As someone that has never played Myst, how does it hold up in a modern setting? It always looked like a game that needed a VR remake.
If I wasn't able to find a walkthrough or guide, I don't think I would have been able to complete the game. But, that was also the era of official strategy guides, so maybe acquiring those would provide adequate context (I know the one for Morrowind makes the game for me. It's written in such a way that you feel like you've got a companion guiding you along with its commentary, providing just enough information to "unblock" you when you're stuck).
I felt like there were far too many moments in Riven where I didn't look in just the right place (the space at the bottom of a door, for example) and so I couple not progress. I played the original 5 CD version where you had to swap CDs as you moved around. Further into the game it finally requests "Insert disc 5". Somewhat fittingly for Riven I couldn't find the fifth disc because it was hidden behind other discs in the double CD jewel case....
Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure games of the day; pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context of the world that you're in. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook.
This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult... the game is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. (I ended up using one myself when I played it as a kid; I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you need to work with.
There are a few exceptions... a certain pair of double doors was a pretty cheap trick, for example.
What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small) revival; I think Portal started it. Before Portal the use of modern rendering technology and first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. third-person 3D. Only with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person non-FPS gameplay. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an FPS shouldn't be first person -- I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person perspective. Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc.
It's been much more recently that the same sense of artistry could be added to realtime games, at least IMHO. Even Myst 5 - ok, yes, done by Cyan when they were a shell of their Riven selves - just feels different due to the compromises made to make it realtime.
The rollercoaster that was the Uru project is a fascinating history. Uru: Complete Chronicles collects ~"season one" and "season two" in a lonely single player form, but the best way to experience them is to grab a friend or three and log in to one of the MO:UL servers [1] that are mostly open source at this point and have been run for the last few years entirely through combinations of Cyan Worlds good will and fan dedication.
All of which is to say that the compromises that made Myst 5 feel "poor" compared to Riven I think are much more due to the lost opportunities of changing waters in an amazing, but troubled business model (the world's largest attempt at a graphical massive multiplayer online third person puzzler), and Cyan Worlds doing needs must to survive (spinning content back out into single player adventures to sell at retail, just like they did with "Complete Chronicles", and using a name they knew would sell, Myst 5).
(There's some sadness that the Myst 5's Ages likely will not be reintegrated into Uru, and I can't play Myst 5 without instinctively trying for my Relto book or KI and being sad when those don't work.)
There's other examples (I think losing Robyn Miller's musical talents change things a bit as well, even though the music in Uru is great), but that's the sort of thing that I'm on about. And, for that matter, I may be over-crediting Vander Wende for this, I just think it's an oddly notable similarity between Aladdin and Riven.
(also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted - there was a test-ish server around 2003/2004 when the single player game first came out, and community-hosted versions in the 2006ish timeframe before GameTap's version launched in late 2006/early 2007. Myst 5 actually came out in 2005, before GameTap's Uru launched)
> (also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted
I mentioned that obliquely in that it had a long history. I played every version. If we want to play pedantry, that "test-ish" server you are thinking on was Ubi's official server which was meant to be the original MMO publisher before Ubi got cold feet and shut down all of their MMOs.
You are correct that Myst 5 came out before GameTap's server, and I misremembered that, but the exact order of operations isn't entirely critical to my point that Myst 5 was a "keep the lights on" release of content originally meant to be slowly released to Uru. Ubi's cold feet scuttled five years or so of planning. GameTap's scuttled two or three years. Between the two "publishers", Cyan Worlds got several hugely raw deals.
I think if I had a fully VR version, I would've ended up spending too much time on all the ancillary props that were scattered about everywhere.
And I'd end up about a hundred times saying "Oh, there's salt-shaker on the table. I'd better try to pick it up and examine it." rather than heading towards the stuff that actually advanced the story.