Because, of course. Having already seen "Myst" remade a dozen times,
what else should we expect?

I was never a fan of "Riven", or indeed any of the rest of the
franchise. The original "Myst" was fascinating but its sequels always
left me tired. That's largely because the reasons I liked the first
game had very little to do with the gameplay of "Myst" itself, but
rather its technology and its radical departure from the standard adventure-game format.

"Myst" was an SVGA game (and running on Windows 3) when most other
games were still VGA and on DOS. It featured (what we took at the time
as) photo-realistic graphics, compared with the cartoonish visuals of
"Kings Quest" or "Monkey Island". It forwent complicated parsers for
one-click interactions. Its narrative and setting were revealed almost
entirely through its environment rather than other characters. Its
puzzles were logic-based rather than half-arsed cat-mustache nonsense
where the solution was just to try everything rather than rationally
work your way through the dilemma. . You couldn't die and - other than
giving up - it was almost impossible to lose the game. It really was
an entirely new way of adventuring.

"Riven" (and its sequels), on the other hand, were just more of the
same. The visuals got a bit better, but the gameplay remained as
unenticing as ever, and its plot became increasing convoluted (and
often required the player to turn to other medium - novels, comics) to
figure out what was going on). Worse, "Myst's" amazing success (and
general low development cost, at least compared to traditional
adventures) resulted in a flood of shitty imitators which first
overshadowed then killed traditional adventure games. The low quality
of these clones are often cited as the reason for adventure gaming's
'death' during the 2000s and early 2010s.

So yeah, I've no real love for the game.

Still, I know it has its fans and I don't want to dismiss it outright.
"Riven" was probably one of the best of its genre and if people
enjoyed it, great. But does it really need a remake?

Its particularly irksome /because/ "Myst" was so revolutionary; Cyan,
Inc. - the developers - have a proven record of creating new and
interesting games, and seeing them resort to cheap nostalgia grabs is disheartening. While neither "Zed" nor "Obduction" were as
groundbreaking as their seminal "Myst" game, they were solid titles.
I'd rather see more in that vein than them constantly returning to the
same old trough again and again.

So seeing "Riven" get a remake doesn't fill me with excitement.
Instead, I just feel exhausted and disgusted hearing the news. Hardly
the best reaction to start with.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)