing just one very large number! It feels more like a mathematical thought exercise than a real system people would actually develop (says he, entirely ignorant of other number systems present among Earth’s hundreds of cultures). How would they count their fingers and toes? But then, these people are being taught by an imprisoned D’ni suffering runaway delusions of Godhood, so perhaps it’s made this way deliberately to put you in Gehn’s way of thinking? My goodness, these unwashed primitives need educating away from their barbarian ways! Such Coloniser. So white saviour. Wo-no wow, it’s horrible.
I’m enjoying this new Riven immensely, in ways I couldn’t have imagined six months ago. It helps that the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) live-rendered visuals are magnificently on a par with the original stunning photography, but now we get to nose around the whole scene like we’re actually there! Myst and Riven both are such Masterpieces, and it’s a real joy to play a game I’ve long feared and find that, actually, it might have been made for me all along and I was the puzzle missing a vital piece.
To that end, once I’m done in Riven I’m going go through III, IV and V in order, to finally experience the full Myst saga as told, rather than second-hand. Such a magnificent series deserves at least that level of respect.
Presses hand to Linking Book, vanishes
